What Happened to the Soviet Union?: How and Why American Sovietologists Were Caught by Surprise

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SOVIET UNION? How and Why American Sovietologists Were Caught by Surprise Christopher I. Xenakis

PMEGER

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Xenakis, Christopher I. What happened to the Soviet Union? : how and why American sovietologists were caught by surprise / Christopher I. Xenakis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-97527^ (alk. paper) 1. Soviet Union—Historiography. 2. Soviet Union—Research—United States— History. 3. Soviet Union—Politics and government. I. Title. DK266.A33X46 2002 947.007,2—dc21 2002022439 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Christopher I. Xenakis All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002022439 ISBN: 0-275-97527-4 First published in 2002 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Valorie

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Acknowledgments 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Introduction: The Regime That Couldn't Change, and Other Sovietological Myths

ix 1

George F. Kennan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jerry F. Hough, and the Nexus of Soviet Change

23

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and American Sovietological Literature, 1974-1977

61

Sovietology in a Funk: Neoconservatism and American Scholarship on the Soviet Union, 1978-1981

95

Looking into a Mirror Dimly: American Soviet Experts and the Three Post-Brezhnev Successions, 1982-1985

133

Surprised by Gorbachev: American Sovietological Literature and the Possibility of Innovative Soviet Change after 1986

171

Epilogue

209

For Further Reading

219

Index

227

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments What happened to the Soviet Union? This question has enduring relevance for post-9/11 Americans, as we attempt to come to terms with the war on terrorism, the requirements of homeland defense, and a redefined foreign policy and international relations climate. Indeed, before anyone ever heard of al-Qaida, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein—and long before September 11, 2001—there was the Cold War, the Soviet Union, the worldwide communist movement, and Leonid Brezhnev. I became interested in U.S.-Soviet relations as a child. I remember riding the Grand Avenue bus in Chicago at the age of seven and staring at a poster of Nikita Khrushchev pointing a stubby finger at me and threatening to "bury" America. Below this menacing photo it said to keep America strong by buying U.S. Savings Bonds, but what I bought into instead was the alternating paranoia and fascination of the Cold War. I remember the day my seventh-grade teacher broke down in tears. It was October 1962, and the Soviets had placed nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles in Cuba. Miss Berkowicz didn't know if these weapons would rain down on us at any minute, but she hoped the crisis would resolve itself peacefully. My classmates and I didn't know much about nuclear brinksmanship, but we hoped there would be no school tomorrow. In the end, America survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we survived the seventh grade. We were a bit wiser and a lot less naive for having lived through those harrowing days—but we didn't sleep as well at night. And I remember my senior year at Lane Tech. Most of us in the class of 1967 would be heading off to college, where we would drink beer, protest the Vietnam War, and occasionally study in relative safety. But many of my high school friends would enter military service and go to Southeast Asia after graduation. Some would die in Vietnamese rice paddies. What was the war about, and why were we in Vietnam? Consciously or subconsciously, I spent

x

Acknowledgments

the rest of my youth and most of my adult life trying to make sense of the Cold War. This book is about Soviet change. It explores the question of why America's foremost political scientists and Soviet experts failed to anticipate even the possibility of significant social, political, and economic transformation occurring in the USSR. While the focus of this enquiry is scholarly, its urgency and passion derive from my Cold War memories and perceptions—and from my unwavering belief that the lessons of America's Cold War experience are deeply relevant to Washington's current diplomatic and military challenges—including the struggle against terrorism. I don't think we can figure out how to handle al-Qaida if we don't understand what went wrong—and how we misconstrued our Soviet adversary—during America's "long twilight struggle" against Communism. This book took nine years to write. That's a long time, and a lot of people and institutions helped me in significant ways in researching, writing, and editing it. I am grateful to Joan Barth Urban, of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., for her inspiration and encouragement, for reading and rereading various drafts, and for suggesting substantive and stylistic improvements to the manuscript. In addition, Carl Linden of George Washington University was very generous with his time in reading and commenting on this work. Others at Catholic University—notably Michael Foley, Stephen Schneck, Wallace Thies, and Lazlo Urban—asked probing questions and helped me articulate my ideas with greater clarity and precision. John Kramer, of Mary Washington University, allowed me in 1990-1991 to test some of my ideas about the Cold War and American Sovietology in his Naval War College nonresident "strategy and policy" seminar. The interaction with John and my classmates in those Thursday evening encounters at the Washington Navy Yard was invigorating. I am also grateful to my former "shipmates," friends, "bosses," and teachers in the U.S. Navy community—particularly at the Bureau of Naval Personnel from 1990 to 1993 and on board the USS Kalamazoo from 1993 to 1996. They gave me their take on the Cold War; and most important, they gave me the time and resources to complete my research and writing. Some, like Cmdr. Bill Coffin, listened to my ideas with Job-like patience and gave me incisive and reasoned feedback. Others, like Capt. James P. O'Connor, provoked my thinking with fundamentally important questions like: how did I know that what I was writing was really true? Many others, from gunners' mates to commanding officers, have contributed to this book in wonderful ways. I thank them all. The research librarians at the Mullen Library at Catholic University of America, at the Gelman Library at George Washington University, and at the Pentagon Library, all in Washington, D.C., have provided invaluable resources and assistance. They are too many to name individually, but they were very kind to me during the research phase of this work. Thanks to David McBride for his timely suggestions on how to pare the book down to a more manageable size. In addition, I want to thank the good people at Greenwood Publishing Group, and particularly my editors, James T.

Acknowledgments

xi

Sabin, Douglas DeKoven Williams, Bridget M. Austiguy-Preschel, and Marlowe Bergendoff for their sage advice and assistance. They can do wonderful things with a blue pencil. Ray Good, Walter S. Snowa, Jean Mueller, and Herman Haller have not read a single word of my manuscript, but they functioned as emotional sounding boards during the initial phase of writing, and throughout several drafts and contractions. In an odd way, they reminded me of something simple that I had forgotten—the power of religion to give hope to people living in bleak circumstances; to citizens of dreary communist countries trying to break out from behind the iron curtain; to weary cold warriors laboring on year after year in the Pentagon and in the State Department; and even to Ph.D. candidates writing thick dissertations. It was the rebirth of this humanistic, reformative hope that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a profound sense, Karl Marx was right when he wrote that religion is the opium of the people—but he was right in a much different way than he imagined. One hundred and sixty years after his call for a revolution by the working class, the communist revolution has gone up in smoke, and workers are going up to the altars of churches throughout Russia, Eastern Europe, and Cuba—to receive the Eucharist. Ray, Walter, Jean, and Herman reminded me of all that. They helped me in ways they do not realize, and I appreciate their friendship. Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my family. Long ago, Zenovia Xenakis encouraged her seven-year-old son to question the conventional wisdom—which in the United States, in the late-1950s, had gelled into a kind of hyperbolic antiCommunism and Cold War consensus. She reminded me that the Russians were Eastern Orthodox Christians like we were, so I shouldn't be frightened by a poster on a bus. Besides, for all of Nikita Khrushchev's bluster, he looked like Elmer Fudd getting "weally angwy" at that "siwwy wabbit." Odd advice, but she was right. Never discount a mother's wisdom. My wife, Valorie, looks like a Norwegian angel, and she is one. My sons, Paul, Mark, and John, have the names of apostles and choirboys, but they are neither. Together and individually, they sustain me with their encouragement and love.

This page intentionally left blank

1 Introduction: The Regime That Couldn't Change, and Other Sovietological Myths How did American Sovietology think and write about the USSR during the final two decades of the Soviet Union's existence? Why did the delegitimation of Communism in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—and the Gorbachev initiatives that precipitated these dramatic events—catch so many political scholars by surprise? Why did the vast majority of U.S. Soviet experts fail to anticipate the possibility of significant innovation, or of virtually any kind of political, economic, or social change taking place in the USSR? And why did most American Sovietologists miss the sure signs of Soviet change that were evident during the 1970s and 1980s? These questions and their likely answers are the central concern of this study. This book is about what happened in 1989 and 1991. More fundamentally, it is about the process of Soviet change, and it chronicles how and why so many American Soviet experts thought that what happened in 1989 and 1991 couldn't happen. Of course, it is a different world today than it was ten years ago—let alone fifty-five years ago, when World War II ended and Soviet-American relations turned ice cold. Perhaps that is why some people view the East-West conflict as a relic of the past. Indeed, in the harrowing days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, some political columnists and television pundits argued that the lessons of the Cold War are less relevant than ever, because "everything has changed" and because we are now fighting "a new kind of war" and a new enemy—terrorism. Well, yes, everything's changed. And perhaps nothing's changed. Plus ca change, plus c 'est la meme chose. My own view is that the Cold War and Soviet-American relations are more relevant than ever—for exactly the reasons some say they're now irrelevant—because "America's new war" against terrorism resembles the "long twilight struggle" of the 1950s and 1960s against Communism and because our new enemy seems every bit as ruthless and un-

2

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

yielding as we imagined our old Soviet enemy to be some forty years ago. Thus, we know that Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, et al. will not listen to reason or act rationally; they will not reform their governments or organizations; and they will not change or ameliorate their political beliefs. Throughout history, philosophers have speculated in various ways about the nature of political transformation. For the ancients, regime change was a risky undertaking that was to be avoided at almost all costs. It would be far better for the polis and her citizens, Plato and Aristotle argued, if the traditional order was upheld. In many respects, this classical antipathy for political reform movements and revolutions was to have a lasting influence on world politics. Distrust of regime change, whether swift and tempestuous or evolutionary and methodical, became a kind of first principle for early scholars and was the driving animus behind Edmund Burke's celebrated fulminations against the French Revolution. These ancient attitudes anticipated modern American political culture and values. Notwithstanding Thomas Paine's quarrels with Burke, and Jefferson's well-known sympathy for revolutionary causes, most early Americans shared a fundamental aversion toward political change. In the nineteenth century, the Civil War was fought largely over issues of social and political reform. More recently, the U.S. Cold War consensus—embraced broadly by traditional realists such as Dean Acheson, "Cold War liberals" like John F. Kennedy, "neoconservatives" including Paul Nitze, and Ronald Reagan conservatives—was informed by a Platonic-Burkean appeal to order and traditional values and a concomitant fear of radical political change. Indeed, some classical ideas about political reform may have influenced the thinking of American Sovietologists who, during the 1970s and 1980s, discounted the possibility of a Soviet transformation. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? The Gorbachev initiatives and their impact on the USSR were largely unexpected by American Soviet experts. As scholar Steven Kull has noted, a "unique feature of the Soviet transformation is that not a single westerner predicted its occurrence."" Throughout the Cold War, scholars saw the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) as "solid and intransigent—a permanent fixture on the world scene." Indeed, "even as change was occurring," many Soviet experts thought "that the change was not real" because of the Soviets' "fixed and intractable nature." This intellectual lapse was no "simple oversight"; rather, it pointed to a "fundamental flaw" in how American scholars, policy makers, and journalists viewed Soviet politics and thought about peaceful political transformation.1 To be sure, not every American scholar and policy maker failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change. As early as 1947, George F. Kennan foresaw opportunities, in his famous Mr. X article, for long-term ameliorative change in Soviet domestic and international behavior. So too, the Eisenhower administra-

Introduction

3

tion—presumably captive to a hostile, Manichaean view of the USSR —was privately quite flexible and held a nuanced understanding of the variations in Soviet politics. And in the mid-1960s, Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski backed away from the totalitarianism model he helped to formulate and documented the USSR's changing relationship to the Soviet bloc. Nevertheless, since the end of World War II, most Soviet experts saw an anti-western Soviet Union as a permanent feature of world politics. Few scholars wrote that Soviet change was a real and foreseeable possibility during the 1970s and 1980s—and those who did tended to be marginalized: their views did not gain credibility in government or academia. Indeed, well into the 1980s, most American Sovietologists viewed Soviet leadership behavior as rational and intentional: Moscow would not soon tolerate, let alone initiate, reform—and Gorbachev was not about to engineer the destruction of his own government. These experts believed that the Kremlin leaders would likely respond to the Gorbachev initiatives as they had reacted to other manifestations of liberalization in the past—with increased domestic repression and aggressive policies abroad. Despite this dominant view of a Soviet Union that could not and would not change, there were important indications that the USSR was, in fact, undergoing enormous economic, social, and political transformation. The forces of modernization, urbanization, and education were improving Soviet life. Soviet citizens were becoming culturally sophisticated and politically participative—"a civil society" in Richard Ullman's celebrated phrase. Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign, Brezhnev's detente with the West, and Gorbachev's new thinking had shown that the Soviet leaders themselves could initiate reform. On the other hand, there were several counter-indicators of reform. Soviet life expectancy was declining, and infant and adult male mortality rates were rising. Production and economic growth were sinking rapidly, and chronic agricultural failures necessitated repeated wheat purchases from the West. Soviet military expenditures were becoming unaffordable. Alcoholism and ethnonationalism were on the rise in all Soviet republics. The quality of Soviet computers, telephones, and other technology was primitive. The Soviet living standard was in steep decline relative to that of the West. All of these trends pointed to the possibility of, and to the need for, fundamental change in the USSR. As such, they were evident to American scholars throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These indicators of Soviet reform should have been, but were not, interpreted correctly. WORD POLITICS: CLARIFYING OUR TERMS To ask why American scholars failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change is to ask several other questions: Were Soviet experts taken by surprise? If so, which Soviet experts? In what sense were they surprised, and what were they surprised by? In order to discuss these questions thoroughly, we will em-

4

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

ploy several common terms in highly specialized ways. An examination of these terms is now in order. Sovietology In our study, Sovietology has to do, broadly, with the Cold-War-era discipline of American political scientists, economists, sociologists, historians, diplomats and policy makers, working in academia, government, private think tanks, and the media, who conducted research and wrote on Soviet domestic and foreign policy, especially during the 1974 through 1988 period.2 Sovietologist, Scholar, Soviet Expert, Policy Maker It is difficult to distinguish finely between "Sovietologists," "scholars," "historians," "Soviet experts," "foreign policy analysts," "decision makers," "policy makers," "Cold War theorists," and "political scientists" who wrote frequently on Soviet affairs. Many of these labels were used (and misused) interchangeably, and some writers of Sovietological literature fit several classifications. Thus, George F. Kennan and Zbigniew Brzezinski are Sovietologists, policy makers, and scholars, while Richard Pipes is a Russian historian and policy maker. Hedrick Smith and Robert G. Kaiser are Sovietologists and journalists, while Strobe Talbott is a Sovietologist, journalist, and policy maker. For our purposes, Sovietologists are political scientists with earned Ph.D.s from leading universities in Soviet politics, history, or economics who have mastered the requisite language skills needed to conduct research in Russia and the other Soviet republics, who have traveled and conducted research in the USSR extensively and repeatedly, and who have produced scholarly work of a high quality on the Soviet Union using primary source materials. We will refer to these individuals as "Sovietologists," "Soviet experts," and "scholars" interchangeably. Change, Instability, Reform In this study, we will use the terms change and reform synonymously to refer to political, economic, and social adjustments of an innovative or progressive nature, leading to an improvement in the performance of the Soviet system. Political change or reform may come about through sudden, systemic transformations, through incremental policy shifts, or through some middle course of innovation between these maximal and minimal extremes. Thus, Jerry F. Hough notes that what Gorbachev sought to accomplish (a curbing of "corruption, alcoholism, and the lack of discipline," the introduction of "market mechanisms" in the Soviet economy, "a relaxation of censorship," "greater citizen participation in decision making," increased "toleration of political group activity that is autonomous from the party," and "the opening of Russia to western culture, investment and market forces") was nothing less than

Introduction

5

a radical reform of the Soviet system.3 Yet other kinds of reform were also possible. In his memoirs, former Secretary of State George Shultz recalls pointedly that throughout the 1980s, some Reagan administration officials had underestimated the Eastern European reforms because they were looking for major transformations, and ignored incremental shifts and subtle but important "small steps." The East European strategy "was to probe constantly for the line that the Soviets had drawn and then to push that line out farther and farther," Shultz said. Yet Washington would have nothing to do with the East Europeans "unless they took a giant leap way over that line."4 This tendency to dismiss small policy movements as irrelevant contributed to U.S. scholars' failure to see that the USSR was changing during the 1970s and 1980s. As scholar Paul Cocks has noted, too often American scholars have maintained a simplistic and undifferentiated understanding of the Soviet reform process. They discussed "change in starkly defined terms and simple dichotomies, like 'degeneration' or 'transformation,' 'petrification' or 'pluralism.'" Yet such un-nuanced views of Soviet change "can make us insensitive to marginal adjustments, evolving experiments, and creeping innovations within the system," Cocks argued. By discussing reform "in predominantly 'either/or' terms, we forget that reality is much more complex and resembles rather a 'both/and' condition."5 Cocks's discussion suggests that political stability and change—often regarded as conflicting processes—are interrelated. Many Sovietologists argued during the 1980s that reform would have a corrupting influence on the Soviet system and that the Gorbachev initiatives would lead to political instability in the USSR. Yet as Columbia University Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer has observed, both stable and unstable regimes are subject to change. Indeed, stability requires both "incremental adjustments" and even "such changes as transform [the] essential characteristics of the regime."6 This study suggests, then, that scholars should have understood Soviet change in all of its variants—from minimal reform to moderate reform to radical reform, in Harvard University Sovietologist Timothy J. Colton's phraseology— to be meaningfully possible.7 They should have seen a range of viable alternatives to the Soviet system. To be sure, some Sovietologists did anticipate change, and a few delineated a broad continuum of possible reform outcomes in their writings - but most Soviet experts thought that the Soviet future would be like the present and the past. Why did so many scholars reject even the possibility of Soviet political, social, and economic change? RECENT AMERICAN VIEWS ON THE SOVIET UNION During the Cold War years, American political scientists constructed a number of Sovietological models and analytical approaches to help them in their study of Soviet politics and as a means of organizing a voluminous quantity of scholarly writings and research on the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most impor-

6

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

tant of these was the totalitarianism model of the early 1950s (Friedrich and Brzezinski). Although this model retained its influence up to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, it was already evident in the 1960s that, in the words of Valerie Bunce, it "rested on certain aspects of Soviet politics that would change after Stalin died"—notably, "the use of terror" and the extraordinary power of the general secretary. Moreover, the totalitarianism model was "static, since it lacked any sense of process and presumed that the system would remain the same over time." Relatedly, the model "ignored society, reducing it to playing a purely reactive role," and it was inattentive "to foreign policy and to the Soviet role in the international system."8 In the wake of the totalitarianism model's disappointment came a panoply of new approaches to understanding Soviet politics. Carl Linden's conflict model (1966), Valerie Bunce's and John Echols' corporatist model (1980), Jerry F. Hough's institutional pluralism (1979), and various structural methodologies sought to "disaggregate] the party and the state apparatus into a myriad of interest clusterings," to view "policy making as the result of bargaining among interests," and to treat the state-citizen link as an "interactive relationship." But most of these approaches, like the totalitarianism model itself, were flawed. Notably, they likened Soviet reality to western political and economic systems; they did not understand the relationship between Soviet foreign and domestic policy; and they could not explain "why some interests prevailed and others did not and why and how new interests came [into] the system." Numerous other categorical methods were used to define the USSR—with mixed success. In 1958, social scientist Daniel Bell catalogued ten models that could be used eclectically in the study of Soviet politics. These included social culture and personality theories, Marxist and non-Marxist industrialization theories, totalitarianism, Slavophile theories, and geopolitical approaches. In 1977, Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing adopted a hard-line/soft-line delineation to describe Soviet and American views of each other's social and political systems. Gregory J. Massell suggested in 1979 that most American scholars gravitated around one of three distinct assumptions—a totalitarianism model outlook (like that of Richard Pipes), a bureaucratic-pluralistic model perspective (favored by Jerry F. Hough), and an imperialist-expansionist view (advocated by Seweryn Bialer)—regarding the nature of the Soviet Union and the potential for ethnic unrest in Central Asia. A year later, Daniel Yergin categorized U.S. Soviet experts into Riga axiom scholars, who viewed the Soviet Union as a revolutionary state driven by ideological warfare and a thirst for world mastery, and Yalta axiom Sovietologists, who likened the USSR to other great powers and diminished the role of Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism as sources of Soviet behavior. Similarly, in 1981, Robert Osgood distinguished Analysis A scholars, who viewed the USSR as opportunistic but pragmatic and willing to compromise, from Analysis B adherents, who saw a relentless, expansionistic Soviet Union animated by communist ideology, totalitarianism, and the quest for legitimacy. That same year, Joel C. Moses identified two broad Sovietological schools, a systemic approach that likened the Soviet leadership to leaders of

Introduction

7

other political systems, and a structural school that viewed the USSR and its leaders as sui generis—different from all other countries and statesmen and shaped over decades in a common dictatorial mold. In 1982, Thomas W. Milburn, Philip D. Stewart, and Richard K. Herrmann suggested that Soviets and Americans tended to view each other's foreign policies as expansionistic (Robert Conquest, Pipes), defensive (Kennan, Stephen F. Cohen), or opportunistic (Bialer, Robert Legvold). The following year, Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus outlined three distinct Sovietological approaches—an essentialist school (Pipes, Hedrick Smith), a mechanist school (Kennan, Brzezinski), and an interactionist school (Hough, Bialer, Carl A. Linden). In 1987, Ken Jowitt divided American Soviet experts into monotheists, who saw a monolithic and anti-western USSR, and polytheists who viewed the Soviet Union as fundamentally pluralistic. A year later, Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson distinguished between scholars who thought that Soviet foreign policy was shaped by internal or domestic motivations, and those who believed that external or geopolitical promptings were more important. And in 1989, Jonathan R. Adelman and Deborah Anne Palmieri differentiated between a conservative view of Soviet foreign policy, which saw the USSR as "a hostile, aggressive adversary" and "a totalitarian dictatorship," and a liberal approach, which viewed the Soviet Union "not as a sworn enemy, but as responsive and flexible, a competing great power" striving with the United States for global influence. Still other categorical approaches were suggested after the East European revolutions of 1989. In 1990, W. Raymond Duncan and Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl identified three dominant views regarding Gorbachev's foreign policy. First, some scholars such as Legvold and Hough saw Soviet foreign policy as "substantively changed" under Gorbachev. A second group, including Alvin Z. Rubinstein and Francis Fukuyama, was "more cautious," seeing Gorbachev's program "as a continuation of previous decision-making imperatives although new tactics have been adopted here and there." A third outlook, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) Robert M. Gates, was wholly skeptical of Gorbachev's intentions, arguing that the Soviet leader sought only "to gain time and advantage" for the USSR. That same year, Michael J. Sodaro distinguished between a focus on the continuities in Soviet behavior, which viewed Soviet foreign policy as a product of "constant geopolitical interests" (some dating back to the Tsarist era) and "unchanging Marxist-Leninist verities," and an emphasis on the discontinuities of Soviet conduct, which "stressed the adaptability of Soviet foreign policy to shifting international and domestic conditions." In 1992, Thomas F. Remington distinguished between an updated totalitarianism model of the USSR and a modernization model which insisted that long-term changes, such as education and urbanization, were creating "irresistible pressures for democratization." Also in 1992, James M. Goldgeier suggested that the question of whether the Soviet Union was expansionist (Pipes, Harry Gelman) or defensive (Coit D. Blacker, Raymond L. Garthoff) was the dominant Sovietological issue of the Cold War.

8

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

How should we evaluate these scholarly models and approaches? Generally speaking, most of them make important theoretical and analytical contributions to the study and classification of Sovietological literature—but they are largely irrelevant to the question of how U.S. scholars wrote about the possibility of Soviet change during the 1970s and 1980s. While some approaches are simply dated (e.g., Bell), others are vague (Snyder and Diesing, Yergin, Osgood) or confusing (Jowitt, Sodaro). Still others have to do principally with Soviet foreign policy (Milburn, Stewart, and Herrmann; Nogee and Donaldson), and one is principally concerned with the potential for Soviet ethnic unrest (Massell). If most of these theoretical approaches are insightful, virtually none addresses the central question that concerns us in these pages. Even the post hoc analyses of the late 1980s and early 1990s have not dealt adequately with this question. For the most part, works by Brzezinski, Alexander J. Motyl, and Laqueur, and anthologies edited by Raymond C. Taras, Frederic J. Fleron and Erik P. Hoffmann, and Daniel Orlovsky, as well as celebrated "special issues" of journals (such as The National Interest, which in spring 1993 discussed "the strange death of Soviet communism") do not examine the question of why American Sovietology could not anticipate the possibility of Soviet change; instead, most of these writings focus on the derivative issue of why scholars failed to predict the Soviet collapse, which scholars failed, and who failed more than others. THREE SCHOOLS OF SOVIETOLOGICAL LITERATURE Since most existing models and categorizations of the Soviet Union are inadequate, we will examine the writings of American Sovietologists during the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the following three schools. The Realist School In the tradition of the classical political realist scholars of the 1940s and 1950s (Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr) and the neorealists of the 1960s and 1970s (Kenneth Waltz), realist Sovietologists such as George F. Kennan and Adam B. Ulam were concerned primarily with CPSU leadership behavior and understood the USSR to be prompted largely by geopolitical considerations, much as other states were. Rejecting an undue preoccupation with political culture and moralistic-ideological bases of Soviet decision making, some realists saw Soviet change as possible, but most believed that reforms would be gradual, long-term, and limited in scope. Within this realist school, some scholars, including Timothy J. Colton, formed a Leninist subschool that insisted the Soviet Union could not change because of the intractable nature of Leninism and the Lenin cult. Another subgroup, led by Seweryn Bialer, argued that the Kremlin would never relax its political and economic grip over Eastern Europe.

Introduction

9

The Political Cultural-Historicist School Richard Pipes, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hedrick Smith, and other members of this school sought to understand Soviet conduct chiefly in terms of Moscow's political values and ideology, as determined by Russia's centuries-old repressive and xenophobic tradition and the USSR's Leninist-Stalinist worldview. Noting an essential continuity between Tsarist Russian and modern Soviet political culture and practice, most of these scholars took stark anticommunist positions and argued that Soviet leadership values were irreconcilably hostile to western values and interests. Additionally, most of these Sovietologists saw the Soviet Union as unable to change, and some called on Washington to wage ideological warfare on Moscow in order to force the USSR to change. The Pluralist School Pluralists such as H. Gordon Skilling, Jerry F. Hough, and Stephen F. Cohen recognized immense differences and uncertainties within the Soviet elite. Adherents of this school viewed the Kremlin leaders and institutions not as unitary purposive actors but as divided along policy lines and susceptible to change. They noted that some Soviet elites, including members of the scientific and intellectual communities, favored economic change and detente with the west and were receptive to political innovation. At the same time, other elites, including members of the security forces, sought traditional and confrontive Leninist policies and were less apt to seek reform. In general, pluralists saw Soviet reform as both possible and likely. Some general comments are in order concerning these three schools and their meaning in this study. First, each of these Sovietological categories encompasses a great deal of variation, and each is depicted broadly in these pages. Thus, even scholars within the same school do not all agree regarding the nature of the USSR and the possibility of Soviet change. For example, Adam B. Ulam, Alexander Dallin, and George F. Kennan are all realist Sovietologists, but some of Ulam's views regarding the possibility of Soviet change were close to a political cultural-historicist position, while Dallin edged toward an incipient pluralist outlook, and Kennan moved, from a hard realist viewpoint in the 1940s and 1950s toward a soft realist or even a pluralist stance in the 1970s and 1980s. Second, the possibility of Soviet social, economic and political change was not addressed adequately by any of these three schools during the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, we may well ponder, with Southern Methodist University scholar Daniel Orlovsky, whether the analyses of American Sovietologists were "so fundamentally flawed as to render the field blind to the coming change." Much that was written before Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985 failed to account for the impact of modernization, education, and Moscow's increased contacts with the west or to consider seriously the number and severity of social and economic challenges confronting the USSR. Writings after 1985 embraced varying perspectives but on the whole either underestimated the economic and po-

10

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

litical attractions of the west or exaggerated Moscow's ability to resist change. IT WAS CHANGING RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES: EIGHTEEN INDICATORS OF SOVIET SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION If American scholars failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change, it wasn't for lack of evidence. Indeed, there was a strong record during the 1974 through 1988 period—in the form of geopolitical events, demographic trends, statistical indicators, and a variety of other data—that pointed to the likelihood of fundamental reform taking place in the USSR. The following eighteen indicators and trends of Soviet change should have been evident to all U.S. scholars. This data was examined in unclassified CIA, U.S. Census Bureau, State Department, and Congressional studies; it was reported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers throughout the United States; and it was discussed openly in various popular writings and undergraduate texts during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This evidence was hardly unnoticed by the American public, yet in large measure, U.S. scholars drew no broad conclusions from it. Social Changes 1. Modernization. The Brezhnev era was not a period of stagnation, but rather, a time of profound social change. Two significant transformations that improved the lot of Soviet citizens during the 1970s were urbanization and a wholesale increase in educational attainment. In addition, the number of individuals employed in professional and specialist fields rose dramatically during this time, and there was a notable increase in popular access to print and broadcast media. Across the board, Soviet society came to resemble the industrialized world in educational and employment patterns, and in cultural tastes. 2. Demographic Shifts. As early as 1978, U.S. Census Bureau demographer Murray Feshbach traced the relative decline of Russians as a percentage of the total Soviet population and the relative increase of Muslim populations in five Central Asian republics: Kirgiziia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. These demographic shifts were bringing profound and lasting changes to the Soviet Union socially, economically, politically, and ideologically, Feshbach noted. By the year 2000, "about one-third of the 18-year old male" candidates for the Red Army and the Soviet labor force would be nonRussians; meanwhile, the supply of young Russian males would "drop to 44 percent." The Kremlin leaders continued to talk about the emergence of the new Soviet man, but it was increasingly obvious that this Marxist-Leninist avatar would have Central Asian features, worship Allah, and be unable to speak Russian.9 3. Health Problems and Mortality Statistics. According to demographers Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach, the USSR enjoyed a rapid decline in

Introduction

11

overall mortality rates for adults and children and a corresponding increase in life expectancy in the immediate postwar period. But by the mid-1960s, these trends had reversed course, and the Soviet quality of life began to decline.10 A variety of factors, including improper diet and the lack of medications and preventive health care, contributed to the shorter life expectancy and higher death rates of Soviet citizens. Colton concluded that these trends "pointed to a partial unwinding of previous accomplishments in medicine and health care. It is hard to avoid the conclusion," he said, that these problems "mirrored a deterioration in the quality of Soviet life more broadly."11 4. Ethnonationalistic Tensions and Problems. An early indicator of tension among the Soviet nationalities was Soviet Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev's "1972 speech commemorating] the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union." In this important address, which was translated into English and should have been read carefully by American Soviet experts, Brezhnev admitted that Moscow's nationalities policy was failing, and he called for a "marshaling offerees [to] speed up assimilation." Since 1972, every Soviet leader has emphasized this priority of promoting the fusion of Soviet peoples.12 Ethnic tensions between the USSR's Central Asians and Russians were evident throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In December 1986, New York Times journalist Philip Taubman chronicled "an outbreak of anti-Russian rioting" in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan. Fourteen months later, Taubman reported that Armenian "nationalist protests" had "disrupted two Soviet southern republics." This "disturbance" was "the most serious domestic crisis" to confront the Kremlin leaders since Gorbachev assumed office.13 5. Soviet Living Standards and Consumption. According to Catholic University Sovietologist Joan Barth Urban, "the stability of the Brezhnev regime had long rested on the twin props of peace and prosperity." During the 1970s, detente and economic robustness had legitimated the Soviet system "in the eyes of its citizens." But by the early 1980s, "both [of] these props had been undermined," and growth in consumer welfare had "all but ceased" as "SovietAmerican tensions threatened to reach Cold War levels."14 Basic food items became expensive—twice or three times as expensive as the cost of these same items in western capitals.15 Luxury goods including alcohol, cigarettes, color televisions, and automobiles were even more costly. Moscow was taking giant strides in lowering the prices of common goods and services and in providing housing, automobiles, televisions, radios, telephones, washing machines, and refrigerators to its citizens, but when compared with the United States, the USSR lagged behind in all areas.16 Compared even with the capitals of Eastern Europe, Moscow trailed in standard of living, convenience of everyday life, product quality, and environmental health. 6. Citizen and Worker Attitudes and Participation. As early as 1965, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington noted an entrenched spiritual vacuity, a "social alienation or deviation from socialist morality" in Soviet society.17 In her celebrated "Novosibirsk Report" of 1983, reformist Soviet economist Tatiana Zaslavskaia argued that the lethargy of the Soviet economy was related

12

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

to "the inability of th[e] system" to use effectively "the labor potential and intellectual resources of society." In other words, Soviet economic problems and low worker morale were intertwined; neither the Soviet system nor its laborers worked very well.18 But Soviet worker passivity and citizen anomie were only half the story; several Sovietologists, including Jerry F. Hough, Theodore Friedgut, and Geoffrey Hosking, found evidence to suggest that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet citizens had become politically, culturally, and economically sophisticated and "participative." Economic Changes 7. Slowed Gross National Product (GNP) and Production Growth. In the 1960s and early 1970s, most of the CIA's statistical indicators—in energy, minerals and metals, transportation, manufactured items, and exports—were rising steadily over time and hinted at Soviet economic resiliency and growth.19 After 1974, however, the CIA began projecting a steady decline in the USSR's economy. Labor productivity showed no growth, while factory productivity and industry factor productivity showed negative growth. This pattern continued into the 1980s, with nearly straight-line reductions in almost every GNP sector.20 In 1983, Tatiana Zaslavskaia's "Novosibirsk Report" noted the growing contradiction between the Soviet economy's impressive size and complexity and its rigid, simplistic system of decision making devised for the 1930s.21 This confidential memorandum was approved by Yuri Andropov and was leaked to the West. By the mid-1980s, it had been read by many U.S. scholars, who should have recognized it as a candid admission by the Kremlin that the Soviet economy required extensive reforms. 8. Agricultural Failure. By 1980, it was evident that there were "severe problems" in Soviet agriculture and food supply, said Timothy J. Colton. Whereas Brezhnev had boasted in the early 1970s that Moscow had "solved [its] food problem," it was apparent that "the Soviet farm system was sliding into absolute decline."22 Similarly, Seweryn Bialer termed agriculture "the chronic weak spot of the [Soviet] economy" and noted that "agricultural performance in 1979-1983 was unprecedentedly poor." Just to maintain its present inadequate level of food supply, Moscow had to import approximately 40 million tons of grain annually—much of it from the United States.23 Fundamental improvements were necessary in the Soviet economy and agricultural infrastructure. 9. Escalating Military Costs. While the Soviet economy seemed able to finance an impressive foreign policy and military apparatus for many decades during the Cold War, these costs had, by the mid-to-late 1970s, become onerous. Obsessed with heavy industry and military production, Moscow's central planning bureaucracy found it impossible to manage its economic resources in a rational manner. The USSR could not both fund consumer goods and services for its citizens and maintain the Red Army. The Soviet military burden was probably more difficult for Moscow to sus-

Introduction

13

tain than U.S. experts had realized. In stark contrast to popular American images of a wildly escalating Soviet military budget, the CIA estimated that between 1966 and 1985 (a period encompassing U.S. perceptions of massive Soviet military buildups), the actual rate of Soviet military spending was significantly lower than Soviet GNP growth.24 10. Antiquated technologies. Many scholars have chronicled the decline in Soviet technological achievement. Since the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union had begun to trail "not only the West or Japan, but also newly industrializing countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore" in computerization and telecommunications. In addition, the April 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl signaled to Moscow and the world just how poor the general condition of Soviet machinery and equipment was, and how outdated USSR technology had become.25 11. Unsettling Manpower Trends. Since the mid-1970s, American demographers Murray Feshbach and Stephan Rapawy had indicated that the aging of the Soviet population and the decline in the number of eighteen-year-old Russian males available for the work force and military service were creating insoluble problems for the USSR.26 Russia and the other Slavic republics would continue to lose manpower through the turn of the new century, while Central Asia, Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus would gain workers. There was no way to squeeze more productivity out of the Soviet economy, and the days of cheap labor, when authoritarian leaders could coerce citizens by the thousands into factories, fields, or military barracks were over.27 12. Foreign Trade Imbalance. Since the mid-1960s, a sharp increase in foreign trade—especially with the industrialized West—was a central component of the Soviet economy. By 1975, and continuing into the mid-1980s, 30 to 35 percent of all Soviet trade was with non-Communist developed countries.28 But this increase in trade was not all good news. In the critical sectors of consumer goods and machinery and equipment, the Soviet Union was far more dependent on the West than western Europe and the United States were on the USSR. This trend was exacerbated after 1981, with almost ten times more Soviet imports than exports of food and non-food consumer goods, and three times more imports than exports of machinery and equipment. Over time, this arrangement became burdensome for the Soviets, Colton recalled, and "net indebtedness to the West, which had been a paltry $600 million in 1971, swelled to $7.5 billion in 1975 and $12.4 billion in 1981."29 Political Changes 13. Polycentrism. An early and important harbinger of change was the development of cracks and fissures in the world Communist movement. Even under Stalin, Moscow tolerated considerable diversity within the Communist parties of the Soviet bloc, despite the Soviet dictator's efforts to exert control over the Soviet sphere.30 These cracks and fissures widened under Khrushchev. In the 1950s, Red

14

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

China and Yugoslavia broke with Moscow and began to strike independent courses. Poland quickly followed. It was evident that "ideological and institutional diversity" had come to "characterize the Soviet bloc," Zbigniew Brzezinski noted. Indeed, there was no single Moscow-led world Communist movement: "[T]he Communist camp is neither homogeneous, monolithic, nor unchanging. Underneath the external facade of unity a continuing process of change is taking place."31 14. Geopolitical Events. Another important marker of Soviet change was the Kremlin's favorable reaction to Ostpolitik, from 1969 through 1971, and later, to detente and the SALT I Treaty. These events demonstrated that the USSR wanted to do away with Manichaean "us-versus-them" arguments and engage in peaceful economic and political partnerships with the West. Detente was an early indication that Soviet change was possible, and remarkably, it came under Leonid Brezhnev—a leader not commonly remembered as an innovator. Other geopolitical evidence of Soviet change included the Prague Spring, a reform program initiated and guided by the ruling communist party in Czechoslovakia; the "Eurocommunist assault" by communist parties in Italy, Spain, and France, challenging Moscow on foreign policy, economic issues, and ideology; and the spectacle of worker protests, led by the Polish Solidarity movement, in the Gdansk shipyard. 15. A Fundamentally Reformative Soviet Tradition. A number of U.S. scholars saw significant precedents for reform in the Russian and Soviet past. S. Frederick Starr noted the existence of an incipient liberal reform movement in prerevolutionary Russia. Peter the Great "opened [his] country to contemporary [western] ideas"; Catherine II read Montesquieu, and her citizens became great admirers of the fledgling American experiment; and a generation later, the Decembrists sought "the abolition of serfdom" and other reforms. Indeed, Russia's innovative tradition did not end even under Lenin and Stalin. Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 was itself an early harbinger of Soviet change.32 Several reforms occurred under Khrushchev. "Political prisoners were released, and the nationalities exiled [by] Stalin were returnfed]"; various "laws were introduced" to benefit workers, improve education, "combat corruption," and drive economic and agricultural innovations; and most important, Khrushchev denounced Stalin before the Twentieth Party Congress.33 16. Generational Change. Another indicator of the broad political changes occurring in the USSR was the generational transformation of the Soviet leadership following Brezhnev's departure. Seweryn Bialer and Jerry F. Hough noted correctly in the late 1970s that the Brezhnev gerontocracy was rapidly departing the scene, and a new ruling generation was emerging. The advanced ages of the Brezhnev inner circle and of other mid-level Soviet leaders suggested that the impending leadership transition would be historic.34 The younger rulers would be more self-assured and pragmatic than their predecessors, who had cut their political teeth on the Stalinist purges and the deprivations of the great patriotic war. Widely traveled, these new officials would be comfortable with western ideas and attracted to western affluence. Their promotion would trigger a broad

Introduction

15

influx of change and fresh ideas in the Soviet Union. 17. Gorbachev's New Thinking. Ideas—the content of Gorbachev's new thinking—were a significant indicator of Soviet change. Journalists Serge Schmemenn and Philip Taubman itemized these new attitudes in their New York Times reportage. First, Soviet new thinking emphasized the USSR's interdependence and cooperation with the West. Second, Moscow began to view western democratic governments as inherently legitimate and to argue that USSR diplomacy itself needed to be "democratized." Third, Gorbachev acknowledged his country's severe political, social, and economic weaknesses and admitted that socialist countries had not successfully competed with capitalism. Fourth, there was a growing awareness in Moscow of the dangers of nuclear war. Fifth, Gorbachev wanted to shed his country's ideological blinders and Manichaean black/white conceptions. The USSR had to stop seeing the West as its enemy and begin viewing liberal values, such as freedom, democracy, and the integration of the world through the international rule of law, as universal virtues.35 18. Soviet Crisis Management and Arms Control Behavior. SovietAmerican relations had weathered several crises and limited wars during the Cold War—in Berlin, Korea, East Germany, Hungary, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, and the Middle East. The peaceful resolution of these crises, and particularly of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, suggested that Soviet-American cooperation was possible, and that the Soviet leaders—often characterized as opportunistic, adventurous, and prone to nuclear brinksmanship—were actually flexible, pragmatic, and able to change course. Eighteen U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements, forged between 1963 and 1987, demonstrated a mutual desire to move away from aggressive militarism and unilateral "totalitarianism model" policies and embrace bilateral agreements, cooperative international gestures, and deliberative decision-making styles. In addition, Gorbachev's arms control proposals demonstrated that Soviet reform was possible. Journalist Seth Mydans of the New York Times chronicled the new Soviet leader's April 1985 "announcement" of "a moratorium on the deployment of [SS-20] medium range missiles in Europe," noting pointedly that Gorbachev had invited the Reagan administration "to respond with a similar freeze."36 Three months later, Gorbachev offered to "suspend the testing of nuclear weapons" through 1985 and beyond—if Washington would also "halt testing." This moratorium was extended several times and eventually lasted nineteen months.37 In January 1986, Serge Schmemman reported that Gorbachev had announced a comprehensive plan for complete disarmament—"the elimination of all" Soviet and American nuclear arms—"by the end of the century."38 Throughout the mid-1980s, "Gorbachev offer[ed] concessions that the United States was too wary to accept, wondering what the loopholes were," added Bernard Gwertzman. In October 1986, at the Reykjavik Summit, "it was evident" that the Soviet leader "was willing to make major sacrifices in Soviet nuclear and other force levels, well beyond any that western powers had thought possible."39

16

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

In April 1988, Philip Taubman wrote that Gorbachev had stunned Washington by announcing plans for a complete Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.40 Thus, Gorbachev's rapid succession of arms control initiatives and troop withdrawals—undertaken during his first three years in office—suggested that significant change was occurring in the USSR. It is common today to read eloquent assertions, by statesmen and scholars alike, that Mikhail Gorbachev changed the Soviet Union. This is, of course, true—but it is also true that the USSR was open to change long before Gorbachev arrived on the scene. The eighteen indicators and trends of Soviet change we have discussed in these pages show this, and American scholars who failed to note them simply weren't looking very hard. So why were U.S. scholars so surprised by the Gorbachev reforms? And why did Sovietologists underestimate the potential for Soviet change? If it wasn't for lack of evidence, then we must look elsewhere for answers: perhaps to the American liberal tradition and Cold War consensus; maybe to the political-intellectual Zeitgeist in which scholars and universities functioned after World War II; and maybe even to the discipline of Sovietology itself—to the way a "conventional wisdom" developed over time concerning the USSR and to the way Soviet experts went about making intellectual discoveries. In the ensuing chapters of this study, we will examine the writings of American Sovietologists over a fifteen-year period, from 1974 through 1988, to see how they responded to these eighteen indicators of social, political, and economic change. HOW CAN SO MANY EXPERTS BE SO WRONG? There is something unsettling about the notion that many of America's most renowned Sovietologists were so wrong about the Soviet Union. How could our best and most important scholars have failed to consider the evidence of Soviet change? These women and men were political scientists of the first rank, with impeccable academic credentials; they had immense international followings, and their pronouncements were studied closely by statesmen, policy makers, and other scholars. It would seem profoundly naive and arrogant of us to insist that these American Soviet experts, and the discipline of Sovietology itself, fundamentally misread the Soviet character and the USSR's capacity to change. We are tempted to conclude that if U.S. scholars did not see the Soviet transformations of the 1970s and 1980s coming, it is because these events were unforeseeable. And yet they were not unforeseeable; the evidence pointed toward fundamental Soviet change. American Sovietologists should have anticipated at least the possibility of such change in the 1970s, and they should have seen the Gorbachev reforms coming in the 1980s, but they did not. Even the best and most renowned scholars can be slow to respond to new data. This study touches on several basic questions raised by Thomas S. Kuhn

Introduction

17

(1962) and Robert Jervis (1970, 1976) concerning the nature and possibility of scholarly inquiry. According to Kuhn, scientific and scholarly observations are paradigm-dependent. Scholars rarely "aim to produce major novelties" in their work; instead, they usually fit their observations into the conceptual boxes of the dominant intellectual models currently in vogue. Indeed, said Kuhn, "sometimes everything but the most esoteric detail of the result is known in advance." Thus, ordinarily, when new facts are discovered that do not accord with traditional scientific expectations, scholars do not abandon their old intellectual models. Even when dominant paradigms come under great strain due to the emergence of large quantities of exceptional data, researchers tend to maintain their established perceptions and intellectual models.41 Kuhn's explanation of how scholars acquire new knowledge suggests that many of America's leading Soviet experts were not independent thinkers in pursuit of new learning about the Soviet Union. Rather, they were curators of an academic tradition; both the parameters of their intellectual curiosity and the conclusions of their inquiry were predefined by the Sovietological community. In the United States, many established scholarly assumptions about the Soviet Union were hostile and moralistic in tone, fueled by a virulent anticommunism. The analytical techniques on which these beliefs were based varied and included scholars' evaluations of the U.S. experience with communism in Vietnam and the Cold War, as well as American Soviet experts' study of totalitarian regimes and "the lessons of history." A number of Sovietologists had begun their careers against the backdrop of World War II and the McCarthyite sensibilities of the 1950s, and many of these scholars had no difficulty applying a kind of Platonic/Augustinian morality, replete with a rigid and absolute sense of virtue and evil, to Soviet-American relations. Little wonder that most of these scholars thought the USSR could not and would not change. Many of these hardened attitudes endured well into the 1970s and 1980s. Evidence of Soviet change was either ignored or considered to be less persuasive than the USSR's military and nuclear capability and Moscow's willingness to use force in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan. Implicit in this fixed mind-set was the notion that no matter how extensively the forces of modernization had changed Soviet society, and no matter how badly the USSR's economy had deteriorated, Moscow would not give up empire, abandon communism, or moderate its policies. Central planners could tell an increasingly westernized and sophisticated Soviet populace to sacrifice butter and blue jeans for bombers and bullets, and citizens would accept such deprivations unremonstratively, year after year. These assumptions were so strongly held that even after Gorbachev unveiled glasnost in the mid-1980s, many American Sovietologists remained skeptical of the Soviet leader's commitment to change and doubted whether his innovations would actually work. There was also a slavish belief among many American scholars— exacerbated by a long history of government funding of academic Sovietological research—that the best way to study the Soviet Union was in light of U.S. policy and national security requirements. Thus, many Soviet experts considered it

18

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

foolishly naive to think that a rival with the military capability to destroy North America was not hostile, or that such a hostile rival could temper its bad behavior. This study challenges traditional assumptions about the Soviet Union and American Sovietology by suggesting that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there existed a "critical mass" of new data that did not fit well into scholars' old conceptual boxes. Even at the height of Moscow's involvement in East Asia and Africa in the mid-1970s, and while Ronald Reagan was raising renewed concerns about the "evil empire" and the Soviet threat in the early 1980s, there were telltale signs of significant change on the Soviet horizon. Thus, the possibility of Soviet change was foreseeable; clear, measurable, and significant evidence of such change was available to American scholars, in unclassified form, during the 1974 through 1988 period. Soviet experts should not have been caught off guard by the Gorbachev initiatives. This study will address two sets of questions. First, to what extent did U.S. Sovietologists fail to anticipate the social, economic, and political transformations that would profoundly change the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s? How well or how poorly did American scholars deal with the evidence of reform during the Brezhnev era, and how enthusiastically did they greet the unfolding Gorbachev initiatives? Which Sovietologists were most receptive to new evidence? Conversely, who remained imprisoned by old ideas? Related to this first set of questions is a second: Why were most American Soviet experts slow to note the economic and political dry rot in the Soviet system? What accounted for the failure of many Sovietologists to anticipate even the possibility of Soviet reform—and what does this failure suggest about how U.S. Sovietology processed new data and developed new attitudes during the Cold War? This second set of questions is particularly important in light of our fundamental premise that clear and unassailable evidence existed, intelligible to American Soviet experts, that the USSR could change. If the evidence was so strong, why didn't scholars see it? If they noted it, why did they reject the possibility of Soviet change? Our examination of American Sovietological scholarship will proceed in two phases. The first part of this inquiry will consist of a close analysis of Sovietological literature—the books, essays, and articles written by American Soviet experts from 1974 to 1988. These writings will be examined in Chapters 2 through 6 to determine how their respective authors responded to the emerging evidence of Soviet change. In particular, Chapter 2 will examine the writings of three influential Sovietologists—George F. Kennan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Jerry F. Hough—and will trace the evolution of their thinking about the Soviet Union through the 1980s. These three scholars are, arguably, the intellectual patresfamilias of the realist, political cultural-historicist, and pluralist schools of American Sovietology, and our analysis of their scholarly work will serve as a "baseline" against which the writings of other Sovietologists may be compared.

Introduction

19

Chapters 3 through 6 will feature periodic studies of American Sovietological literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Chapters 3-5 will evaluate the Sovietological writings of a single four-year period. Chapter 3 will examine the scholarly work of 1974 through 1977; Chapter 4 will consider the Sovietological literature of 1978 through 1981; Chapter 5 will review the scholarly work of 1982 through 1985; finally, Chapter 6 will examine the writings of a three-year period from 1986 through 1988. Our examination will show that many respected scholars failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change from 1974 through 1988, and that remarkably, a large number of U.S. Sovietologists, political scientists, and Cold War scholars of the mid-1980s misjudged both the pace and the outcome of the Gorbachev initiatives. The second phase of our study is, of necessity, somewhat more speculative. Interspersed throughout Chapters 2 through 6 is an ongoing discussion of the complex but important questions raised above, of why U.S. Sovietologists failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change, and relatedly, why scholars were surprised by the Gorbachev initiatives. As we will see, a variety of intellectual and cultural forces were at work, both in academia and in government policymaking circles, which influenced scholars toward a fundamentally negative view of the USSR and its potential for change. Some of these forces are quite ancient in origin, dating back to Platonic and Augustinian political thought. Others, including Americans' consciousness of their nation's history as exceptional, and of its present and future course as guided by a manifest destiny, are rooted in the social, political, and economic ideas of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America but also go back to the writings and speeches of Puritan leader John Winthrop. Still other cultural and intellectual forces, including various outbreaks of American anticommunism and the formation and maintenance of a vast Cold War consensus, are more recent phenomena. We will examine these important influences carefully; in addition, we will look at how the institutional beliefs, values, prejudices, and geopolitical priorities of various U.S. government agencies, departments, and organizations (as well as the generous financial subsidies these agencies provided for university research!) co-opted or politicized academic Sovietology during the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, we should note that the starting and ending dates that bracket this study were not chosen arbitrarily. The year 1974 marked the completion of Brezhnev's first decade in power and was the approximate start of the second half of his term, when economic, military, and political constraints began to be felt more keenly by the Kremlin leadership, and Moscow's evaluation of the worldwide "correlation of forces"—heretofore quite optimistic—became darker and more conflicted. For the United States, 1974 marked, approximately, the end of the Vietnam War, the birth of the neoconservative movement, and the termination of detente. The reason for concluding this inquiry with 1988 is perhaps more obvious: this was a year of dramatic political and economic transformations in the Soviet Union. In June and July 1988, delegates to the Nineteenth Party Conference

20

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

approved what the New York Times termed "a major overhaul of the Soviet political system," which "mandated a partial transfer of power from the party to popularly elected legislatures and an end to party interference in the day-to-day management of Soviet life."42 Then, in a December 1988 speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Gorbachev announced a unilateral 20 percent cut in Soviet military forces and a withdrawal of troops from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany.43 Finally, 1988 marked the eve of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. Thus, by 1988 it was evident—or it should have been evident—that Soviet change was eminently possible. But then again, this should have been evident in 1974. Considering the sheer number of Sovietological writings that appeared during these years, and the time and money spent by public and private institutions studying the Soviet Union, the failures documented in this study constituted a serious deficiency.

NOTES I. Steven Kull, Burying Lenin: The Revolution in Soviet Ideology and Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992), p. 3. 2 . Particularly helpful in constructing this definition were two discussions, by Alexander Motyl, "The Dilemmas of Sovietology and the Labyrinth of Theory," in Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., and Erik P. Hoffmann, eds., Post-Communist Studies & Political Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology (Boulder: Westview, 1993), p. 98, n. 1, and Daniel Orlovsky, "Introduction—Judging the Past, Charting the Future: On Aquariums and Fish Soup," in Daniel Orlovsky, ed., Beyond Soviet Studies (Washington, D C : Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), p. 22, n. 1. 3. Jerry F. Hough, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 212. 4 . George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years As Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), p. 694. 5. Paul Cocks, "Rethinking the Organizational Weapon: The Soviet System in a Systems Age," World Politics 32, no. 2 (January 1980), pp. 251-252. 6. Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors: Leadership Stability and Change in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 134. 7. Timothy J. Colton, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1986), pp. 4-5. 8. Valerie Bunce, "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," in Raymond C. Taras, ed., Handbook of Political Science Research on the USSR and Eastern Europe: Trends from the 1950s to the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992), pp. 184-186. 9. Murray Feshbach, "Population and Manpower Trends in the U.S.S.R.," in The USSR and the Sources of Soviet Policy (Washington D.C.: Council on Foreign Relations and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1978), pp. 83, 87. 10. Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach, Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970s, Series P-95, No. 74 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, September 1980), p. 3. II. Timothy J. Colton, The Dilemma, p. 37. 12. Walker Connor, "Soviet Policies Toward the Non-Russian Peoples in Theoretic and Historic Perspective: What Gorbachev Inherited," in Alexander J. Motyl, ed., The

Introduction

21

Post-Soviet Nations: Perspectives on the Demise of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 43-46. 13. Philip Taubman, "Soviet Reports Rioting in City in Central Asia," New York Times (hereinafter, NYT), December 18, 1986, and "Gorbachev Urges Armenians to End Nationalist Furor," NYT, February 26, 1988, in Bernard Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: Times Books, 1992), pp. 52 and 94, respectively. 14. Joan Barth Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 262. 15. Keith Bush, Retail Prices in Moscow and Four Western Cities in May 1976, Radio Liberty Research Supplement, June 1976, p. 32. 16. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Handbook of Economic Statistics, 1975, 1979, 1983, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: CIA, 1975, 1979, 1983, 1987), pp. 27, 153 (1975 Handbook); 10, 252 (1979 Handbook); 25, 163 (1983 Handbook); and 28, 176 (1987 Handbook). 17. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking, 1965), p. 105. 18. Tatiana Zaslavskaia, "The Old Regime in Crisis," in Robert V. Daniels, ed., Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1995), p. 36. 19. CIA, Handbook, 1975, 1979, pp. 14-15, 24 (1975 Handbook); p. 10 (1979 Handbook). 20. CIA, Handbook 1983, 1987, p. 63 (1983 Handbook); p. 67 (1987 Handbook). 21. Tatiana Zaslavskaia, "The Old Regime," p. 38. 22. Timothy J. Colton, The Dilemma, p. 37. 23. Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal Decline (New York: Vintage, 1986), pp. 47, 67. 24. CIA, Handbook, 1983, 1987, p. 62 (1983 Handbook); p. 66 (1987 Handbook) 25. See Timothy J. Colton, The Dilemma, pp. 40-41; Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet Paradox, pp. 17—18; and Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs, His Failure, His Fall (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), pp. 127-128, 229. 26. Murray Feshbach and Stephan Rapawy, "Soviet Population and Manpower Trends and Policies," in Soviet Economy in a New Perspective: A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 150. 27. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Projections By Age and Sex for the Republics and Major Economic Regions of the USSR 1970 to 2000, International Population Series, P-91, No. 26 (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), p. 128. 28. CIA, Handbook, 1983, 1987, pp. 93-95 (1983 Handbook); pp. 99-101 (1987 Handbook). 29. Timothy J. Colton, The Dilemma, p. 206. 30. Joan Barth Urban, Moscow, pp. 16, 25. 31. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. ix, 263, 266-267. 32. S. Frederick Starr, "A Usable Past," New Republic, May 15, 1989, pp. 24-27, in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, The Soviet System in Crisis: A Reader of Soviet and Western Views (Boulder: Westview, 1991), pp. 12-14. 33. Walter Laqueur, The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost (New York:

22

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Collier, 1989), pp. 18-19. 34. See Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors, and Jerry F. Hough, Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington D.C: Brookings Institution, 1980). 35. See Serge Schmemann, "Moscow Offers More Modest Plan for Achieving True Communism," NYT, October 25, 1985; Philip Taubman, "Gorbachev Assails Crimes of Stalin, Lauds Khrushchev," NYT, November 2, 1987; and Philip Taubman, "Sweeping Political Revision of Soviet System Approved in Stormy Meeting of Party," NYT, July 1, 1988, in Gwertzman and Kaufman, The Decline, pp. 18-20; 74-75; and 124 respectively. See also the Draft Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, "Socialism, Democracy, Progress," in Robert V. Daniels, ed., Soviet Communism, p. 243. 36. Seth Mydans, "Gorbachev Ready for Reagan Talks; Freezes Missiles," NYT, April 7, 1985, in Gwertzman and Kaufman, The Decline, pp. 9-10. 37. Seth Mydans, "Soviet to Stop Atomic Tests; It Bids U.S. Do Same," NYT, July 29, 1985, in Gwertzman and Kaufman, The Decline, pp. 15-17. 38. Serge Schmemann, "Gorbachev Offers to Scrap A-Arms Within 15 Years," NYT, January 15, 1986, in Gwertzman and Kaufman, The Decline, p. 26. 39. Bernard Gwertzman, introduction to Gwertzman and Kaufman, The Decline, p. xii. 40. Philip Taubman, "Gorbachev and Afghan Leader Say Way Seems Clear to Start Soviet Troop Pullout by May 15," NYT, April 7, 1988, in Gwertzman and Kaufman, The Decline, p. 101. 41. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). See also Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970) and Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1976). 42. Philip Taubman, "Sweeping Political Revision of Soviet System Approved in Stormy Meeting of Party," NYT, July 1, 1988, in Bernard Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, eds., The Decline, p. 124. 43. Bill Keller, "Gorbachev Pledges Major Troop Cutback, Then Ends Trip, Citing Vast Soviet Quake," NYT, December 8, 1988, in Bernard Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, eds.. The Decline, pp. 147-150.

2

George F. Kennan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jerry F. Hough, and the Nexus of Soviet Change George F. Kennan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Jerry F. Hough were, arguably, three of the most influential American Sovietologists of the Cold War era. As such, their prodigious writings helped shape U.S.-Soviet relations for forty years and defined the realist, political cultural-historicist, and pluralist schools of Sovietological analysis. If anyone should have noted and properly interpreted the evidence of Soviet change, it was these three scholars. While the preponderance of this study is organized in chronological increments, with Chapters 3 through 6 each given to an examination of the Sovietological literature of a single short historical period, this chapter focuses on the scholarly careers and major writings of Kennan, Brzezinski, and Hough as they touch on the evidence for, and the possibility of, meaningful Soviet transformation. Our approach is comparative, allowing us to highlight key similarities and differences between the three scholars—and correspondingly, between the three analytical schools they represented. In the process, we will see how each scholar's views of the USSR evolved over time, and we will gain insight into why so many American Soviet experts failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change.

GEORGE F. KENNAN AND THE REALIST TRADITION Virtually all realist thinkers of the Cold War era were concerned about the stability of the international political system. In practice, however, most American realist scholars envisioned the creation and maintenance of this system in the context of a geopolitical balance of power in which the United States was dominant, first among equals. Given to an "Americacentric" diplomatic perspective, many of these political scientists had trouble defining U.S. vital interests and setting foreign policy priorities and limits. Indeed, argued revisionist scholar Walter L. Hixson, "despite their efforts to distance themselves from ide-

24

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

ology and morality, Kennan, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and other postwar realists were inveterate anticommunists who sought to isolate and weaken the Soviet Union." If they talked of "a timeless diplomacy that would be focused almost exclusively on power and national interest," their ambition was "an exercise in idealism that was doomed from the start."1 In both the vitality of his ideas and the quality of his writings, George F. Kennan towered over the U.S. foreign policy establishment and over American Sovietology during every decade from the 1940s through the 1980s. A classical realist, and "a man guided by versions of Burkean conservatism and Protestant religiosity,"2 Kennan believed that Soviet policy was influenced mainly by the interests of the Soviet state and geopolitical considerations but that economic factors, ideology, and Russian tradition and culture also played a role in shaping the Kremlin's plans. Two themes dominated his early speeches and writings. First, Kennan (like most other realists in the mid-1940s) warned of a totalitarian Soviet Union that was led by ruthless men. Second, the diplomat-scholar suggested that Moscow's propensity for expansion and bullying the West, as well as the apparent dynamicism of postwar Soviet foreign policy, posed a significant psychological threat to Western Europe and the United States—a threat that had to be countered with American economic, political, and perhaps military power. Despite these emphases, Kennan viewed Soviet politics as multifaceted and capable of eventual change, requiring a nuanced response from the United States. He "did not believe that the Soviet Union sought world revolution," John Lewis Gaddis noted; Kennan saw Marxism-Leninism as a "crude means of justifying a repressive regime, not [as] a blueprint for unlimited expansion." The diplomat-scholar thought "a Soviet invasion of western Europe highly unlikely," since Moscow would have its hands full merely trying to "retai[n] control" of its East European allies. Kennan believed that Moscow preferred obedient allies to Communist ones per se, Gaddis added, but many of his opinions remained a virtual secret because he did not write them where it mattered the most—in his influential Mr. X article. Thus, the diplomat-scholar was "appalled" by "the heavy ideological emphasis" of the March 1947 Truman Doctrine speech, yet his early writings did "much to make the administration think in ideological terms."3 It is perhaps ironic that Kennan, a polished writer, could be criticized for failing to express himself clearly. In part, this criticism derived from the diplomat-scholar's own personality and vast intellectual gifts. By temperament a philosopher drawn to exploring at length various sides of an issue, Kennan was given to an unusual "on the one hand/on the other hand" kind of analysis that invited misinterpretation. Thus, Kennan said many different things about the same subject, and he often took two or even three positions on key Sovietological issues—not only over the course of his career but in a single essay. Many of his writings exhibited this dyadic and triadic quality. According to Cold War scholar Thomas G. Paterson, Kennan's argument was so complex and misunderstood in the late 1940s that it seemed schizophrenic. By depicting a USSR that was both hostile and weak, and by advocat-

The Nexus of Soviet Change

25

ing a U.S. response that would be both vigilant and restrained, Kennan tacitly allowed the Truman administration—and subsequent presidents—to emphasize whatever part of his message they wanted to believe. Invariably, Washington was attentive to Kennan's depiction of "an uncompromising, warlike, aggressive, neurotic, and subversive Russia that had to be stopped," but it ignored his consistent assertions that the USSR posed no military threat to the West, that the Soviet leaders were rational and responsible men, and that political change was possible in the Soviet Union.4 In the final analysis, we cannot come to terms with Kennan's ideas without first understanding the cultural and political temperament of postwar America. Hitler had just been defeated, and Stalin was poised to replace him as the free world's principal nemesis. Most Americans saw the USSR as an expansionist and totalitarian state that was seeking to alienate the United States, and they believed instinctively that wherever communism seized power, millions of people would be subjugated, and perhaps killed, under the Kremlin's ruthless iron fist. Haunted by the intense memories of two world wars, many Americans worried that a third global conflagration, a U.S.-Soviet nuclear war, would soon be ignited. In large measure, Kennan did not deny these concerns; rather, his early writings were "reflective of the mood, events, or Zeitgeist of the immediate postwar period," wrote Robert E. Harkavy.5 At the same time, Kennan's thinking was more nuanced than that of State Department colleagues Paul Nitze and Averell Harriman, whose longevity and influence in government paralleled Kennan's but who did not move away from their early anti-Sovietism as Kennan did. Soviet Motives Assessing Soviet motives, Kennan argued in his Long Telegram (1946) that the "Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs" was based on a "traditional and instinctive Russian insecurity." Moscow relied "only [on the] patient but deadly struggle for [the] total destruction of [a] rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it." The Soviet Union wanted to "undermine [the] political and strategic potential of major western powers" through the "disruption of] national [defense and] self-confidence," the "increase [of] social and industrial unrest, and the stimulation] of disunity."6 Kennan's telegram to Washington "powerfully reinforced the growing tendency within the United States to interpret Moscow's actions in a sinister light," noted Gaddis.7 A virtual article of faith of this sinister interpretation was the idea that "Soviet foreign policy bore little relationship to what the West did or did not do"; the "Kremlin leaders were too unsophisticated to know how to govern by any means other than repression." Therefore, Washington would never resolve its differences with the Soviet government. "Nothing short of complete disarmament" or an abject U.S. surrender to Soviet Communism "would even dent this problem," Kennan maintained, since "suspicion is an integral part of [the] Soviet system, and will not yield to rational persuasion or assurance."8

26

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Kennan's Long Telegram argued unequivocally that the USSR could not change; indeed, the diplomat-scholar edged toward a political culturalhistoricist position when he attributed the Kremlin's animosity toward the West to "both historical and ideological circumstances." The Russian past "afforded ample evidence of a hostile outside world," he noted. Soviet ideology "reinforced" this hostile mind-set, "as did the conspiratorial habits [of the] Soviet leaders" and the "unsympathetic responses [of] the West." Still, Kennan did not view Soviet policy as rigidly determined by Russian political culture, and he did not see Marxism-Leninism "as a reliable guide" to Soviet behavior, Gaddis noted. He knew that "Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany" was "neither schematic nor adventuristic. It [did] not work by fixed plans" or "take unnecessary risks." Indeed, compared with western defenses, the Red Army was still "the weaker force." Thus, "Kennan did not expect" a Soviet-American war to break out. He knew that "neither the Russian economy nor the Russian people" could withstand "another conflict so soon after the last," said Gaddis.9 Soviet behavior was strongly constrained, economically, politically, and militarily—and these constraining factors, Kennan felt, could eventually lead to change. Like the Long Telegram, Kennan's Mr. X article (so named because of its anonymous authorship when first published in 1947) was pessimistic about U.S.-Soviet relations and the possibility of Soviet change. As Richard J. Barnet noted, "[I]t is hard to read the 'X' article and come to any conclusion about when negotiation with the Soviet Union would make sense, if ever." This is because the article implied "that there could be no useful diplomacy until the mellowing process was well advanced." Indeed, said Barnet, if "Kennan had misgivings about the division of Germany, German rearmament, and the deployment of NATO armies," and if he "was appalled by the Truman Doctrine no one could guess it from the cold print" of his article.10 In the Mr. X article, Kennan embraced a deterministic view of the Soviet system, arguing that Moscow's foreign policy could not change so long as the USSR remained committed to Marxism-Leninism. "There [could] never be on Moscow's side any community of aims" with the west, he wrote. The Soviet system was inflexible and "invariably" antagonized against "the capitalist world."11 So influential were these ideas that they became an enduring western political dogma. Kennan saw in Soviet foreign policy an essential "secretiveness, lack of frankness, duplicity, suspiciousness, and unfriendliness of purpose" that were interwoven in Russia's traditional xenophobia and antagonism toward the outside world. According to State Department official Peter A. Hauslohner, Kennan believed that "the sources of [Moscow's] belligerency were inherent in the Soviet system itself." These included "the messianic ideology of the party, the profound insecurity of the party's leaders [caused] by the illegitimacy of the Soviet state, and the leadership's freedom from popular accountability."12 Thus, any sign of Soviet change was a trick: whenever the USSR wanted something from the West, Moscow would temper its hostility, and Americans would make "gleeful announcements that 'the Russians have changed,' and some [would]

The Nexus of Soviet Change

27

even take credit" for bringing about the change. Despite the Mr. X article's depiction of the USSR as unreformable, Kennan believed that Washington could, and perhaps should, compel the Soviet Union to change: "The United States has it in its power," Kennan wrote, "to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and to promote the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."13 This argument, which came to be known as the "containment" doctrine, quickly became official U.S policy and proved to be one of the most enduring Cold War verities. Kennan likened U.S.-Soviet relations to a chess game in which Washington had to "marshal" all the military and political "forces at [its] disposal on the world chessboard." Thus, dealing effectively with the Soviet Union was a matter of gamesmanship: "You have to dispose of your pawns, queens and kings in such a way that the Russian sees it is in his interests to do what you want him to do, and then he will go ahead and do it." In future decades, Kennan would criticize this notion that by manipulating game pieces on the world chessboard, U.S. leaders could force Moscow to modify its behavior.14 "There was, in fact, something patronizing," Gaddis said, "about the idea that one could 'train' the Soviet Union, like some laboratory animal, to respond in predictable ways to positive and negative stimuli." Kennan depicted the USSR as "economically powerful" and relatively immune to economic pressure by the United States. Analogously, Soviet change would not erupt from below, he noted, because citizens could not gain control of the instruments of "dictatorial power."15 But a significant transformation could come "from above"—although the diplomat-scholar viewed systemic instability and "disunity" as more likely Soviet outcomes than reform or liberalization—at least in the short term. Kennan viewed Stalinist Russia as a totalitarian state, but his endorsement of the totalitarianism model was strongly qualified. Even in the 1940s, wrote biographer David Mayers, the diplomat-scholar knew something of "the disorderliness, confusion and inefficiency that plagued" all such regimes that was lost on traditional totalitarianism model scholars like Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Kennan's "experiences in Germany [had] reinforced his views about the weakness of totalitarian states"; indeed, he believed that "totalitarian incompetence, whether Soviet or German, far outstripped democratic disorderliness." Kennan guessed that the Soviet Union would not be able to hold on to its Eastern European empire; many of these countries were politically and economically more advanced than the USSR. Moreover, all totalitarian regimes, including the Soviet Union, were "bound to change drastically in a moderate direction."16 Kennan believed that the Soviet Union had significant weaknesses. World War II "revealed the Kremlin leaders not as supermen, but as ordinary people, fallible, fearful for their own power [and] susceptible to the ravages of disease and old age." Thus, Soviet policy was not static, but dynamic; it had to respond

28

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

creatively to human foibles, geopolitical shifts, and varying domestic circumstances. Kennan rejected the idea, prominent in Washington, that the Kremlin leaders had "everything neatly arranged at home" and were "free to follow their own whims and caprices in foreign affairs." Thus, the USSR was very different from the disciplined totalitarian state that Friedrich and Brzezinski would describe in 1956. Soviet change was an ever present reality.17 Not unrelatedly, in 1961, the diplomat-scholar argued that a political "relaxation of the Iron Curtain" had already taken place and that "it would not be easy to bottle up again the intellectual and cultural life of this talented people as it was bottled up under Stalin." Kennan added that all powerful states faced practical obstacles to the building and maintenance of empire; there were "geographic limits to the possibilities of military occupation," and any "colonial regimes established [far] from the ostensible center [would] soon develop a will and identity of their own and become increasingly ineffective as instruments."18 Thus, Soviet foreign adventurism would eventually tear asunder, rather than strengthen, the Communist movement. Even if Moscow wanted to behave immoderately toward the non-Russian republics or Eastern Europe, it could not sustain such rule for long. Eventually, Soviet power would be subject to the forces of amelioration and change.19 Kennan's Shift When Kennan left the State Department in the early 1950s, he broke with his colleagues, David Halberstam noted, because "they were too ideological and military-oriented in their policies" and "were creating [their] own demonology."20 The plateauing of Kennan's diplomatic career, and the advent of McCarthyism, had a profound effect on Kennan's writings about the Soviet Union. In particular, the "militarization of containment"—a central feature of NSC-68, the Pentagon's wholesale reformulation of national security policy undertaken in light of the development of the hydrogen bomb—"and [the] establishment of NATO, was anathema to [him] and out of proportion to the danger posed by Soviet intentions," said Mayers. Kennan was skeptical about "the USSR's threat to the West. The country was poor in comparison to most of Europe and unable to conquer the continent" even if it wanted to do so—which it didn't. Thus, "limited agreements" should have been "possible over Germany, arms control, and European settlement."21 Kennan found NSC-68 to be hyperbolic and harmful to U.S. security interests, Hixson added. Where the diplomatscholar emphasized "the significance of Tito's defection and the possibilities offered by a polycentric Communist world," NSC-68 ignored these realities. While Kennan envisioned containment as a "temporary strategy," NSC-68 turned "the Cold War [into] a permanent feature of life."22 In the early 1950s, Kennan began to relax his hard realist views and antiSoviet rhetoric, insisting that Washington's hostility toward the Soviet Union and the militarization of containment were based on a misunderstanding of his ideas. To be sure, the diplomat-scholar was still pessimistic about the USSR—

The Nexus of Soviet Change

29

but he was certain that East-West tensions could be resolved apart from war. When asked how, Kennan replied, "gradual, peaceful change plus a positive example." In words that recalled the nineteenth-century American ideas of exceptionalism and manifest destiny, and perhaps, Puritan leader John Winthrop's vision of the early American colonial settlement as "a city set on a hill" in "witness" to other nations, Kennan hoped that "the necessary alternatives could be kept before the Russian people, in the form of the existence elsewhere on this planet of a[n American] civilization which is decent, hopeful, and purposeful." Provided with such a powerful example, "the day must come," Kennan insisted, "when that terrible system of power" would collapse or soften its rule.23 Kennan admitted in his first volume of memoirs (1967) that the Mr. X article was flawed in its failure to address Moscow's domination of Eastern Europe, its confusion of military and psychological-ideological threats, and its inability to distinguish vital from non-vital U.S. interests.24 Nevertheless, despite Kennan's post hoc explanation of what he had meant to say twenty years earlier, the diplomat-scholar "was more uncertain intellectually and more of a cold warrior in the late 1940s than he later wanted to admit," Mayers noted.25 At the same time, "Kennan's conception of 'containment' was more subtle [than] other analysts ha[d] recognized." Since 1947, various administrations had redefined the containment doctrine into a systemic attempt to ensnare and bankrupt the USSR in an escalating arms race. Yet Kennan's original formulation was different. "The purpose of 'containment,'" he wrote, "was not to perpetuate the status quo but to tide us over a difficult time" until the United States and the Soviet Union could "discuss effectively the drawbacks and dangers" of the Cold War and "arrange for its peaceful replacement by a sounder [policy]."26 By the 1970s, the transformation in Kennan's thinking about the Soviet Union was nearly complete. Kennan recalled the powerful influence of the American right wing and the Cold War consensus. "It was hard to get the Pentagon to desist from seeing in Stalin another Hitler and fighting the last war all over again in its plans for the next one," he noted. Conservatives were perennially "call[ing] for war with Russia—usually over China;" meanwhile, U.S. military planners envisioned "the Soviet leaders as absorbed with the pursuit of a 'grand design' for the early destruction of American power and for world conquest." Kennan saw these fears as "chimerical," and he disagreed with those who wanted Washington to interfere with internal Soviet politics or to orchestrate the disintegration of the USSR.27 In an amazing essay that could have been written by pluralist scholar Jerry F. Hough, Kennan noted that while the modern Soviet state remained authoritarian, it featured "very little of the terror that prevailed in Stalin's time." The regime was now "headed by a moderate, a man of the middle, a skilled balancer among political forces—a man of peace." Just as significantly, "Moscow's monopoly over the world Communist movement has been thoroughly disrupted." Remarkably, Kennan did not write these words in the mid-1980s but in 1977, and the Soviet leader he had in mind was not Gorbachev but Brezhnev. Later in the article, Kennan blamed American conservatives for being "unaware" that the

30

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

USSR had changed between 1947 and 1977. Indeed, the U.S. right wing seemed to be "unaware that Stalin [was] dead."28 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Kennan wrote about the excesses of the arms race. While the diplomat-scholar expected Moscow to achieve military parity with the United States, he did not see any benefit accruing to either superpower in an indefinite weapons race; the Cold War competition was a great strain on the Soviets and a danger to the United States, he noted. By 1988, Kennan was pronouncing his containment doctrine "irrelevant." The scholar who once characterized the Soviets as naturally xenophobic and duplicitous, now saw the USSR as flexible and capable of change. The diplomat who once spoke of "marshalling" America's forces "on the world chessboard" so as to bring about "the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power" now argued that except for 1948 and 1949, during the Berlin blockade, the USSR had, in scholar H. W. Brands's words, "never posed a serious military threat" against the West. As for the "Soviet ideological challenge," it disappeared by the late 1960s, once Western Europe had recovered economically and politically, Kennan noted; today, "even the Communists" did not "believe their ideology." Neither American military power nor Reagan administration policies were responsible for bringing about these innovations; rather, "forces operating within Soviet society"—especially the inability of Communism to fulfill consumer demands, and deep undercurrents of nationalistic feeling—were bringing about change.29 Thus, over the span of five eventful decades, Kennan's ideas about the Soviet Union changed remarkably—yet the changes did not obviate the continuities in his thinking. Kennan always harbored significant and fundamental doubts—even in his earliest writings—about the accuracy of the totalitarianism model and about its deterministic temper. If he did not believe that systemic Soviet reform would occur anytime soon, his realism convinced him that Soviet change was possible. Kennan's intellectual journey was remarkable, in no small measure because of the longevity of his career and the sheer quantity of his writings, but in truth, other scholars made similar, if less dramatic, shifts—away from hard realist perspectives in the 1940s and 1950s that were tough, viscerally anti-Soviet, and relatively un-nuanced in tone and content, to soft realist or incipient pluralist positions in the 1970s and 1980s that were conciliatory, anticommunist rather than anti-Soviet in focus, and more sophisticated than their previous views. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of these intellectual shifts paralleled the waning influence of Friedrich's and Brzezinski's original totalitarianism model on American Sovietology.30 Yet such scholarly movements did not represent a broad Sovietological trend. Any reasonable expectation that the Sovietological writings of the midto-late 1980s would have been more responsive to the possibility of Soviet change than the scholarly literature of the 1970s—if for no other reasons than the intensifying Soviet political and economic crises in the 1980s and the closer chronological proximity of these later writings to the events of 1989 and 1991—

The Nexus of Soviet Change

31

was not borne out. The reasons for this paradox may have had more to do with American domestic politics than with Soviet behavior. During the 1960s and early 1970s, many U.S. scholars, transfixed by the essentially reformist character of the Khrushchev era, believed that Soviet change and a Cold War thaw were possible. But by the 1980s, the Reagan revolution and the rise of neoconservatism (along with the Red Army's incursion into Afghanistan) tempered the optimism of many Soviet experts and suggested that the potential for Soviet change was limited or illusory. As Thomas F. Remington noted, Sovietology during this period could be "faulted for a theoretical bias in the direction of stability."31 There was both a "tacit assumption" and "a sort of conventional wisdom" among American scholars that the Soviet future would be characterized by "business as usual." Soviet politics was thought to be resilient and likely to continue as it was—"if not indefinitely, then at least into the foreseeable future." ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, THE POLITICAL CULTURALHISTORICIST TRADITION, AND THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITY VERSUS CHANGE Throughout the Cold War years, and particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of scholars sought to explain present-day Soviet political and social realities in terms of the unique historical, traditional, and cultural continuities of the Russian past. Foremost among these political cultural-historicist Soviet experts, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes, and Walter Laqueur took a dim view of the possibility of Soviet change. Influenced by the hard realist tone of Kennan's early writings, by the continuing intellectual sway of the totalitarianism model, and by the burgeoning neoconservative movement, these scholars insisted that "Soviet politics cannot be separated from Russian history. The central reality" of Russia was "its autocratic [and totalitarian] character," they noted.32 "Several related elements recur frequently" in political cultural-historicist literature, noted Sovietologist Alexander Dallin, "including assertions of historical determinism," a focus on "militant strategic options" and "the 'militarization' of Soviet society," "the denial of diversity and politics at the apex of the Soviet system," and an emphasis "on the role of non-Russian nationalities as a cause of both militarization and expansionism."33 Dallin attributed the lasting popularity of the political cultural-historicist emphasis to the discovery of apparent similarities in Russian and Soviet political experience, as well as to scholarly dissatisfaction with realist explanations of Soviet behavior that emphasized geopolitical events, national interest, and the balancing of power in the international system. The son of a World War II-era Polish diplomat, Brzezinski seemed to fit comfortably in the Kissinger realpolitik intellectual tradition, but as Gaddis

32

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Smith noted, he "never abandoned the conventional wisdom of the 1950s." Throughout the Cold War, Brzezinski believed "that the nature and existence of Soviet power were the primary obstacles to the creation of a stable world." Thus, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, he urged bombing missile sites, and a year later "he wrote that it was 'absolutely essential to maintain American military superiority over the Soviet Union.'" His views did not change even after he joined the Carter administration in 1977: "[I]n facing a choice between inflicting pain and trying reassurance as an approach to changing Soviet behavior, Brzezinski [chose] inflicting pain." An outspoken critic of detente, Brzezinski thought that Henry Kissinger had relied too heavily on manipulating the strategic triangle between the United States, the USSR, and China while neglecting the economic triangle linking Washington to Western Europe and Tokyo. Viewing the Soviet leadership as "rigid, unimaginative, and vulnerable in time of crisis," Brzezinski wanted the United States to drive an economic and political wedge between Moscow and its allies, thereby encouraging the independence of the East European countries. Thus, before leaving office in 1981, Brzezinski urged U.S. war planners "to focus on how, during a war, military means could be used to [break up] the USSR."34 Many scholars have noted a certain intellectual trendiness in Brzezinski's rapid-order adoption and abandonment of the totalitarianism model in 1956, the developmental model in 1965, his emphasis on the communist movement's diversity and potential for change in 1967 and 1968, and neoconservatism in 1986 and 1989. Thus, Gaddis observed dryly that, unlike the consistent themes and arguments of Henry Kissinger's scholarly work, Brzezinski's writings "showed no such depth." Gaddis quoted approvingly Simon Serfaty's acerbic comment that Brzezinski's work was characterized by an "enduring penchant for fashionable issues and concepts that are adopted or discarded in the light of changing circumstances [and by] an unbecoming reliance on the intellectual cliche of the moment."35 Despite these criticisms, Brzezinski's work evidenced a significant thematic focus from the 1950s through the 1980s: first, in the scholar's fundamental distrust of the Kremlin leaders and of Soviet power; second, in his view of Soviet behavior as deriving from, and being an essential continuation of, Russian political culture and tradition; third, in his dichotomous view of Soviet "change," which saw reform and liberalization as virtually impossible but envisioned the eventual delegitimation of Communism and fragmentation of the Soviet empire as likely; and finally, in his belief that the United States should apply economic and political pressure on the Soviet Union in order to hasten its disintegration. Totalitarianism and the Totalitarianism Model In 1956, two major Brzezinski works were published. The first was his doctoral dissertation, The Permanent Purge (which, economist Marshall I. Goldman noted disparagingly, was released "just as the systemic purging process in the USSR came to an end"). In this work, Brzezinski stressed the ingredient of ter-

The Nexus of Soviet Change

33

ror in Soviet politics. Under totalitarianism, he argued, human beings had no individuality or freedom of action whatsoever; the totalitarian citizen was essentially "a robot" of the state. Thus, the capacity of the totalitarian Soviet regime to intimidate both ordinary citizens and would-be dissidents into silent compliance was complete.36 Soviet change—whether from below or from above —was unlikely, if not impossible. Expecting the Khrushchev era to follow the Stalinist model, Brzezinski suggested that the purge was implicit in the logic of totalitarianism. Khrushchev needed, and would use, the purge to control society, punish "deviant individuals," and manage and shape the party and society. Thus, the Soviet Union was committed, "beyond the power of recall," to expansion and to the "maintenance of its coercive apparatus." Many subsequent Brzezinski writings would follow this hard-line logic, although the term "totalitarian/-ism" was quietly dropped in the 1960s. A more important Brzezinski work—also published in 1956—was Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, coauthored by Carl J. Friedrich. In this work, Friedrich and Brzezinski applied Hannah Arendt's totalitarianism model to the Soviet Union and stated explicitly what had only been implicit in The Permanent Purge, namely that "totalitarian dictatorship is historically unique and sui generis" and that, relatedly, "fascist and Communist totalitarian dictatorships are basically alike." Elaborating on the ideas of Arendt and Harvard University Sovietologist Merle Fainsod and generalizing from the careers of Hitler and Stalin, the two scholars devised a six-fold definition of totalitarianism. Totalitarian dictatorships, they argued, "all possessed an official ideology covering all aspects of man's existence," "a single mass party led by [a single] 'dictator'," "terroristic police control," "control [of] mass communication," control of the armed forces, and "central control of the economy." Additionally, Friedrich and Brzezinski saw totalitarian foreign policy as aggressive and opportunistic.37 In 1965, Brzezinski dropped the totalitarianism model and, with coauthor Samuel P. Huntington, adopted a developmental approach, which, according to Gabriel A. Almond and Laura Roselle, analyzed "converging political tendencies" in the United States and the Soviet Union "in terms of the common impact of industrialization and modernization."38 According to convergence theory, the two Cold War rivals were "becoming more alike." But in practical terms, the "differing historical and ideological patterns" in the two systems would prevent complete convergence. In the end, those who subscribed to convergence theory posited "not convergence but submergence of the opposite system," the two scholars noted. Thus, in the West, "almost all the change is seen as occurring within the [USSR]. The United States is affluent and free; the Soviet Union is gradually moving in th[at] direction." Meanwhile, "the Communists believe that the world will converge, but into an essentially Communist form of government."39 Popular during the 1960s, the idea of a U.S.-Soviet convergence was stimulated by industrialization, urbanization, and "mutual influence and contact between nations." Still, "the western and the Communist theories of convergence

34

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

[we]re basically revolutionary," Brzezinski and Huntington insisted: each "predicted] a revolutionary change in the character of the [other] system." The two scholars added that both the USSR and the United States were politically stable and "had avoided drastic changes in the last forty years." Thus, each system was unlikely to collapse or reform appreciably in the foreseeable future. Unlike pluralist scholars H. Gordon Skilling and Frederick Barghoorn, who detected significant diversity and conflict inside the Soviet leadership and elite, Brzezinski and Huntington saw very little intra-party bargaining among top Soviet officials: "Only rarely" did the men in the Kremlin "bargain extensively with the leaders of social forces and specialized bureaucracies," they noted; the Soviet rulers "virtually monopolize initiation and decision on major policy issues." While Brzezinski and Huntington conferred an extreme totalitarian efficiency upon the Kremlin leaders, they saw U.S. policy makers as being in disarray. This was because "all the strong points of the Soviet system—in ideology, in leadership, in policy making—[are] impossible to duplicate in a society which protects the liberty of the individual."40 Polycentrism and Soviet Change Two years after Brzezinski's collaboration with Huntington came The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (1967). In keeping with his developmental approach, the Columbia University scholar argued that "the events of recent years" had shown Communism to be "neither homogenous, monolithic, nor unchanging." Beneath the veneer of ideological unity was "a continuing process of change." Brzezinski added that from 1945 to 1965 Moscow's Eastern Bloc relations had undergone several phases of change, from "institutional and ideological diversity" to Stalinism to "Communist pluralism."41 Brzezinski believed that "relations among Communist states"—and the Soviet future itself—would be influenced by "many factors," including "the changing character of the Cold War," "external pressures on the Communist camp," the rise to power of "new ruling elites in the Communist states," the industrialtechnological-scientific balance between East and West, "domestic changes in the USSR and China," and the political and economic "options available" to the Soviet bloc. Ominously, the Polish-American scholar foresaw the possibility of fragmentation in the Soviet camp—particularly among the most western of the Eastern European states. In addition, he believed that change could be forced on the USSR—by rebellious allies, by ethnonationalistic tensions in the Soviet republics, by domestic crises, or by western influence. Implicit in Brzezinski's discussion was the clear notion that these variables were constantly changing— and a related expectation that both the Communist movement and the Soviet Union could undergo similar change. But despite this argument, Brzezinski did not shed his political culturalhistoricist skin. He did not believe that Moscow would initiate change on its own, and he did not give up his belief in the fundamental continuity of Tsaristera political culture and tradition into the modern-day Soviet Union. If he

The Nexus of Soviet Change

35

stopped writing about totalitarianism, he continued to view the Soviet system as hostile to western interests, and he stressed the idea that no Soviet leader could rise to power who was not committed to the traditional formulations of Communism. In Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (1969), Brzezinski brought together a number of articles by eminent Sovietologists in an effort to explore the multifaceted issue of Soviet change. In the 1966 essay that introduces this collection, Brzezinski argued that the Communist Party (CPSU) had become an obstacle to Soviet innovation and development. Because the 1970s would likely bring about greater tension internationally and increased ethnic and national unrest in the individual Soviet republics, the Soviet system was not highly stable, he noted. In his introductory essay, Brzezinski approached H. Gordon Skilling's interest group theory and Jerry F. Hough's institutional pluralism. The Columbia University Sovietologist suggested that a kind of "interest group approach" was at work in Soviet politics and that a "range of opinion" prevailed in the USSR, along with differing "alliances, group competition, and political courtship." Indeed, "not just western but also Communist (although not as yet Soviet) political thinkers" were acknowledging "the existence of group conflict even in a Communist-dominated society," Brzezinski argued.42 The scholar characterized the Brezhnev-Kosygin economic policies of 1965 as innovative and enlightened: "[H]aving rejected Khrushchev's reorganization of the party," the Soviet leaders knew that they could "no longer direct the entire Soviet economy and that major institutional reforms [were] indispensable." Indeed, this was "a partial and implicit acknowledgment that a party of total control is incompatible with the Soviet public interest." But however closely Brzezinski approached the pluralism of Skilling and Hough, he rejected the possibility of Soviet political reform. Instead, he saw a significant likelihood of systemic breakdown in the USSR. "The effort to maintain a doctrinaire dictatorship over an increasingly modern and industrial society has reopen [ed] the gap that existed in prerevolutionary Russia between the political system and society," the Columbia University Sovietologist argued. Thus, "the possibility of revolutionary outbreaks" or of a systemic degeneration "could not be discounted entirely." Brzezinski continued this theme in his concluding essay. "In all probability," he wrote, "there is more political ferment in the Soviet Union than we are aware of, since we see only the top of the iceberg. Yet such destabilizing tendencies" were no "prelude to revolution"; the Soviet Union would not become a civil society. Brzezinski viewed the rise of ethnonationalistic tensions in the non-Russian republics as a "potentially explosive issue." Expecting the Soviet leaders to endure "fairly difficult relations with the non-Russian nationalities" and guessing that the Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Georgians, or others would desire "greater national autonomy," Brzezinski predicted that Soviet ethnonationalism could "produce in the Soviet Union a political issue of even greater proportions than that posed by the current racial crisis in the United States."43

36

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

If the development of polycentrism (which Brzezinski had chronicled two years earlier) was troublesome for the ideological unity of world Communism, the growth of ethnonationalistic forces within the non-Russian Soviet republics was potentially more serious, the Columbia University scholar believed, for it threatened the political viability of the Soviet state. In addition, it was unlikely that the Soviet political system and economy would be able "to withstand a protracted rivalry with the United States." Accordingly, "major internal social, economic, and political transformations" were needed for Moscow "to maintain rapid technological and economic development." But Brzezinski doubted whether Moscow could institute the required changes. As the 1960s ended, Brzezinski's pessimism about the USSR's long-term prospects intensified. By 1973, the Columbia University scholar was asserting that the Communist giant was politically paralyzed and that it was "in a metastable state" from which "even a slight turbulence can start a destabilizing chain reaction."44 Unable to deal with the manifold social and economic problems confronting it, the USSR would not undergo change until a generational transition occurred in the leadership, sometime in the 1980s, Brzezinski declared. A Return to Original Themes In 1976, Brzezinski returned to his earliest political cultural-historicist themes, insisting that "Soviet politics cannot be separated from Russian history" and that industrialization, urbanization, and other social changes could not "alte[r] the underlying character of Soviet politics." Thus, even if the USSR experienced fundamental social and economic reform, it would not change politically because "varying political systems may coexist with similar economic systems and vice versa." But if political change were to "threaten the autocratic tradition," Brzezinski warned, the Red Army would quash the reforms and restore order.45 By 1986, Brzezinski had become sufficiently alarmed about Soviet expansionism that he began to advocate a western response that went well beyond both detente (the demise of which he did not mourn) and containment itself. The Columbia University Sovietologist knew that the Soviets were experiencing severe economic problems, but he believed that Moscow was not dissuaded from its expansionistic vision of achieving worldwide Soviet domination. Indeed, Brzezinski feared that Soviet economic change, without a concomitant political transformation, would only result in a more powerful Soviet Union that was better able to compete with the United States. In addition, he saw Moscow pursuing a "grand strategy" of military intimidation and terrorism to sow political divisions in the West and subvert the Third World.46 Although the Soviet collapse was only five years away, Brzezinski argued that "the American-Soviet contest is not some temporary aberration but a historical rivalry that will long endure." What was at stake was "nothing less than global preeminence"; accordingly, U.S. leaders had to "prevail historically" over the USSR. The Sovietologist depicted the United States and the Soviet

The Nexus of Soviet Change

37

Union as engaged in a duel over Eurasia, with Moscow intent on evicting the United States from its positions on the eastern, western, and southern fringes of that territory. Thus, Washington had to "view its transoceanic positions as the forward lines of defense that spare it from having to mount a defense of North America." If the United States failed to stop Communism in Central America, he warned darkly, "a fourth central strategic front may be opening up on the Rio Grande." In 1989, Brzezinski's The Grand Failure was published. Writing "about the terminal crisis of Communism," the scholar argued that "by the next century," Communism would be "largely irrelevant to the human condition" and would "be remembered as the twentieth century's most extraordinary political and intellectual aberration." The USSR's one-dimensional emphasis on centrally directed economic development had produced a spiritual emptiness that sapped Soviet domestic vitality, said Brzezinski. Hence, the most important discussion about the future was not whether Gorbachev would survive or succeed; rather, "the real issue is whether Soviet Communism is evolving into a more permissive and economically innovative system, or whether it is decaying or fragmenting." Brzezinski envisioned a continuum of five viable options for the Soviet future— reform, turmoil, stagnation, a political coup, and fragmentation.47 Of these alternatives, Brzezinski picked the second, turmoil, as the most likely to occur— but the Sovietologist also feared that the forces of change Gorbachev had unleashed could spin out of control and eventually turn violent. Widely hailed for "anticipating" the downfall of Communism ("The Bock That Foretold the Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and in Russia," Brzezinski's publisher gushed in a front cover blurb), The Grand Failure depicted Gorbachev's initiatives as a heroic effort to sweep away three layers of accumulated Communist dogma and practice. The removal of the surface layer—the Brezhnev era—was well underway. The removal of the second, Stalinist, layer just beneath the superficial Brezhnevian layer, had just begun and would prove more difficult. But the deepest layer, Leninism, was out of reach, Brzezinski believed; Gorbachev would not even try to sweep it away, let alone succeed in doing so, because "any rejection of [Leninism] would be tantamount to collective psychological suicide." Thus, the Soviet political system could not be reformed.48 Still, the Soviet people had become sophisticated and politically involved, Brzezinski said, and it was impossible "to put the genie of social assertiveness back into the totalitarian bottle, now that Soviet society had a whiff of open debates and [was] less immune to foreign ideas." Brzezinski faulted Gorbachev for causing these political and social "dislocations" and for inciting "the buildup of a potentially revolutionary situation." The Soviet leader had "creat[ed] constituencies for change" by "unleashing hopes" that were certain to be dashed. While Gorbachev's efforts reduced political fear, they "rais[ed] the level of social frustration. Such a combination [was] inherently explosive": any further disturbances in, say, Poland could disrupt Gorbachev's initiatives and spark a military takeover in Moscow.

38

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Over the years, many scholars have questioned the validity of Brzezinski's political cultural-historicist ideas. If the historical continuity argument provided "a simple and plausible alternative" to the totalitarianism model, the "effort to make Russian history a tool for partisan argument in policy making" was regrettable, said Alexander Dallin: "[T]he stress on distinctive and unchanging (and presumably unchangeable) characteristics of Russian history appealed to those who [saw] the Soviet regime as beyond the pale and perhaps beyond redemption." Indeed, "some of the most vociferous affirmations of historical determinism come from persons espousing the most militant and anti-Soviet positions."49 Agreeing with Dallin, Jeffrey W. Hahn localized the fault line in the debate on Soviet change directly over the political cultural-historicist argument. Hahn saw scholarly opinion as divided between those who believed "that societal changes in the Soviet Union have produced a population supportive of democratic ideas and institutions" and others like Brzezinski who believed "that the persistence of a political culture antithetical to democratic values ensures the restoration of authoritarian rule in one form or another." Hahn noted a strong correlation between Brzezinski's political culturalhistoricist viewpoint and his fundamental pessimism regarding Soviet change; indeed, "those [who see] a strong continuity in Russian political culture are more likely than others to discount the possibility of [Soviet] political change [toward] a more democratic polity," Hahn observed. In effect, scholars' views regarding the cultural continuity argument conditioned their expectations of whether Soviet political, social, and economic change could or would occur.50 The inherent simplicity of the cultural continuity model has always been its greatest advantage and, ironically, its severest liability. As Dimitri Obolensky suggested in 1950, it would be only natural for a western observer, puzzled by the culture and politics of the USSR and "wishing to understand the origin and meaning" of what he sees, "to single out those [Soviet aspects] which appear to him most striking and to trace them back as far as possible into Russia's past history."51 Ultimately, then, the cultural continuity argument is reductionistic, Obolensky suggested, since most people are "inclined to conclude that similarity is proof of historical filiation." Robert Jervis explained the enduring popularity of the political culturalhistoricist approach, and of the totalitarianism model, in terms of the natural reluctance of statesmen to revise their deeply entrenched beliefs about other countries. The inherent bad faith model explains "almost any possible behavior the other may engage in," Jervis noted. "Hostility needs no special explanation, and conciliatory actions can be seen as an attempt to lull the perceiver into lowering his guard, or as evidence that the other responds only to power and that pressure should therefore be continued."52 Partly because of the seductive simplicity of the cultural continuity argument and the attraction of inherent bad faith models—especially within an ideological and suspicious political and foreign policy atmosphere—Brzezinski's political cultural-historicist views were compelling to American scholars and helped define the mainstream of U.S. Sovietological analysis during the Cold War in a way that other approaches could not.

The Nexus of Soviet Change

39

JERRY F. HOUGH AND INSTITUTIONAL PLURALISM If George F. Kennan softened his hard realist perspective after leaving the State Department in 1950, and if Zbigniew Brzezinski employed several different methodologies and intellectual approaches in his depictions of the USSR, Jerry F. Hough's writings were remarkably consistent throughout his career. Indeed, Hough's pluralist views constituted a sharp break from the hard-line realism of Kennan and the totalitarianism model advanced by Friedrich and Brzezinski. While Hough agreed with much of Kennan's Mr. X article (for example, he approved of the diplomat-scholar's argument that Soviet domestic and foreign policy were intrinsically interrelated, and he sympathized with Kennan's view that the totalitarian Soviet system would eventually become unstable), he faulted the former State Department official for failing to anticipate "the transformation of the Soviet Union from a totalitarian dictatorship" into "a regime that [would] prov[e to be] very stable for thirty years." Kennan underestimated the sources of Soviet Communism's legitimacy, and he "paid too much attention to the possibility of its collapse" rather than "its evolution," Hough noted. While the diplomat-scholar anticipated the "mellowing of Soviet ideology" and the amelioration of Moscow's "foreign policy in a more cooperative direction, his article did not [address] the kind of challenges that a mellower Soviet Union would pose, or the continuities in [Soviet] behavior." Finally, Hough thought that Kennan's article was tinged with an unfortunate political cultural-historicism and that it suggested a rigid two-camp mentality on Moscow's part that really was not valid.53 Indeed, even in the 1940s, Hough argued, there was debate and flexibility at "the highest levels of the Politburo" regarding the relationship of the Soviet Bloc to the West. Hough disagreed more fundamentally with Brzezinski, viewing both the early Friedrich-Brzezinski "six-point definition" of totalitarianism and the Columbia University Sovietologist's political cultural-historicist ideas as flawed. The totalitarianism model all but ignored "the implications of the [postBrezhnev] succession," which elevated a new generation of leaders who were far better educated, more widely traveled, and less fixed ideologically than preceding generations, Hough noted. Moreover, by focusing on the Soviet leaders' maintenance of power, the totalitarianism model said very little about the role of society or the "policy process." Finally, "with the death of Stalin," the Soviet system changed significantly, Hough believed, and the gap between Friedrich's and Brzezinski's six-point definition and Soviet reality—never close to begin with—widened appreciably.54 While Hough acknowledged that the Soviet system was authoritarian, he did not endorse Brzezinski's conclusion that Brezhnev represented a "counterrevolution of the clerks." The Brezhnev administration was conservative in style but not in substance, he noted; it understood that a complex modern economy and society required tolerance, autonomy, flexibility, and feedback. Hough believed in a highly manipulable Soviet political order, and he saw Soviet interests as subjective and variable over time and circumstances. Envisioning the USSR as

40

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

a developing political system with modern rather than traditional political values and patterns of decision making, the Duke University scholar depicted Moscow's leaders as autonomous men who were not captured by various constituencies but, rather, were capable of real innovation. "Institutional Pluralism" As early as 1971, Hough detected several "potential sources of cleavage" within the CPSU elite, including officials' "early political socialization, education, participation in the Great Purge, involvement in World War II," and especially their "ethnic diversity."55 Such diversity could be found "within any party organization," in foreign policy, agriculture, chemical industry, construction, culture, defense, heavy and light industry, and food industry. This meant that the Soviet leaders behaved less as "rigid ideologue[s]" and more like "bargainees] imbued with the values of the civic culture."56 Hough applied the term, institutional pluralism, to the modern Soviet political system. Institutional pluralism represented an intermediate stage between authoritarianism and "classical pluralism," Hough noted, and shared several "features of conventional American pluralism." First, institutional pluralism assumed the existence in the Soviet system of a "multiplicity of interests: nothing is monolithic about society or the political system, and no single interest dominates either." Second, under institutional pluralism, "the political process revolve[d] around conflict among a complex set of crosscutting and shifting alliances of persons with divergent interests." Third, "citizens and officials treat[ed] politics as 'the art of the possible' and 'as a set of give-and-take interactions in which each side bargains for limited objectives.'" Fourth, "political leaders serve[d] as mediators or brokers in the political process." Fifth, under institutional pluralism, "governmental decisions [were] most heavily influenced by those affected by them and knowledgeable about them." And sixth, "incrementalism is the hallmark of the system."57 Under institutional pluralism, CPSU leaders followed the advice of specialized "complexes" or "whirlpools" in their respective policy areas, limiting themselves to a role of mediating the conflicts that arose among them, Hough said. Thus, the party leaders—and Brezhnev himself—were not "against change"; indeed, they grappled with it constantly, albeit uneasily. In Hough's schema, ideological debates, interest group rivalries and conflicts, and citizen participation in Soviet politics were widespread—but could take place only through existing state-approved institutions. The Soviet leaders believed "that advocacy of incremental change should be permitted on most questions if phrased carefully" but that "such advocacy should not be accompanied by confrontation politics and public criticism of the leadership." Currently, the USSR was more oligarchic than democratic, Hough acknowledged; thus, institutional pluralism was an "ideal type," representing a direction in which the USSR was heading politically, rather than a destination at which it had arrived. The process was not irreversible—though Hough did not view a reversal as

The Nexus of Soviet Change

41

likely.58 In 1983, Hough updated this definition by noting that institutional pluralism marked "an important change in the [post-Khrushchev] Soviet system." Under "Khrushchev, policy outcomes [were influenced] by the arbitrary intervention of the leader, but in the Brezhnev period they [are] determined by specialized policy complexes" that resemble "the triangle of executive department, congressional committee and interest group found in the pluralist model." In short, "a devolution of de facto power" had occurred in the USSR, "from the leaders to a type of differentiated 'leadership echelon.'"59 Hough added that "whatever labels are used" for the USSR—institutional pluralism, or something else—"the absolutely crucial point to understand [was] that in any meaningful sense there [was] some societal autonomy in the Soviet Union." Indeed, "the way in which decisions are drafted at all levels" assumed "that ministries have different points of view and fight for them." Thus, Hough saw significant political and social openness in Brezhnev's USSR, with various controversial topics aired openly albeit carefully in the press. "Large numbers of Soviet citizens participate in [these] debates" concerning "the most fundamental ideological and political questions," he noted. Hough added that while it was difficult to gauge the direction, extent, or intensity of change in Soviet politics, "changes of some significance have, in fact, occurred."60 Most important, there was a "gradual erosion" within the bureaucracy "of those forces that emphasize industrial growth over other interests"; additionally, Hough saw innovation in social policy—notably in the recent "narrowing of inequalities in income." The Brezhnev Era Hough characterized Leonid Brezhnev as a power broker. It was "wrong," he argued, to think that "the Soviet system, even under Stalin and Khrushchev, [concentrated] all power in the leader or the Politburo." Even during the Stalin era, Soviet policy "decisions were shaped by the [complex] social forces that [supported] the regime and were crucial to industrialization." Hough added that "great changes occurred" after Stalin and Khrushchev left the scene. Thus, there was, in the Brezhnev era, "a significant diffusion of power away from the top leadership."61 Indeed, Hough concluded, "Brezhnev simply does not correspond to our old image of a Soviet dictator who ruthlessly forces through social transformation on the basis of his ideological preconceptions." Hough took western leaders to task for their "deep misunderstanding" of the Brezhnev era. The Brezhnev years were "not a period of growing repression of individual freedom," he noted; they did not trigger "declining citizen participation"; they were not an era in which "greater privileges are accorded to the 'New Class' in comparison with other strata of society"; they were not a time when consumers were neglected; and they did not herald a "recentralization of the Soviet political system."62 Indeed, "the trend [was] in the opposite direction." Hough disputed the western notion, popularized by Carl A. Linden and

42

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

other scholars, that "Khrushchev's ideological innovations" had been "reversed" by Brezhnev. Citing statistical data suggestive of citizen involvement in Soviet politics, as well as the prevalence of extensive popular debates in Soviet journals and newspapers, Hough saw widespread political participation in the USSR. "Nearly all the debates" during the Brezhnev era were "richer and freer" than they had been under Khrushchev.63 Popular participation in political affairs—and even in the CPSU—was "extremely widespread in comparison with the typical levels of political activity in the West," the Duke University Sovietologist argued. Most male party members were "family men" who brought party news and information home. Thus, the CPSU was widely represented throughout Soviet society: "[T]o think of [the] party as a 'priesthood'"—as Brzezinski called it—"makes no sense at all," Hough complained, "and even to call it 'an elite' requires us to recognize that it is 'an elite of a rather peculiar kind.'" Indeed, "the mass character of the party [was] a key fact about the USSR that has not been sufficiently absorbed" into American scholarly thinking, said Hough. In the past, American Sovietologists assumed that political participation was a coercive tool and that "the controls flowfed] in one direction only." Clearly, this notion was wrong, Hough said, and scholars needed to revise their assumptions of a fundamentally apolitical Soviet population.64 Soviet "society [was] not inert and passive but participatory in almost all senses of the term."65 Hough suggested two reasons why Brezhnev was so misunderstood in the West. First, western scholarly opinion had been poisoned by the harsh antiSoviet rhetoric of Soviet dissidents. Oddly, such criticism flew in the face of Brezhnev's ameliorative policies toward dissenters. Second, Brezhnev's rule seemed more conservative "in style and rhetoric" than the Khrushchev regime had been. Still, there was potential in Brezhnev's USSR for significant liberalization, the Duke University Sovietologist noted. Hough believed that Brezhnev was "in an extremely strong position" as the USSR's "undisputed leader" but that he had "deliberately chosen to delegate a great deal of authority to subordinates."66 The speeches of top party officials did not suggest that Brezhnev was wrestling "against the bonds of oligarchical control"; rather, he was regarded as "the universally-recognized leader" and as "a wonderful man to work for," Hough noted. Although much that Hough said would attract significant attention and criticism, the Duke University scholar's central theme—that western scholars' views of the Soviet political system determined their attitudes toward change in the USSR—contained an important truth. If "Soviet leaders [and the CPSU apparatus were] hostile to the West," if Soviet bureaucrats were concerned only with the "preservation of [their] privilege^]," and if Soviet power were seen as "residing almost exclusively among top political and governmental officials" and "flow[ing] from ideological commitments," then western Sovietologists might reasonably conclude that "nothing, short of [a Soviet] collapse [could] produce [important] change." But Hough preferred a different image of the USSR—one that recognized that significant "debate [was] permitted on most policy ques-

The Nexus of Soviet Change

43

tions in the Soviet Union and that, within the framework of authoritarianism," there was "an increased tendency to tolerate individual differences." Conflicting viewpoints—the give-and-take of politics—existed in the Soviet Union, "even on the most important questions," and debate over issues "could produce change for the better or for the worse."67 This new image suggested a different kind of "relationship [between] the party and society." It depicted the Soviet system as "participatory, with many societal inputs in the decision-making process." Generational Change In the early 1980s, Hough analyzed the complex generational changes that were occurring in the various Soviet leadership hierarchies, and he weighed their meaning for Moscow's future. There was great "pressure for change," the Duke University scholar noted, "along with a frustration at the weakness and indecision of Brezhnev." Since the mid-1970s, the aging general secretary had steadily refused to deal with a growing number of difficulties his successors would not be able to avoid. Noting that the Soviet leader had been in office for nearly twenty years and that the Brezhnev generation had clung to power for almost forty years, Hough suggested that western scholars could not easily "discern which features of Soviet politics [were] inherent in the system, and which reflected generational] values." Many aspects that the totalitarianism model deemed essential to the Soviet system and that political cultural-historicist scholars saw as rooted in the Russian past might very well disappear altogether when the Brezhnev generation left office.68 The emergence of a new post-Brezhnev generation would introduce qualitative changes in Soviet domestic and foreign policy. The new leaders would be "considerably younger than their predecessors. Instead of having had little exposure to the West," as was the case with the Brezhnev group, these new men would "have studied [and traveled in] the West" extensively. In foreign policy, they would be less driven by the classic Soviet inferiority complex about "catching up with the West"; they would be more assertive and "self-confident" in demanding American respect for the USSR as an equal global power; and they would demonstrate greater willingness to pursue long-term "cooperation" in trade and to resolve international conflicts.69 Hough guessed that the new rulers would have a more realistic appreciation of the limits of Soviet influence abroad and of the economic dilemmas and volatile political complexities of various Third World regions—dilemmas and complexities that could not be reduced into simple Marxist-Leninist tenets. Noting that generational differences were significant and often influenced career experiences and attitudes, Hough rejected the neoconservative argument that the next general secretary would likely be a carbon copy of the present one. The USSR was facing an "absolutely historic succession," Hough said in 1982, and the younger leaders were different: they found "Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin a real shock," and they participated in "breaking] up the rigidities of Stalinis[m]" in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, real transformations were possi-

44

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

ble. Soon, a new collective leadership, which included Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev, would likely replace Brezhnev. "Not only can change come quickly," Hough concluded; "there is an excellent chance that rather significant change will come fairly quickly."70 In the economic realm, the post-Brezhnev leadership would not institute Yugoslavian market socialism or try to reestablish capitalism anytime soon. On the other hand, it might attempt "to expose the Soviet economy more to world market forces" and to reduce military expenditures. Less hidebound by dogma than preceding generations, and more aware of the USSR's grave economic difficulties during the 1970s and 1980s, this younger generation could inch toward a Hungarian economic model through "meaningful price adjustments," legalization of parts of the second economy, the granting of greater independence for farms and peasants, and various changes in foreign policy. Such actions could stimulate greater efficiency and labor productivity—although they would also invite short-term increases in inflation, unemployment, and income differentiation. If there was any uncertainty about the decisions these new leaders would make, some economic reform was essential, the Duke University scholar warned. If no economic changes occurred following the succession, riots could ensue, the Soviet system could destabilize, and—if troops failed to quell the disturbance out of ethnic solidarity with the people—the Soviet Union could unravel. But Hough discounted such a dire outcome, and he restated his belief that change was inevitable upon Brezhnev's departure. Besides the need for economic reform, which was "the central issue of the succession," several other problems had to be addressed soon—including the nationalities problem, "questions concerning political reform," the "relationship of the Soviet Union with the outside world," and the Polish crisis.71 Gorbachev Shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev's elevation to power in 1985, Hough characterized the new Soviet leader as "a natural politician who instinctively know[s] how to say the right thing and make the right gesture. The speed of his rise [demonstrated] his political skill." Thus, it was "hard to believe" that Gorbachev would "make elementary political mistakes in introducing reform."72 The new leader gave every "appearance of being a world-class chess player who delights in complex combinations and knows how to make them." Moreover, "he was a man in a hurry," and subsequent "events [only] confirm [ed] this impression." Hough concluded that "it would be a grave mistake to dismiss Gorbachev as [a] typical party apparatchik" and it would be doubly dangerous to assume that the party apparatus opposed all change.73 Hough did not say a great deal about the nationality problems that Brzezinski and a number of other scholars including Seweryn Bialer and Gail W. Lapidus found so ominous. To the extent that he thought about ethnonationalism at all, he saw it as a stabilizing factor that worked in Gorbachev's favor. Most non-

The Nexus of Soviet Change

45

Russian Soviet citizens believed that the new economic reforms would enhance their own autonomy and dignity. At the same time, "the multinational character of the Soviet Union" required the sort of gradual approach that the new general secretary favored. Indeed, Hough noted, "as Gorbachev loosens controls, his problem is how to restrain those who want to go further, without instituting a repression that destroys reform."74 Hough believed that Gorbachev's toughest problem would be transforming the USSR's economy. The Soviet leader was so urgent in his discussion of economic problems and in his advocacy of change "that he made it difficult to go backward." Gorbachev's domestic and foreign policies would be influenced, if not constrained, by this singular priority. Hough thought that lagging economic growth rates and problems with the availability and quality of consumer goods (and the associated difficulty of waiting in queues for hours to buy food and other consumer goods) were tolerable inconveniences for most Soviet citizens. A more serious economic dilemma was the pervasive "technological backwardness" that "threatened] a series of disastrous consequences" for the USSR. "The question for the Soviet Union now is not equality with the West, but with countries such as Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and even Taiwan," Hough noted. "The Soviet model was good for heavy industry and the smokestack period of industrialization," but it did not work "in the current electronics-computer phase." Indeed, technological backwardness now threatened even the one sector in which the USSR truly excelled—defense.75 In the end, Hough predicted that Gorbachev's economic reforms would work, and he weighed the possibility that before long the Soviet Union—not Hungary or China—would be setting the standard for such reform. In response to Gertrude E. Schroeder's claim that Gorbachev's policies were directly descendant from previous reform measures that had failed—such as the 1965 Kosygin initiatives—Hough insisted that Soviet change was inevitable and that Gorbachev would succeed. The idea that economic change could not occur in the USSR was based on the faulty "assumptio[n] that the General Secretary [was] not committed to reform, and that if he [was], he would not be able to overcome resistance to it." While acknowledging that many western observers were cynical about the possibility of Soviet change, Hough found it significant that this time it was Gorbachev—the general secretary himself—and not an assistant like Kosygin, who was calling for fundamental reforms.76 In 1987, Hough addressed the growing western anxiety over Gorbachev's future. While the Soviet leader's opposition seemed to be mounting, the Duke University Sovietologist insisted that Gorbachev's position was as strong now as Stalin's had been in 1928. Indeed, western scholars who feared that the general secretary's support would collapse, or that he, like Khrushchev, would be deposed, had "paradoxically come to accept a Marxist view of the Soviet political system and to rely on Moscow rumors about Kremlin politics." Gorbachev now was "completing one of the most rapid consolidations of power in Soviet history," said Hough.77 He was at the height of his power—yet remarkably, many scholars were "predicting his downfall in as little as one year, although some

46

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

conceded he might survive for two or three years." Hough believed that many of these predictions of opposition and defeat were planted by Gorbachev himself and were intended for Soviet domestic consumption, to persuade liberals and dissidents to stem their criticism of his program. As for the presence of conflict among Gorbachev's advisors, the Soviet leader did not want "to eliminate a diversity of views among his lieutenants" or to "surround himself exclusively with yes-men." Thus, U.S. scholars "should be very cautious" about concluding that "differences of opinion" signaled political opposition or weakness. Indeed, many such critics, presuming "that no change is possible in the Soviet Union, seize[d] on possible opposition to Gorbachev as the guarantee that his [program] would be stymied." In other words, since "no change was possible," Gorbachev would fail to effect change. Obviously, this was a circular argument. In point of fact, the USSR and its leadership were deeply affected by the forces of modernization, Hough argued. "Despite the differences between capitalism and socialism," the life of "the average urban Russian" was "closer to that of the average American than to that of his grandfather in a preindustrial [Russian] village at the turn of the century." The profound generational shift that had already occurred in Soviet society—as well as the advances in educational attainment, tolerance of ideological differences and ambiguity, and political skill within the leadership—were bound to influence the Soviet future; Gorbachev's elevation was itself no accident, because he represented these forces of "change." Hough believed that the Soviet leader would herald a new era in Soviet politics in which the regime would become less authoritarian (if not partially democratized) and more fully integrated in the world economy (if not significantly marketized).78 Given the fact that the "Gorbachev generation" evidenced a fundamentally western orientation, Hough reasoned that xenophobia, censorship of western influences, and other repressive or totalitarian manifestations in Soviet society and politics reflected not the "unchanging character of Russia" or immutable Soviet ideology but, more simply, the values of an earlier generation born at the turn of the century, which had cut its political teeth during the Stalin era. Later generations, which grew up in an urbanized and modernizing Soviet Union, had different values. Thus, a broad stratum of Soviet society and of the elite, including Gorbachev himself, was eager for change and wanted to dismantle "the two Iron Curtains" that had been erected—one to resist "western ideas" and the other to block "market forces." Noting that "industrialization [is] extremely corrosive of dictatorship when countries reach the level of economic development of Argentina, Brazil, Greece, South Korea, and Spain," Hough rejected the idea that Moscow was somehow exempt from the forces of change, or that the USSR was completely different from western countries. If "the prevailing western image [saw] Gorbachev on a hill," pushing "the huge boulder of Russian society up toward reform with only a few intellectuals helping him," the Duke University Sovietologist's image differed. "Gorbachev [was], indeed, on a hill and dealing with a huge boulder of

The Nexus of Soviet Change

47

social forces," he noted—"but he [was] on the down slope of the hill trying to bring the boulder down gradually to reform without letting it roll over him." In the end, Hough expected systemic reform to occur in the USSR, but he did not expect Gorbachev to challenge the CPSU's monopoly, and he warned scholars not to "judge" the Soviet leader's initiatives "by the standard of a totally free market."79 The impetus for Soviet change was virtually irresistible, Hough believed; economic and political changes were needed just to keep up with the transformations that had occurred in Soviet society—and Gorbachev was leading this vast movement for reform. While some westerners depicted Gorbachev's mind-set as "thoroughly Stalinist," the truth was "much more complex," Hough insisted. Although Stalin was in power during Gorbachev's formative years in the 1940s and 1950s, there was, even in 1945, a movement within the Soviet Union "to reintegrate Russia back into the West." A "substantial" number of CPSU "members of the Moscow intellectual community were for liberalization." Moreover, "the Gorbachev generation first came into contact with the West during World War II"—"when Hitler was a deadly enemy and the United States was a crucial ally"; thus, it "saw America in a favorable" and even a friendly light. During Gorbachev's first year in office, western observers argued that the new Soviet leader's position would be "relatively weak" because of his youth and inexperience and that his elevation would auger "a change in the style of Soviet leadership rather than in substance." But this assessment was too clever by half, Hough noted. The new general secretary was "not merely returning to [the New Economic Policy] of the 1920s; he [was] implicitly repudiating Lenin and returning to Marx." U.S. scholars had "been consistently misjudging Gorbachev" for years, and the basic reason for this error was that Americans had "misunderstood] Russian history and the Bolshevik Revolution." Gorbachev's initiatives represented "a return of Russia toward that which is normal for it," Hough concluded. "For that reason, they will go very far."80 Hough believed that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had disrupted "the natural Russian path of integration into the West. Supported by] peasants streaming into the city," the Revolution "rejected the westernized elite, and promised a path of development" independent of "western economic and political" help. "In this sense, the Bolshevik Revolution was the Khomeini revolution of Russian history." It was ushered in by Lenin, and maintained by his successors. By contrast, the Gorbachev generation—Soviet "bureaucrats under 55 years of age—[were] the youth we have seen for the last 30 years, who were not anti-western but who yearned for western clothes and music and contact with the West." Instead of seeking "warm water ports," these younger leaders wanted "warm water beaches in the Riviera, in Capri, on Greek islands."81 Thus, Hough anticipated that Gorbachev would complete the work that was interrupted by the Bolshevik revolution—the work of integrating the USSR into the West. The Soviet leader would thereby undo much of the damage that was inflicted on the Soviet Union by the 1917 revolution.

48

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

The first U.S. scholar to understand that Gorbachev would be a serious innovator, Hough probably stuck with the Soviet leader too long—partly in response to other Sovietologists' doubts about the possibility of Soviet change. Hough continued to support Gorbachev into the late 1980s and early 1990s, even in the face of Gorbachev's sliding political fortunes, and—ironically—despite the fact that the USSR would cease to exist at the end of 1991. Calling attention to the close relationship in most societies between high education and urbanization levels and democratic values, Hough argued in 1990 that Gorbachev "had good reason" to expect "dramatic political change" in the Soviet Union. The Duke University Sovietologist criticized those scholars who had switched their support from Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin and his radical pro-democracy followers, and he noted that western Sovietologists were making a big mistake by underestimating Gorbachev. "The real story of the past year [1989] has been the further consolidation of Gorbachev's political position," he insisted.82 Indeed, Hough saw "one [future] scenario [as] particularly compelling. Assuming good health, Gorbachev is almost certain to remain in power at least until the 1995 presidential election, even if the radicals win the legislative elections of 1994." Hough was so sure of Gorbachev's staying power that he reiterated this core belief in 1991: "Gorbachev's position will be very strong in the 1990s."83 AMERICAN SOVIETOLOGY AND SOVIET CHANGE: SOME CONCLUSIONS How well did Kennan, Brzezinski, and Hough—and the Sovietological schools they represented—respond over time to the eighteen indicators of social, economic, and political reform that we identified in Chapter 1? In general, while the three scholars mentioned these trends in passing in their prodigious writings, they discussed only a few of them in any detail. Kennan's early work, dating from the mid-1940s through the early 1960s, focused on geopolitical events, polycentrist tendencies in world communism, and Moscow's crisis management and arms control behavior. At the same time, Kennan wrote about modernization, ethnonationalistic tensions, and the Soviet military burden, but he said very little during these early years about the demographic, public health, and economic problems that would become apparent in the USSR after the mid-1970s. Following the conclusion of the Vietnam War, Kennan's writings began to address all or most of the Chapter 1 indicators of change. Of major concern in these late Kennan writings were the decline in Soviet living standards and consumption, stagnant gross national product (GNP) and production growth, agricultural setbacks, and the reformative influence of Gorbachev's new thinking. In addition, Kennan continued to emphasize many of the data and trends that he found persuasive in the 1940s and 1950s. Brzezinski's earliest writings, penned in the 1950s, emphasized the unchanging totalitarian character of Soviet politics and purposefully rejected most of the evidence of Soviet change we noted in Chapter 1. To the extent that Brzezinski

The Nexus of Soviet Change

49

mentioned these indicators at all in the 1960s, he emphasized modernization, polycentrism, and the Soviet military burden as suggesting that some limited adjustments—but no significant changes—were possible. In the 1970s and 1980s, Brzezinski continued to highlight this data, but he began to note additional evidence of change—including demographic shifts in Soviet society, increasing ethnonationalistic tensions and problems, declines in living standards and consumption, slowed GNP and production growth, widespread agricultural failure, antiquated technology, and unsettling manpower trends—as pointing to Soviet social, economic, and political decline. Significantly, Brzezinski minimized the other indicators of political change—such as generational transformation, the USSR's fundamentally reformist tradition, and Gorbachev's new thinking. Even in his earliest writings, Jerry F. Hough cited many of the Chapter 1 indicators of Soviet social and political change—including modernization, demographic shifts, increased citizen input in policy questions, polycentrism, the USSR's reformist tradition, and Moscow's temperate crisis management and arms control behavior. In addition, the Duke University Sovietologist noted such developing trends as increased Soviet health problems and mortality statistics, living standard and consumption declines, generational change, and Gorbachev's new thinking. This data suggested to Hough that the Soviet Union would soon undergo significant reform. But Hough said relatively little about ethnonationalism or the USSR's economic difficulties. The question of whether Kennan, Brzezinski, and Hough saw Soviet change as possible is closely related to the three scholars' views regarding several other issues—such as whether the Soviet system was resilient and legitimate, whether the Cold War would endure, and whether the USSR would collapse. While Kennan always understood that Soviet change was possible, he did not see it as likely to occur anytime soon. In the 1940s and 1950s, the diplomat-scholar described the Soviet system as brittle and illegitimate, although he did not expect it to collapse, and he did not expect the Cold War to end. By the 1970s, Kennan came to view Soviet change as likely, and he saw the Soviet Union as both resilient and legitimate. While this "late" Kennan still did not think that the USSR would collapse anytime soon, he was more ambivalent on the question of whether the Cold War would endure. Brzezinski's ideas on these matters also evolved over time—but less so than Kennan's views. While the Columbia University Sovietologist never saw the USSR as particularly resilient or legitimate, neither did he think that an imminent collapse was in the cards. If Brzezinski's earliest writings detected little prospect of Soviet change, his later essays and books argued that destabilizing change was possible and even likely. On the whole, Brzezinski's early thinking—like Kennan's early position—depicted the East-West conflict as a nearpermanent feature of world politics. Seeing an American-Soviet rivalry that was historically and ideologically foreordained, Brzezinski anticipated that the Cold War competition would continue for a long time to come. But by the 1980s, Brzezinski, like Kennan, came to think of the Cold War as finite, ending some-

50

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

time in the indeterminate future. Finally, Hough's views on these questions were remarkably consistent from the late 1960s through the late 1980s. The Duke University scholar saw Soviet reform as likely, and he viewed the Soviet system as legitimate and resilient; thus, he did not expect the Soviet Union to collapse but was hopeful that Cold War hostilities and suspicions would eventually recede. Why Did American Sovietologists Fail to Anticipate the Possibility of Soviet Change? Perhaps the three most interesting questions suggested in these pages are: How were American Sovietologists caught by surprise? Why did U.S. Soviet experts ignore or misread the evidence of Soviet change? And what do the writings and careers of Kennan, Brzezinski, and Hough tell us about the shortcomings of American Sovietology, and about the failure of so many American scholars to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change? George F. Kennan had a great deal to say about the failings of American diplomacy. In 1951, the diplomat-scholar found "serious fault" with Washington's "legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems." The legalistic belief assumed that the United States could "suppress the chaotic and dangerous aspirations of governments" through the imposition of a "system of legal rules and restraints." It tried to apply "the Anglo-Saxon concept of individual law" internationally, making it as "applicable to governments" as it was to persons.84 But behind the legalistic approach lay an insidious belief that the values and goals of non-Americans were unimportant in their own right and were secondary to the demands of global order and peace, Kennan noted. Americans thought it "implausible that [the leaders of other countries] should have positive aspirations that they regarded as more important" than U.S. diplomatic goals. Thus, the legalistic approach to foreign affairs discounted "political problems and the deeper sources of instability. It assume[d] that civil wars [would] remain civil" and not escalate into global conflicts. It expected other countries to solve their problems without provoking the international system. Kennan was equally troubled by the infusion of "moral judgment" into international politics and foreign policy making. "Whoever [imposes] a law must be indignant against the law-breaker, and feel a moral superiority to him," the diplomat-scholar noted. "And when such indignation [leads to warfare], it knows no bounds short of the reduction of the law-breaker to complete submissiveness." There was a terrible irony in this sort of diplomacy, Kennan added: "[T]he legalistic-moralistic approach, rooted in a desire to [end] war and violence," made "violence more enduring and destructive. A war fought in the name of high moral principle finds no early end short of total domination." Kennan believed that the United States was particularly vulnerable to legalistic-moralistic thinking. "A democracy is peace-loving [and] slow to rise to provocation," he noted, but once "it [has] grasp[ed] the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary" for creating a disturbance. Indeed, the United States was

The Nexus of Soviet Change

51

not unlike a large but dim-witted "prehistoric monste[r]" that dozed contentedly "in his primeval mud and [ignored] his environment." An enemy "practically ha[d] to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests [were] being disturbed; but once he grasp[ed] this, he la[id] about him with such blind determination that he not only destroyed] his adversary but wreck[ed] his native habitat. It would have been wiser for him" to have dealt with his enemies and potential threats in a timelier and less violent manner, "instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating."85 As Kennan wrote to diplomatic historian Norman Graebner in February 1960, "[W]e Americans like our adversaries wholly inhuman: all-powerful, omniscient, monstrously efficient, unhampered by any serious problems of their own." We are unable "to recognize any relativity in matters of friendship and enmity."86 This was evident in America's involvement in World Wars I and II. Kennan suspected that the true cause of Americans' wartime fervor had little to do with the real issues involved in the conflict, but was rooted in "a profound irritation that other people have finally provoked us" into fighting. But policy making born of anger "len[ds] to the democratic war effort a punitive note, rather than one of expediency," the scholar noted. This explained Washington's "difficulty in employing force for rational and restricted purposes" rather than for "emotional" and open-ended ones. Kennan's observations parallel the writings of other historians and political scholars who have chronicled the influence of exceptionalism and manifest destiny on American politics, diplomacy, and culture. Behind these currents was a common assumption that the United States was impervious to the revolutions sweeping through Europe and exempt from the messy conflicts and changes that modernity was creating abroad. Exceptionalism and manifest destiny "constitute^] the predominant language of [U.S.] politics," said scholar Dorothy Ross, yet they "distorted" that politics in their "simplistic and idealized vision" and in their "exaggeration of American uniquenesses."87 Exceptionalism drew much of its force from Protestant millenarianism. According to scholar-theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, "[T]he two great religiousmoral traditions" of early U.S. history viewed America as "a 'separated' nation, which God was using to make a new beginning for mankind." This idea had significant foreign policy implications: Americans found it "almost as difficult" as the Soviets themselves "to believe that anyone could think ill" of them, since both societies thought of themselves as "so essentially virtuous that only malice could prompt criticism" of their actions. Related to exceptionalism was the notion that the United States had a moral obligation—a manifest destiny—to tutor or exert leadership over the unenlightened peoples of other countries. This belief in "America as the darling of divine providence" was formed early in U.S. history and explains why Americans seem so "self-righteous." But Niebuhr rejected all claims of American preeminence: Washington had neither the wisdom nor the moral authority to organize the rest of the world, he said. Americans "cannot simply have [their] own way, not even when the 'happiness of mankind'" is their goal.88

52

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Kennan's critique was consonant with the ideas of Harvard University political scholar Louis Hartz. In 1955, Hartz argued persuasively that America's "liberal tradition" derived from its nonrevolutionary character. Despite the "storybook" myths about the American Revolution, Americans "lacked [the] tradition of reaction" of the French and Russians. This fact "deeply conditioned [Americans'] outlook on people elsewhere who did" endure social and political turmoil, and "it help[ed] thwart the crusading spirit in them," thereby giving "to the wild enthusiasms of Europe an appearance of analytic error." If Americans were "symbols of a world revolution," Hartz noted, they "were not in truth world revolutionaries." Thus, Americans could "dream of [them]selves as emancipators of the world at the very moment" that they had "withdrawn from it." They could "see [them]selves as saviors at the very moment that [they] were isolationists." This collective delusion led to "absolute thinking," and exacerbated Americans' "difficulty [in] communicating] with the rest of the world."89 Oddly, American liberalism had "saturated the [U.S.] sense of mission, not with a Christian universalism, but with a curiously Hebraic separatism," said Hartz. Whenever America was confronted with an external military or ideological threat, "the national response [was] an instinctive and immediate closing of ranks that 'transform[ed] eccentricity into sin' and dissent into subversion." Americans were "inspired either to withdraw from 'alien' things or to transform them"—they could not live with them. This "explained] the [U.S.] tendency to depict opponents not merely as [enemies], but as evil, as devils deserving destruction by worthy Americans."90 Such thinking was particularly evident in the "Red scares" of the 1920s and the 1950s, Hartz recalled, when "the American liberal community contained far fewer radicals than any other western society, but the hysteria against them was [greater] than anywhere else." Indeed, everywhere in the West, liberalism was "a glorious symbol of individual liberty, yet in America its compulsive power [threatened] liberty itself."91 In essential agreement with Hartz, scholar Michael H. Hunt argues that "three core ideas" have shaped U.S. foreign policy during the twentieth century. They are: a strong sense of national mission, a tendency to view other peoples in terms of a racial and ethnic hierarchy, and a reflexive hostility toward social revolutions. It is perhaps easy to see a connection between these influences and the rise of anti-Sovietism in Washington and the academy.92 Individually and collectively, these cultural and political strains—legalisticmoralistic thinking, exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and the American liberal tradition—exacerbated U.S. Sovietologists' misperceptions of the USSR. Kennan himself lamented the "political intolerance" of the Red scare and the McCarthy investigations. These episodes were "accompanied by a rousing antiintellectualism, a mistrust of thought, a suspicion of foreign contacts and influences," and "a demand for uniformity within the framework of a cheap, provincial chauvinism."93 The diplomat-scholar saw "in these tendencies, a primitivism and brutality that threatened [the] freedom of thought [and] cultural progress" of all Americans. In addition, these curious influences damaged Kennan's diplomatic career

The Nexus of Soviet Change

53

and harmed the careers of other Cold-War-era Sovietologists who found themselves in the service of practical-minded but unknowledgeable bureaucrats. Thus, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, railroad tycoon Averell Harriman and Wall Street lawyer Paul Nitze virtually ran U.S. Soviet policy and supervised the work of legitimate scholars like Kennan, despite their own lack of formal Sovietological training. Worse, Harriman and Nitze took it upon themselves to frighten America with a simplistic and hyperbolic image of a monstrous Soviet threat. In effect, careful scholarship was co-opted by pragmatism, decisiveness, and virulent anti-Sovietism. In his memoirs and late writings, Kennan attributed many of the failings of American Sovietology to the undue influence of Russian and East European emigre scholars. He recalled how, throughout the early Cold War years, U.S. Soviet experts listened carefully to the pessimistic and anti-Soviet arguments of these individuals, most of whom had singularly horrible experiences and opinions of the Soviet Union. "To a man," these scholars "did not hesitate to recommend themselves" to academia and the government as Sovietologists and national security "experts."94 Many of these emigre experts saw themselves as "escapees from Communist oppression." In the 1940s and 1950s, they wanted the United States to declare war against the Soviet Union in order "to achieve the final breakup of the traditional Russian state" and the liberation of their own respective countries. Most of these scholars were more concerned about their own interests than American interests, Kennan warned, yet they carried "considerable political influence in Congress" and in the ethnic "voting blocs in the big cities." Thus, "they appealed successfully to the prevailing anticommunist hysteria." Moreover, their views resonated in certain American conservative quarters that "did not advocate a war with Russia but scoffed at the thesis that there might be any gradual mellowing of Soviet power." These groups urged Washington to mount a political and propaganda attack "on various communist regimes, aimed at their overthrow [through] the action of local anticommunist groups, [and] the 'liberation' of the Soviet peoples. Had [such] talk come only from extremists," there would be little cause for concern, Kennan noted; "but it had, by [the 1950s], made deep inroads on the opinions of people who could not be relegated to that category."95 What are we to make of Kennan's curious argument? It is noteworthy that the diplomat-scholar was more an Anglophile than a Slavophile and that he was often criticized for his aristocratic manner. Indeed, many governmental and educational institutions shared Kennan's elitist perspective during the early Cold War years. For example, James O. Freedman, president emeritus of Dartmouth College, recalls that most of America's leading universities—including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth—used quotas to discriminate against Jewish, Irish-American, Asian-American, Italian-American, Native-American, African-American, and Hispanic-American scholars in their admissions and hiring practices. Thus, it is entirely possible that Washington and the academy (and Kennan himself!) were predisposed toward an anti-Soviet bias.96

54

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Although Zbigniew Brzezinski's writings were less forthcoming than Kennan's regarding the failings of American diplomacy and the question of why U.S. scholars did not anticipate the possibility of Soviet change, the Columbia University Sovietologist's career in academia and government may itself be instructive. In his history of the national security council, political scholar John Prados recalled how, throughout 1976, Brzezinski had courted presidential candidate Jimmy Carter for a cabinet level position in his administration. "Brzezinski wanted to be active and engaged," Prados argued; "he saw in aiding politicians a means to that end." Wanting "to remain the epitome of relevance," Brzezinski shifted "back and forth between government and academia constantly absorbing information and giving advice," Prados added. "Whether at Columbia University or on policy planning at State, Zbig's objective was to be provocative but right in step with the national security consensus."97 Prados concluded that there was "an entire community of defense intellectuals and civilian strategists" like Brzezinski—"men and women who floated seamlessly between government and academia, in and out of one administration after another." In the end, Brzezinski's desire to be "relevant" and "right in step with the national security consensus," along with his abiding love of his Polish homeland, may have colored his conclusions about the USSR and the possibility of Soviet change. It is noteworthy that in December 1995, long after his government service had ended and six years after the dissolution of Communism in Eastern Europe, Brzezinski was awarded Poland's highest civilian honor, the Order of the White Eagle, "for supporting his homeland's transformation to democracy"—both during and after his tenure as national security advisor in the Carter administration. According to wire service accounts of this award presentation, Brzezinski, who had been "forced to leave Poland at a young age, said he decided to enter American political life to influence policy toward his homeland," and to "suppor[t] its efforts to regain independence from Moscow."98 We may well wonder to what extent Brzezinski's desire to help his homeland colored his perception of the Soviet Union and nudged his scholarly views toward the harsh totalitarianism model perspective that he and Carl J. Friedrich popularized in 1956. Like Kennan, Jerry F. Hough had a great deal to say about why American Sovietologists failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change. "To a considerable extent, Soviet studies in the United States [were] confined to a ghetto within the social sciences," the Duke University scholar noted in 1977. This problem was "self-created"; most U.S. Soviet experts had undertaken their study of the USSR "either out of a conscious or unconscious search for their personal roots or out of an interest in understanding America's major adversary." Hough regretted the tendency of these scholars to read their commitment to democracy and western liberalism into their study of the Soviet Union.99 According to Hough, "[T]he process of socializing a constant stream of immigrants into American culture, of inculcating [U.S.] political values into them, and of creating a sense of common national identity" lent a strong tone of "mor-

The Nexus of Soviet Change

55

alism, messianism, unconscious arrogance, and self-righteousness" to American diplomacy.100 In effect, the roots of anticommunism were buried deep within the immigrant ethos of most Americans. As the American Friends Service Committee noted persuasively in 1989, "[T]he rapid expansion of our country carried with it a suspicion of the [newcomer] in town and the consequent compulsion on the part of the stranger" or foreigner "to identify himself as a good American." But the problem is that "we are all immigrants," the American Friends Service Committee argued: "[W]e are all hyphenated Americans. None of us belongs in the sense of the European whose ancestry in his own community goes back a thousand years." Consequently, "we have to demonstrate to one another that we are good Americans— primarily by demonstrating that we are not un-American." This reflexive compulsion to prove our loyalty was strictly an American phenomenon, the American Friends Service Committee emphasized: "[A]n Un-Danish (or Un-British or Un-French) Activities Committee is unthinkable."101 Thus, Senator Joseph McCarthy drew much of his popular support from "Catholics of recent immigrant background" who thought "that if they proved their patriotism by hating communism, they would be accepted." But Hough was unimpressed; such attitudes impaired the U.S.-Soviet relationship, he noted, and encouraged all Americans, including scholars, to view the USSR as "driven by some inner logic." If Soviet politics was characterized by institutional pluralism, Hough believed that the totalitarianism model still colored far too many western Sovietological assumptions. The Duke University scholar criticized Brzezinski and Richard Pipes for advancing a pessimistic image throughout American universities and government of a totalitarian USSR that could not change. In the 1950s and 1960s, Hough recalled, totalitarianism-model scholars and historians viewed "19th-century Russia as part of Western Europe and the Bolshevik Revolution as an unnatural break in Russian history." Correspondingly, they saw a Soviet political system that was controlled by "an extraordinarily strong General Secretary, a weak bureaucracy, and an ideology committed to world dominion abroad." But by the 1970s and 1980s, these judgments were reversed. "The dominant view of Russian history" now, Hough noted, "is that of Richard Pipes, who believes that the Soviet period is the natural continuation of the Tsarist period." This shift was unfortunate. Despite its severe flaws, the conventional totalitarianism model correctly saw the similarities between Bolshevism and right-wing extremism; indeed, the older view was "closer to the truth than the new orthodoxy"—at least concerning the 1917 revolution and the question of Soviet change. Hough recalled that throughout the Soviet period, but especially during the Brezhnev era, western predictions about the USSR's future were "less successful than one would have expected." This was because "few [western scholars] caught the combination of conservative style and moderate liberalism in [Soviet] policy toward social questions and some aspects of civil liberties that was to mark the 1960s and the 1970s."102 What led to such miscalculations? Much of

56

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

the problem stemmed from the faulty Sovietological generalizations—for example, in projecting the present onto the future, or in transferring the Soviet leader's idiosyncrasies onto the system as a whole. Additionally, the fascination of scholars with building "models" of the Soviet "system" was intrinsically dangerous, Hough suggested, because the search for "interconnections and common causes [often] uncover[s] interconnections and common causes that do not exist." Thus, the Soviet political order of 1952 seemed to be a highly stable system in which the basic political institutions had remained unchanged for a quarter century, and there were no disruptions or civil unrest. Yet it proved unstable and disappeared soon after Stalin's death. In Kuhnian terms, by concentrating so intently on the old Stalinist paradigm, scholars had neglected new data that did not fit the dominant model. NOTES 1. Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 49, 300. 2. David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. x. 3. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 19411947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 322-323 , 350. 4. Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 115. 5. Robert E. Harkavy, "Soviet Conventional Power Projection and Containment," in Terry L. Deibel and John Lewis Gaddis, eds.. Containment: Concept and Policy (Washington D.C: National Defense University Press, 1986), p. 313. 6. George F. Kennan, "The Kennan 'Long Telegram,' February 22, 1946," in Kenneth M. Jensen, ed., Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan and Roberts Long Telegrams' of 1946 (Washington D.C: United States Institute of Peace, 1991), pp. 2 0 21,27. 7. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 39. 8. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 20. 9. Ibid., pp. 33-35. 10. Richard J. Barnet, "A Balance Sheet: Lippmann, Kennan, and the Cold War," in Michael J. Hogan, ed., The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 118-119. 11. Mr. X (George F. Kennan), "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs, vol. 25, no. 4 (July 1947), in Michael B. Levy, Political Thought in America: An Anthology (Chicago: Dorsey, 1988), p. 537. 12. Peter Hauslohner, "Politics Before Gorbachev: De-Stalinization and the Roots of Reform," in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, The Soviet System in Crisis: A Reader of Western and Soviet Views (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), p. 57. 13. Mr. X (George F. Kennan), "The Sources," p. 542. 14. George F. Kennan, Navy War College lecture, October 6, 1947, quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies, pp. 49-50, 319-320. 15. George F. Kennan, "Measures Short of War (Diplomatic)," lecture given on Sep-

The Nexus of Soviet Change

57

tember 16, 1946, and "Formulation of Policy in the USSR," lecture given on September 18, 1947, in George F. Kennan, Measures Short of War: The George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College, 1946-47 (Washington, D.C: National Defense University Press, 1991), pp. 10, and 239, respectively. 16. David Mayers, George Kennan, pp. 9, 84. 17. George F. Kennan, "The Backgrounds of Current Russian Diplomatic Moves," lecture given on December 10, 1946, in George F. Kennan, Measures, pp. 71, 84-85. 18. George F. Kennan. Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (New York: Mentor, 1961), pp. 260, 369. 19. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies, p. 47. 20. David H. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 134. 21. David Mayers, George Kennan, pp. 46-47. 22. Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan, p. 95. 23. George F. Kennan, "America and the Russian Future," Foreign Affairs 29, no. 3 (April 1951) in American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (New York: Mentor, 1951), p. 123. 24. George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925—1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967), pp. 358-359, 364. 25. David Mayers, George Kennan, p. 106. 26. George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925—1950, p. 365. 27. George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1950-1963 (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 90, 92, 172. 28. George F. Kennan, "Needed: A New American View of the USSR," Washington Post, December 11, 1977, in Detente or Debacle: Common Sense in U.S. Soviet Relations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 30, 32. 29. George F. Kennan, "Obituary for the Cold War," New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer 1988, cited in H. W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 204-205. 30. Although they contradicted the growing affinity of other scholars during the 1970s and early 1980s toward neoconservative positions, and a more nuanced and sophisticated totalitarianism model. 31. Thomas F. Remington, "Common Knowledge: Soviet Political Studies and the Problem of System Stability," in Daniel Orlovsky, ed., Beyond Soviet Studies (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), p. 180. 32. Jeffrey W. Hahn, "Continuity and Change in Russian Political Culture," in Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., and Erik P. Hoffmann, eds., Post-Communist Studies & Political Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology (Boulder: Westview, 1993), p. 303. 33. Alexander Dallin, "The Uses and Abuses of Russian History," in Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., and Erik P. Hoffmann, Post-Communist Studies, p. 139. 34. Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 36, 67. 35. See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies, p. 349, and Simon Serfaty, "Brzezinski: Play It Again, Zbig," Foreign Policy, no. 32 (Fall 1978), pp. 6-7. 36. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 1-2, 168, 174. 37. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956), pp. 5, 9-10, 57.

58

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

38. Gabriel A. Almond with Laura Roselle, "Model Fitting in Communism Studies," in Gabriel A. Almond, A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), p. 79. 39. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking, 1965), pp. 8-10, 12, 418-419, 436. 40. Ibid., pp. 412-413. 41. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. ix, 497-499, 501-502. 42. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The Soviet Political System: Transformation or Regeneration," in Zbigniew Brzezinski, ed., Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 23, 26-27, 30-31. 43. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Concluding Reflections," in Zbigniew Brzezinski, ed., Dilemmas, pp. 154, 161-162. 44. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, "U.S.-Soviet Relations," in Erik P. Hoffmann and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., eds., The Conduct of Soviet Foreign Policy (New York: Aldine, 1980), p. 316. 45. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Soviet Politics: From the Future to the Past?" in Paul Cocks, Robert V. Daniels, and Nancy Whittier Heer, eds., The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 337, 344-345, 351. 46. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Game Plan: How to Conduct the US.-Soviet Contest (New York: Atlantic Monthly Books, 1986), pp. xii, 23, 98, 239. 47. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989), pp. ix, 1, 95. 48. Ibid., pp. 41-48, 100-101. 49. Alexander Dallin, "The Uses and Abuses," pp. 131-132. 50. Jeffrey W. Hahn, "Continuity and Change," pp. 299, 304. 51. Dimitri Obolensky, "Russia's Byzantine Heritage," Oxford Slavonic Papers 1 [1950], pp. 37ff., quoted in Alexander Dallin, "The Uses and Abuses," p. 141, n. 7. 52. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 310. 53. Jerry F. Hough, "The 'X' Article and Contemporary Sources of Soviet Conduct," in Terry L. Deibel and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 292, 300. 54. Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 520-522. 55. Jerry F. Hough, "The Party Apparatchiki," in H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 50. 56. Jerry F. Hough, introduction to The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 3-4. 57. Jerry F. Hough, "The Soviet System: Petrification or Pluralism," Problems of Communism 21, no. 2, March—April 1972, p. 23. 58. Jerry F. Hough, "The Brezhnev Era: The Man and the System," Problems of Communism 25, no. 2, March—April 1976, p. 14. 59. Jerry F. Hough, "Pluralism, Corporatism and the Soviet Union," in Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Pluralism in the Soviet Union: Essays in Honor of H. Gordon Skilling (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), pp. 52, 57-58. 60. Jerry F. Hough, "The Soviet System," pp. 35, 39. 61. Jerry F. Hough, "The Apparatus of Power" in The U.S.S.R. and the Sources of

The Nexus of Soviet Change

59

Soviet Policy (Washington D.C: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1978), pp. 117-118. 62. Jerry F. Hough, "The Brezhnev Era," p. 8. 63. Jerry F. Hough, "Political Participation in the Soviet Union" in Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union, pp. 111-112, 115, 118, 123. 64. Jerry F. Hough, "Party 'Saturation' in the Soviet Union" in Paul Cocks, Robert V. Daniels, and Nancy Whittier Heer, eds., The Dynamics, pp. 125-126, 132-133. 65. Jerry F. Hough, introduction, p. 5. 66. Jerry F. Hough, "The Brezhnev Era," pp. 5-6, 8. 67. Jerry F. Hough, preface to The Soviet Union, pp. vii-viii. 68. Jerry F. Hough, "Soviet Succession: Issues and Personalities," Problems of Communism 31, no. 5, September-October 1982, in Soviet Succession, Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, September 29, 1982 (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 49, 66-67. 69. Jerry F. Hough, Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington D.C: Brookings Institution, 1980), pp. 130, 167. 70. Jerry F. Hough, statement on "Soviet Succession," made before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, September 29, 1982 (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 3-5, 20; and "The Generation Gap and the Brezhnev Succession," Problems of Communism 28, no. 4, July—August 1979, p. 15. 71. Jerry F. Hough, "Soviet Succession," pp. 49-52, 55, 68. 72. Jerry F. Hough, "Gorbachev Consolidating Power," Problems of Communism 36, no. 4, July-August 1987, pp. 39^10. 73. Jerry F. Hough, "Gorbachev's Strategy," Foreign Affairs 64, no. 1 (Fall 1985), pp. 33, 38. 74. Jerry F. Hough, "Gorbachev Consolidating Power," pp. 42—43. 75. Jerry F. Hough, "Gorbachev's Strategy," pp. 39, 44, 54-55. 76. Jerry F. Hough, "The Gorbachev Reform: A Maximal Case," in Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: The Economy (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution, 1991), pp. 47-50. 77. Jerry F. Hough, "Gorbachev Consolidating Power," pp. 21, 37, 39. 78. Jerry F. Hough, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 121. 79. Ibid., pp. 27-29, 102, 185, 213. 80. Ibid., pp. 7-9, 28, 65, 156, 186. 81. Jerry F. Hough, "The Gorbachev Reform," pp. 48-49. 82. Jerry F. Hough, "Gorbachev's Endgame," in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System, pp. 226, 229, 247. 83. Jerry F. Hough, "Understanding Gorbachev: The Importance of Politics," in Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: Politics and People (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution, 1991), p. 481. 84. George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, pp. 82-83, 85. 85. Ibid., pp. 59, 73-74, 87. 86. Kennan to Norman Graebner as recorded in David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 127. 87. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge

60

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

University Press, 1991), pp. xviii, 29. 88. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), pp. 24-25, 74. 89. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), pp. 5, 38, 306. 90. Tom Wicker, introduction to ibid., pp. xi—xii. 91. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, pp. 11, 37, 300. 92. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 17-18. 93. George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1950-1963, pp. 223-224. 94. George F. Kennan, introduction to the Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia (New York: Anchor, 1989), pp. xxxv-xxxvi. 95. George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1950-1963, pp. 96-97, 99-100. 96. James O. Freedman, "Ghosts of the Past: Anti-Semitism at Elite Colleges," The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2000, p. B7. 97. John Prados, Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (New York: William Morrow, 1991), pp. 273, 381. 98. "Zbigniew Brzezinski Gets His Homeland's Top Honor," The Virginian-Pilot, December 20, 1995, p. A9. 99. Jerry F. Hough, introduction, pp. 1—2. 100. Jerry F. Hough, Soviet Leadership, p. 158. 101. American Friends Service Committee, Anatomy of Anti-Communism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), p. 22. 102. Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union, pp. 557-559.

3

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and American Sovietological Literature, 1974-1977 Given the vitality of Louis Hartz's American liberal tradition, it should not surprise us to learn that both the government and the academy came under the sway of legalistic-moralistic thinking and began to harbor an exaggerated sense of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny in the years immediately following World War II. According to Yale University historian Robin Winks, these currents, along with a virulent anti-intellectualism, were evident in the wideeyed enthusiasm with which U.S. colleges and universities joined forces with Washington to fight, first the Axis powers in the 1940s and then global Communism in the 1950s and 1960s. "Americans generally and the [academy] specifically, thought of themselves as having a mission to the world," Winks wrote. They had "the blessings of liberty," the know-how, and the energy "to reshape the world to [their] benefit and, not incidentally, to America's. One enemy would be replaced with another," but their "continuity of purpose," their belief that education should be harnessed to "the service of the state," and their certitude of "civic virtue, these convictions [continued], from World War II, across the arch of the Cold War into the 1960s." Winks cautioned that Americans' "sentimental imperialism" should not be "utterly scorned." Critics could neither "utterly condemn, nor wholly praise" this well-intentioned impetus to "make the world safe for democracy," even if they knew, "as Woodrow Wilson had meant, that the form of democracy for which the world must be made safe would be the form best exemplified by and most comfortable to the United States."1 Similarly, there can be little doubt that the totalitarianism model of the 1940s and 1950s—as articulated by Friedrich and Brzezinski in 1956 and adapted later by other scholars—exerted a strong influence over American Sovietology throughout the Cold War and well into the 1970s and 1980s. But despite the totalitarianism model's dominance—or perhaps because of it—a variety of competing scholarly approaches were also advanced during this time. In particular, the totalitarianism model's simplistic characterization of the USSR as

62

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

monolithic, unchanging, and hostile to western interests was severely challenged by the emergence in the 1960s of several new ways of studying Soviet politics that emphasized interest groups, leadership conflict, bureaucratic politics, development and modernization theory, and patron-client relations. Many of the writings that we will review in these chapters, spanning the entire period from 1974 through 1988, reflect a conscious attempt by American scholars to break free of this pervasive paradigm of the past. Remarkably, this effort to overcome the intellectual limitations of the totalitarianism model was aided, in the 1960s and early 1970s, by an important realization among Soviet experts that the differences between Stalin and his successors were profound. In particular, the social, political, and economic innovations of the Khrushchev era showed scholars that real Soviet change was possible. In this chapter, we will highlight several new approaches from the pre-1974 period; then we will consider the continuing influence of the Khrushchev period and the succeeding Brezhnev era on American Sovietological literature during the pivotal years from 1974 through 1977. AMERICAN SOVIETOLOGICAL LITERATURE BEFORE 1974 The Khrushchev innovations had a largely positive impact on American Soviet experts before 1974. While much of the scholarship of the 1960s was held captive by a starkly anti-Soviet totalitarianism model, a significant and expanding Sovietological literature written during this period—and particularly those scholarly works penned before the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968—pointed to the eleven-year Khrushchev tenure as a unique era of liberalization in Soviet politics. Many of the scholars who produced this literature were emboldened by Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress and by his de-Stalinization campaign. They saw the Soviet leader's various attempts at political and economic reform—as well as his efforts to curb the appetite of the "metal eaters" in the industrial-defense complex—as indicating that Soviet change was possible. In this light, even Khrushchev's ouster in 1964 was not interpreted by U.S. scholars—at least initially—as a repudiation of reform but was understood as a rejection of the Soviet leader's economic programs and mercurial foreign policy decision-making style. Thus, many realist and pluralist Sovietologists remained optimistic throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s about Moscow's growing cooperation with the West and especially with the United States, and a significant number of these experts believed that Soviet reform was possible. Conversely, other realist and political cultural-historicist Sovietologists stopped writing about Soviet change altogether—particularly after the Kremlin's brutal disposition of the incipient Dubcek reforms in Czechoslovakia. These scholars noted the USSR's impressive military power and wrote about the Kremlin's political viability and resilience. But they believed that Brezhnev's dictatorial methods and malevolent character precluded any possibility of Soviet change.

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

63

Pre-1974 Realist Literature Although many of the earliest U.S. realist scholars—notably, those Sovietologists writing in the 1940s and 1950s—viewed Soviet politics through the perceptual lenses of the totalitarianism model, by and large they saw nothing inevitable or permanent about the Soviet system, and many did not deny the possibility of Soviet change. The USSR was no more unchanging, in their view, than Nazi Germany. Significantly, many of these early realist works eschewed the hyperbolic anti-Sovietism usually associated with the totalitarianism model in favor of a more balanced discussion of USSR domestic and foreign policy. In the late 1950s, the influence of the totalitarianism model on realist Sovietological literature was further tempered by a new awareness on the part of scholars that the Khrushchev leadership was prompted as much by domestic welfare concerns as by traditional security requirements. Khrushchev seemed to be, in Joan Barth Urban's apt phrase, a "conservative innovator," and this realization that the new Soviet leader was remarkably different from Stalin suggested to many realist scholars that change was possible in the USSR. Perhaps the most respected U.S. textbook on the Soviet system from an early Cold War era, realist perspective was Harvard Sovietologist Merle Fainsod's How Russia Is Ruled (1953). In his study, Fainsod argued that the USSR was, from its Leninist inception, a "monolithic and totalitarian" state. "The elitism, the theory of the party as a dedicated revolutionary order, the highly centralized leadership," the strict party discipline and "absolutism, the intolerance of disagreement and compromise, and the drive for power—all these patterns which crystallized in the early years exercise a continuing influence" on Soviet politics.2 Thus, Moscow's rulers were powerful and "self-perpetuating" and could not be contradicted or "dislodged." Still, Fainsod recognized that complete totalitarian monolithicity and efficiency was a myth and that Soviet change was always possible. Any totalitarian depiction of the USSR was, to some extent, an "ideal type," he noted; as such, there was "danger in uncritical acceptance of the stereotype of the Bolshevik as an iron-disciplined, dedicated, and completely integrated instrument of the party." Indeed, totalitarianism was a kind of "facade," masking a struggle for power and influence in the party (CPSU) apparatus, in the police, in the army, and in the administrative bureaucracy.3 This facade "obscure[d] the diversity of interests," pluralism, redundancy, and bureaucratic competition that existed in Soviet politics, Fainsod believed. In the 1963 edition of his textbook, Fainsod moved away—far away—from the totalitarianism model he had embraced a decade earlier. Whereas the Harvard scholar's early (1953) view of Soviet Communism was influenced in no small measure by the "high development" under Stalin of the purges, terror, and the secret police as instruments of control and power, his 1963 discussion acknowledged Khrushchev's fundamental repudiation of terror as an "essential ingredient" in governing the Soviet Union.4 Indeed, Fainsod approached an incipient pluralist position in his depiction of Khrushchev as a virtual reformer

64

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

who sought to end the worst excesses of Stalin and restore Lenin's original idealism and emphasis on the leading role of the CPSU. Noting Yugoslavia's and China's political independence from Moscow and the uneasy Polish-Soviet relationship, Fainsod concluded that polycentric tendencies under Khrushchev had undermined "the political and ideological unity of the Communist camp." While the Red Army seemed "sufficiently formidable to prevent the secession" of Eastern Europe, "underlying yearnings for freedom and independence persisted]," and these ethnic sentiments could "rise to plague the Soviet leadership." Stalin believed that "the world [was full] of enemies, and [that] the faster one marched forward to socialism, the sharper the class war had to become," Fainsod observed. But Khrushchev "radiate[d] confidence that Communism [would] march to world mastery without unleashing a nuclear holocaust. He believe[d] that the Communist leadership ha[d] consolidated its position within the Soviet Union, [and] that mass terror [was] no longer necessary." In addition, Fainsod noted, Khrushchev "count[ed] on welfare concessions, rapid industrial progress, scientific and military achievements, and heightened [international] prestige [to] appeal to the world at large."5 Robert C. Tucker's 1963 work, The Soviet Political Mind, described the reforms that came about in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death as substantial and significant, amounting to a shift from one virulent form of totalitarianism to another, milder one. A number of these improvements were triggered by popular pressures for higher living standards, noted Tucker, while other transformations came about with the demise of Stalin's psychopathic personality. Soviet external conduct also changed radically in 1953; while retaining its long-range goal of defeating capitalism, the USSR tempered its aspirations to territorial aggrandizement and global hegemony and softened its belligerent posture toward the noncommunist world. Post-Stalin foreign policy remained expansionistic, but now Moscow sought to expand its influence, not its control. Its method was persuasive rather than coercive; its preferred instruments were diplomacy, trade, and propaganda. Thus, Stalin's death marked a decisive turn in both Soviet history and politics.6 In 1967, Tucker described the Soviet leaders' accommodations to the modern world in words that strongly anticipated the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. "The men who came to power...after Stalin's death" were not revolutionaries, but "executives and managers," the Princeton University Sovietologist noted. "Communist in ideology, the post-Stalin leaders [were not] radical; they [were] an essentially post-revolutionary leadership presiding over a de-radicalized Soviet Marxist movement that [had] accommodated] itself to the world that it remained] ideologically committed to transform."7 Thus, the USSR became a status quo power, Tucker argued. This shift was effected in the 1950s and 1960s by the growth of polycentrism and "the need for international stability as a setting for Soviet development and reform." Moreover, these political changes required parallel economic reforms: "[A] Soviet regime attempting to rule without terror must necessarily seek substantial and

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

65

continuing improvement in the living standards" of its citizens. Tucker added that most U.S. leaders tacitly acknowledged that the USSR had changed; thus, Washington had, "since President Eisenhower's time," reacted "favorably to the concept of a changed relationship involving cooperation as well as continued rivalry" with Moscow. In Politics in the USSR (1966), Frederick C. Barghoorn examined internal Soviet politics through the perceptual lens of culture and saw a "potentially or latently pluralistic" modernizing society. Like Fainsod, Barghoorn believed that strong factions had always existed in Soviet politics; even under Stalin, "there were sharp differences over policy alternatives." After Stalin's death, power struggles continued over de-Stalinization, the economy, defense policy, detente, the handling of writers and intellectuals, and other issues. Thus, "Soviet high politics" under Khrushchev was "characterized by contained pluralism, or closed oligarchic politics," Barghoorn argued.8 Viewing the CPSU as "highly centralized, but also differentiated," Barghoorn argued that the Soviet system was "increasingly confronted" by the divisive "aspirations of social strata" that were "loyal to the 'socialist' system but critical of particular party policies and practices." Indeed, "even in the official [Soviet] media" there was no "complete uniformity of opinion and interpretation"; since 1953, Soviet citizens "have had increasing access to both official and unofficial information." Listeners and "readers [were] able to perceive policy differences and rivalries among high-level political leaders and groupings," Barghoorn noted. Thus, western scholars must not "regar[d] Soviet public opinion as a mere carbon copy of Kremlin perceptions and moods." Barghoorn indicated that "problems of nationality and national sentiment assume complex and unusual forms in the USSR because of the multinational composition of the Soviet population." In particular, "puzzling questions [were] raised" by the "persistence" of religious and national expression—which the CPSU saw as "inimical to its efforts [to] mobiliz[e] and homogeniz[e]" Soviet society. The fact that these "national and cultural difficulties [were] so troublesome as to require continuous and massive propaganda and administrative countermeasures fifty years after the [Revolution] attestfed] to their tenacity." Barghoorn guessed that the "nationality problem" would not lead to regime disintegration, but he acknowledged that some scholars like Richard Pipes saw non-Russian nationalism as a growing danger to Moscow "precisely because modernization strengthens the consciousness of cultural distinctiveness" among non-Russians.9 Barghoorn criticized the "biased prediction" of American Sovietologists who "seemed particularly fond" of arguing that "the Soviet regime might collapse because of widespread popular discontent" or "because it lacked the market economy or religious freedom" of the West. In reality, he noted, the USSR was a modernizing, pluralistic society, similar to more advanced western countries; it was not about to unravel or change suddenly. Indeed, "we cannot assume that the Soviet agricultural problem," or any problem, "is insoluble."10 Barghoorn believed that three conditions were necessary for "fundamental

66

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

[Soviet] change" to occur. "First, the leadership must be badly split, or paralyzed by indecision. Second, there must be widespread loss of support for the political authorities." Third, an "organized political opposition with a clear conception of an alternative to the present system" was required. "Some years will pass before these conditions are fulfilled," Barghoorn noted, but "the burden of proof is upon anyone" who thinks that the present leadership could not govern effectively.11 In 1972, the third edition of Donald W. Treadgold's Twentieth-Century Russia was published. The University of Washington Sovietologist depicted Khrushchev as a complex and contradictory figure "who had brought the world to the verge of war and yet tried to further 'peaceful coexistence' with the West," who was "brutal," but "had steadily pushed 'de-Stalinization,' and who had tightened the screws on the Soviet peasant while at the same time offer[ing] the Soviet consumer visions of 'goulash Communism.'" Still, Treadgold saw this "colorful and crude little man" as a reformer.12 Treadgold characterized Soviet economic development as a series of mixed blessings. "Agriculture lagged behind industry," he noted, and "consumer goods increased slowly in quantity [but] not in quality. The private automobile hovered on the Soviet horizon; black and white television was everywhere, and color was soon to come." In addition, "urban housing finally crept past the level of the early NEP" years. Soviet citizens "were glad of the modest economic improvements," Treadgold concluded, "even if they understood] the enormous gap that still separated them from the comforts available in the West." Politically, "the appearance of open dissidents among writers and artists, the national minorities, and religious believers has agitated the political leadership"—but the Brezhnev administration "regarded [such activity] as a [mere] chronic annoyance" and nothing more, Treadgold noted. More troubling was the wholesale leadership transition that was sure to come within a decade or so. The days of the Kremlin gerontocracy were numbered, and the old leaders would "in the next few years undergo an interesting process of replacement," Treadgold predicted, but discussion of the coming leadership transition raised serious questions about the next generation of Soviet leaders. In addition, the Kremlin was "gravely concerned" about the political "indifference" of Soviet youth and about their growing antipathy toward Komsomol and the CPSU.13 There were a number of other significant realist Sovietological writings in the pre-1974 period. In The Icon and the Axe (1966), historian James H. Billington related the common American belief that the Soviets could not change to the twin Sovietological misconceptions that first, the ideals of truth and freedom had no appeal inside the USSR, and second, the Soviet future would be just like the past. Rejecting such notions, Billington noted that the crucial determinant of the Soviet future would be the West's ongoing lure to the East—and Moscow's relationship with its most western allies, such as Poland and Hungary.14 Similarly, in his 1969 memoirs, diplomat Charles E. ("Chip") Bohlen posited the strong likelihood of Soviet reform, although he did not speculate when such reform would take hold. Bohlen added that "if there [was] a breakup of party

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

67

control we can expect a re-emergence of national sentiment among the subject peoples"—and perhaps a "palace coup d'etat."15 But Alexander Dallin rejected such a dire outcome, noting that totalitarian systems tended to relax with increased modernization and social complexity. In the future, Soviet politics would likely manifest "greater functional specialization, greater multiplicity of role conflicts, [and] a greater awareness of divergent group interests," the Sovietologist wrote.16 In addition, "political articulation and participation [would] increase while the pressures of forcible social, political, and economic mobilization" would decline. Analogously, Sidney I. Ploss argued in The Soviet Political Process (1971) that substantial debates and rivalries existed within the party and that "such dissension involve[d] multifarious issues of government and foreign affairs, as well as the mechanics and personalities of the struggle for power" within the leadership.17 Pre-1974 Political Cultural-Historicist Literature While most pre-1974 political cultural-historicist Sovietologists were not unmindful of the innovations of the Khrushchev era, many had fundamental doubts about the possibility of significant Soviet reform. Committed to the prevailing totalitarianism model and to the related idea that Soviet ruthlessness, xenophobia, and political inflexibility were rooted in the Russian past and were near permanent features of Soviet politics, these scholars concluded that the Soviet Union could not change. The positive example of Khrushchev's innovations was not as significant for most of these Soviet experts as the fact that his policies ultimately failed and that the Soviet leader was forced out of office in 1964. Similarly, Khrushchev's welfare concerns seemed less credible than his bombastic anti-American rhetoric and his reckless, missile-rattling behavior. Finally, the squashing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968 signaled a return to terror in the minds of many scholars. A number of political cultural-historicist Soviet experts adopted Zbigniew Brzezinski's cultural-continuity argument, although they did not go along with the Columbia University Sovietologist's intellectual shifts to a developmental and interest group approach and an emphasis on communist diversity and potential for change. In his classic work on Stalinism, The Great Terror (1968), Robert Conquest depicted a monolithic USSR, led by a despotic ruler who was driven more by ideological promptings than by realpolitik or national interest. Neither the peasant terror of 1929 to 1933 nor the great terror of 1936 to 1938 came "out of the blue," Conquest noted; nor did they "follo[w] inevitably from the nature of Soviet society" and of the CPSU. Still, both of these destructive episodes were rooted in "the extraordinarily idiosyncratic background of Bolshevik rule."18 After Stalin's death, the dictator's machine continued to rule the USSR, Conquest argued, and the spirit of Stalin's terror guided the thinking and policies of Cold-War-era Soviet leaders. "The principle of one-party rule, the overriding competence of that party in all spheres of life, the preservation of its

68

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

'monolithic' nature—and rule over it by a small central body—all continued." Indeed, "all the [modern] leaders," the political "machine through which they rose, and the principles of rule" were Stalinist in character.19 Thus, Conquest rejected both the view that Khrushchev was a reformer and the fundamental idea that Soviet reform was possible. Conquest minimized the importance of Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress, in which the Soviet leader denounced Stalin's arbitrary rule and abuses of power. The de-Stalinization speech was "little more than [an] abandonment of a specific set of excesses associated with the late dictator," he argued. "It did not change the system of political rule in the USSR." The CPSU still ruled Russia, and "partiinost—the doctrine of the party's right to rule on all questions of speed and direction—remained untouched." Khrushchev merely "renounced the] excessive use of [the] whip and spur." In 1969, Conquest described the Soviet political system as "organizationally effective," "ideologically disciplined," and unlikely to change anytime soon. But "if the final crisis of the Communist regime" was to occur, he noted, it would be triggered by a fundamental economic collapse. The Kremlin leaders would "soon have to face a major dislocation which their present small-scale economies and conservation measures [could not] avert." Conquest added that the Soviet economy was "overextended" and could not "compete with the [West] in armaments and at the same time maintain the increasingly complex industry that has now become necessary."20 Nevertheless, the current Soviet "crisis" was "even more a crisis of ideas than of economics," Conquest concluded. Of course, not everyone agreed with the political cultural-historicist and totalitarianism model position. In a shrewd argument, scholar Alfred G. Meyer wrote in 1967 that Sovietologists like Brzezinski and Conquest had fundamentally misconstrued the Soviet Union and other communist states when they perceived them as sui generis—that is, as wholly unique and unlike any other country. By "us[ing] one set of concepts" and models to analyze "communist countries and another for the rest of the world," these scholars had abandoned "the framework of comparative political science" and embraced unsound and essentially dishonest methodologies.21 Pre-1974 Pluralist Literature Like many realist scholars, pluralist Sovietologists of the 1950s and 1960s were encouraged by the Khrushchev initiatives and by the swelling tide of polycentrism evident in the Communist movement. What set pluralists apart from most realists, however, was their early and complete repudiation of the totalitarianism model and their free adoption of American and Western European pluralist theory, interest group approaches, and bureaucratic politics models, which emphasized the influence of leadership factions and conflict on Soviet policy making. Rejecting the idea that the USSR was sui generis, these scholars embraced a comparativist methodology that sought to study the Soviet Union

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

69

the same way political scientists examined all other states, including western countries. This approach suggested to pluralist Sovietologists that Soviet reform was eminently possible. By and large, pre-1974 pluralist writings are notable for their currency even thirty and forty years after they were written. In Terror and Progress—USSR (1954), Harvard University political scholar Barrington Moore chronicled "the kinds of situations that confront different people in Soviet society, the ways in which they see their situation and respond to it, and how their behavior sometimes modifies and sometimes perpetuates it." Moore's focus on Soviet citizens—"from the factory worker to the leaders in the Kremlin"—anticipated the work of such 1980s scholars as S. Frederick Starr, who would portray the USSR as "a civil society," and Moshe Lewin, who would examine "the Gorbachev phenomenon" from the vantage point of its origin in, and its effect on, Soviet society.22 Moore thought that the recent amelioration in Soviet domestic and foreign policy under Nikita Khrushchev was, if not a permanent development, at least a hopeful first step. The Harvard scholar guessed that the new "collective leadership" was probably not "strong enough to reverse" these reforms "with the forceful and harsh methods of a Stalin, even if [it] wanted to."23 Thus, Moore was hopeful that "if peace should continue for a decade or more, the rationalist or the traditionalist forces in Soviet society, or some combination of the two," would succeed in finally "ero[ding] the Soviet totalitarian edifice." In Soviet Politics—The Dilemma of Power (1965), Moore expressed strong "reservations and doubts" regarding the question of whether the USSR was intrinsically expansionist. "Modern events reveal the weakness of the argument" that a given state's "warlike policy is the result of hostilities toward outsiders" among its citizens, he noted.24 Accordingly, U.S. scholars should be "wary of dramatically pessimistic conclusions that the Soviet leaders are marching to[ward] a world holocaust. Soviet expansionism [is] primarily an adaptation to the changing balance of power." Despite Moscow's unyielding adherence to Marxism-Leninism, USSR foreign policy was remarkably adaptive, and the Soviet leaders played the great power game exceedingly well, Moore noted. "While adding some new twists of their own," these men depended more on "Bismarck, Machiavelli, and even Aristotle than [on] Karl Marx or Lenin." Over the decades, Soviet ideology proved to be intrinsically "flexible" and "resilient," able to coexist with a wide variety of political systems. Indeed, "with certain shifts of emphasis, Communist doctrine would be congruent with the institutions and practices of western democracy."25 Moore concluded that the phenomenon of Communist polycentrism was facilitated by the flexibility of Soviet ideology, and this implied that the Soviet Union could change. In Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964 (1966), George Washington University Sovietologist Carl A. Linden focused on Khrushchev's rivalry and conflicts with other Soviet leaders in the Presidium as an important object of Sovietological study in its own right. "Despite his primacy, Khrushchev in the

70

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

years after 1957 continually engaged in an intensive and complex battle behind the scenes to sustain and extend his power within the leading group," Linden noted. Indeed, "conflict over power and policy animates the political process everywhere and Soviet politics is no exception," the George Washington University scholar emphasized. "Policy conflicts, personal rivalries, and personnel shifts at the top levels bear on [the leader's] continuing effort to sustain or expand his dominance." Thus, "the Soviet leader must engage in continual maneuvering to prevent aggregations of power around him" from threatening his position. This means that "no 'office' or formal position he holds automatically [protects] him [from] such threats." Linden sought to examine the Khrushchev tenure as a case study on the conflict model of Soviet politics. In this regard, the Sovietological debate over the question of Khrushchev's power "mirrored a broader divergence of outlook regarding the general nature of Soviet leadership politics since Stalin's death." While some western scholars "stressed the element of conflict in Soviet leadership politics," other "more conventional" Soviet experts "emphasized the stability of the Soviet leadership process." But Linden saw this stability approach, which depicted limited struggle in the Soviet Presidium punctuated by long periods of stability as an inadequate explanation of Soviet politics. In viewing Soviet politics as a monolithic whole, the stability school was fundamentally aligned with the totalitarianism model that was an inadequate "tool for plumbing Soviet political realities," he noted.26 Conflict continued to characterize Soviet leadership politics long after Khrushchev was deposed, said Linden. "The reformist forces Khrushchev sought to lead did not disappear with his fall any more than did the more conservative forces Kozlov once sought to marshal against him." Not insignificantly, Linden noted in the 1990 revision of his study that the Gorbachev reforms of the late 1980s had picked up and continued where Khrushchev left off. H. Gordon Skilling "introduced] the term pluralism" into Sovietological discourse "when he proposed the term 'pluralism of elites' as one way of characterizing Communist systems."27 In 1964, Skilling observed that most western countries tended to think of "world Communism" in one of three ways: "as a unified and monolithic 'bloc' or 'camp,' directed from a single center, Moscow, and by a single man, Lenin, Stalin, or Khrushchev"; "as a group of man-made satellites which travel in preordained orbits from the Moscow launching pad"; or "as an empire, whose dependent territories, in Asia and Europe, are strictly controlled by the...USSR."28 Anticipating the writings of Jerry F. Hough, Skilling criticized these popular images as inaccurate. Despite their outward show of unity, Communist countries and parties "exhibited] considerable differences of interest, of policies, and of institutions, and possessed] varying degrees of independence of action in their domestic and foreign policies," he noted. Indeed, "world Communism" was "changing so rapidly" that western Sovietologists "fail[ed] to readjust [their] perception of it, and [continued to] think of it in terms of old [and inappropriate] cliches."

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

71

Skilling identified several active interest groups in the USSR, composed of intellectuals, jurists, managers, nationality groups, the military, and intra-party groups. In addition, "Communist society, in spite of its monolithic appearance and claims of homogeneity" was "divided into social classes and other categories distinguished by factors such as nationality or religion." While refusing to equate the growth of such aggregations with genuine pluralism, the scholar insisted that interest group politics, group rivalries, conflicts, and "struggles over ideas and interests" took place throughout Soviet society. Yet the existence of such activity in the USSR had long been ignored or denied in the West, Skilling added, due to the dominance of the totalitarianism model.29 With Stalin's death, new pluralistic understandings of the Soviet leadership became evident, Skilling argued. While the USSR's formal structure "remained unchanged" and "Soviet doctrine still rejected] the rights of autonomous groups to articulate interests distinct from those of the party," the system now functioned "differently than it did under Stalin," due to "increased activity by [autonomous] political groups. In that sense Soviet society has shown signs of incipient pluralism."30 AMERICAN SOVIETOLOGICAL LITERATURE, 1974-1977 The years 1974 through 1977, corresponding approximately with the start of the second half of the Brezhnev tenure, were a pivotal time for American Sovietologists. A number of factors—including the continued impact of Khrushchev's ouster; renewed Soviet conservatism, regimentation, and moderate repression; the 1968 crackdown on the Prague Spring; mutual suspicions over detente; Moscow's faltering economy; Soviet adventurism in the Third World; Brezhnev's advancing years and loss of vitality; a new mood of paralysis and frustration in Washington, triggered by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate crisis; and the development of a revisionist American scholarship—all these geopolitical events and intellectual currents, and the controversy they engendered, served to politicize the U.S. Sovietological debate and inspired a plethora of neoconservative interpretations of Soviet behavior. Whereas the pre-1974 period, dominated as it was by the Khrushchev initiatives, detente, and the tantalizing promise of some measure of Soviet liberalization, was a relatively sunny era in American Sovietology, and a time when all things seemed possible, many of the Soviet experts who wrote after 1974 saw dark storm clouds forming on the Soviet horizon. Just as Moscow's perception of the correlation of world forces, long thought to be in the USSR's advantage, had now turned pessimistic and conflicted and was perceived for the first time as favoring the West, so too, U.S. scholars had begun to view the prospects for Soviet reform as constrained by various social, economic, and political crises and weaknesses. If American Sovietologists were not about to return en masse to the totalitarianism model, neither were they quite as open by the mid-1970s to the idea that fundamental Soviet change was possible.

72

What Happened to the Soviet Union? Realist Literature

The new mood that dominated American domestic politics and U.S. Sovietology in the mid-1970s had more in common with Zbigniew Brzezinski's political cultural-historicism than with George F. Kennan's realism or Jerry F. Hough's pluralist views. Yet ironically, it was the realist Soviet experts, more than any other group of scholars, who were instrumental in (and some would say responsible for) bringing about this new pessimistic mood in American Sovietology. This is because, in an important sense, realists changed their thinking about the USSR more profoundly after 1974 than political cultural-historicists, who were already suspicious of the Soviet Union and were not inclined to alter their ideas greatly, or pluralists, who tended to be indefatigable optimists. More to the point, realist scholars comprised the largest of the three Sovietological schools and occupied a kind of centrist niche in U.S. academia and diplomacy. But they listened to pluralist and political cultural-historicist Soviet experts and often were influenced by their arguments. Whereas realist scholars of the 1960s were generally encouraged by Khrushchev's welfare-oriented policies and looked forward to a time of Soviet innovation and reform, much of this optimism had evaporated by the mid-1970s, and many of these Soviet experts became pessimistic about the Soviet system and its leadership. Many "hard" realist Soviet experts of the 1974-1977 period hedged their bets by embracing a cautious "on the one hand / on the other hand" kind of reasoning and cast doubt on the question of whether Moscow could change its ways. But other "soft" realist scholars continued to view the USSR in much the same way that they saw it when Khrushchev was in power—as a normal state, subject to various domestic and international constraints, but capable of significant political, social, and economic reform. Hard Realist Views. A number of hard realist scholars during the 19741977 period were persuaded by neoconservative and political cultural-historicist arguments that doubted whether any sort of change was possible in the USSR. Although Harvard Sovietologist Adam B. Ulam was a realist, his writings straddled the fence between realism and a political cultural-historicist emphasis. As James M. Goldgeier noted, Ulam believed that "Russian history and MarxistLeninist ideology" drove Soviet expansionism, but he knew also that "the Bolsheviks were constrained by their need to survive in the international system."31 Two historical events were of paramount importance for Ulam. "The signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918" demonstrated to the Soviets their need for a policy of coexistence and cooperation with the West. But "the split with China" in the 1950s forced Moscow to adopt confrontational policies toward the West, in order "to maintain the legitimacy of the CPSU." Ulam believed that the "foundations of the Soviet system" were rooted both in Russian history and in Marxism-Leninism. Soviet "political culture traced [its] beginnings to the tenth century," he noted, "yet it [had] the imprint of an ideology that has developed within the last century." Ulam noted many differences between Russian and western history. These included a Russian church derived "from Constantinople rather than Rome"; the absence in Russian soci-

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

73

ety of a Renaissance or Reformation tradition; "a social system in which peasants [were] emancipated from serfdom [in] 1861, long after those of Western Europe"; and "the absence or fragility of representative institutions and of an independent judiciary."32 Serfdom was "the central fact of Tsarist Russia's politics and econom[y], just as collectivized agriculture constitute^] the main dilemma" of communism, Ulam added—thus, social passivity was an ongoing Soviet trait, rooted deeply in Russian history. Recalling the emphasis in the Soviet art and literature of the 1930s on "stability, conventionality, and optimism" and the popularity of Sovietized "Horatio Alger stories" in newspapers of that same era, Ulam questioned whether these themes were not "the natural reactions of a society undergoing industrialization and acquiring (for all the Marxian phraseology) middle-class values reminiscent of Victorian England." The Harvard University Sovietologist saw this as a key admission that even at the height of Stalinism, the totalitarian concept could not bear its own weight. Indeed, the "logic of modernization and industrialization has played a strange joke on Marxism," Ulam argued. "[D]ecades of socialism and of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' have instilled" in Soviet society "the bourgeois values of the nineteenth-century West"—the value of work, "of saving, [and] of measuring one's station in life" in income and "the quality of one's material goods." The majority of Soviet youth today wanted to become rich, own "a car and a television set and enjoy 'all the amenities of a rich and cultural life.'" Such was "the ideal set before the youth of Russia" by the CPSU! But despite tangible evidence of social transformation, the Soviet masters continued to impose despotic controls upon their people, Ulam argued; even after 1945, the USSR was still "a primitive society that needed the whiplash of totalitarianism to make it into a modern industrial state." Khrushchev tried to "expan[d his] subjects' material well-being [and] enlarg[e] their freedom and cultural horizons," but he "fear[ed] that excessive concessions and unbridled freedom" would topple the political and economic system—so the repressive edifice remained.33 In turn, while Brezhnev "sought to impose a sane pattern of totalitarianism" on the USSR, "in contrast with Stalin's [psychopathic] despotism," sane totalitarianism was still totalitarianism. If "mass terror" was not restored under Brezhnev, "individual dissenters" continued to be imprisoned, exiled, or "silenced," Ulam noted. Thus, "nothing suggests that barring a cataclysmic occurrence," the Soviet system can be democratized. Certainly this could not happen in the foreseeable future."34 In the end, Ulam did not anticipate major reforms, and he saw "no alternative" to CPSU rule, but he warned that if the Soviet Communist Party did not "recover its vitality and esprit de corps," it would "lose ground" to other social forces and institutions, like the army, and soon be a ruling party in name only. "A future [Soviet] historian" would likely analyze the character of Soviet foreign policy in "one of two" ways, Ulam noted. First, she could interpret the 1974-1977 period as a "basic change of directions" when "the need for coexistence finally prevailed over the impetus for expansion," and the Soviet Union

74

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

"relinquished [its] propagation of Communism throughout the world." In this light, the U.S.-Soviet agreements of May 1972 were "the beginning of a new era." Such a reordering of Moscow's foreign policy would deeply affect its domestic policy, since domestic repression was "largely conditioned and always rationalized by the external danger." But a contrasting view—one with which Ulam was more comfortable—saw no "fundamental change [occurring] in Soviet foreign policy." From this perspective, the Moscow leaders "changed their tactics" but not their "basic premises and strategy." Such tactical retreats occurred before, notably during the New Economic Policy years, Ulam noted, and recent geopolitical events like the Arab-Israeli War and the invasion of Czechoslovakia demonstrated "the unchanging nature of Soviet ambitions." Domestically, this latter depiction of USSR foreign policy anticipated a "reimposition of controls over cultural life, [and] a systematic repression of dissent."35 Speculating on the Soviet future, Ulam rejected the notion that popular opposition would force the USSR to change: the dictatorial character of the USSR precluded "the possibility of organized political opposition" petitioning "the Supreme Soviet or the Central Committee on a subject or in a tone that clashes with the official party line," he said. But fundamental change could be triggered by negative "developments" within international communism; in particular, the expansion of the Sino-Soviet conflict, a loss of dynamism to "competing systems and ideologies," or increased "pressures for liberalization and for more consumer goods" could eventually "undermine the regime." Still, Ulam doubted that this would occur in the foreseeable future.36 Ulam acknowledged the possibility that "a new generation of leaders" may reject the expansionistic premises of traditional Soviet foreign policy, but it was equally conceivable "that they would retain them while abandoning their predecessors' caution." The Harvard Sovietologist doubted whether "Soviet Communism under any leadership [could] dispense with [the] psychological prop" of a hostile capitalist threat, with which it rationalized its domestic repressions, and relatedly, he did not think that Moscow would ever risk its "domination of Eastern Europe" to achieve a "far-reaching cooperation with the West." Rather, Ulam seemed to anticipate continued East-West conflict: if Moscow used "aggressive policies" in the past to "mask [its military] inferiority [with] the United States," he noted, it may behave the same way in the future, whenever it feels that "Russia's [superpower] status [is] not sufficiently recognized by the West."37 Thus, if the Soviet Union felt inferior, it acted aggressively to mask its inferiority; if the Kremlin was confident, it again behaved aggressively in order to tweak American noses. By Ulam's logic, bad Soviet international behavior was a constant—a surety that would not change no matter what reforms actually occurred in Moscow. The question of whether the USSR could change was effectively nonverifiable. In 1976, Frederick C. Barghoorn published a pessimistic appraisal of "detente and the democratic movement" in the Soviet Union. Barghoorn argued that within the USSR, there could not "be any significant toleration of dissent,

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

75

and that this intolerance [was] a powerful indicator of the limited, one-sided character of detente as practiced by the Kremlin."38 Barghoorn believed that Soviet foreign policy threatened "American national interests and democratic values around the world"—but instead of providing evidence to substantiate this threat, he argued polemically against both the Soviet political system (with its "vengeful, despotic Kremlin spirit") and the incompetence of Washington policy makers. Barghoorn acknowledged repeatedly the arguments of Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev, and Valentin Turchin that the "preponderant part" of Soviet "intelligentsia and youth" wanted democracy—but in the end, he rejected their arguments without fully accounting for his doubts. In all likelihood, Barghoorn's pessimism about Soviet change and democratization reflected the harshness of Khrushchev's ouster and of the Prague Spring crackdown, as well as Brezhnev's "adventuristic" foreign policies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which seemed to violate the spirit of detente. That same year, Paul Cocks surveyed a variety of western and Soviet views regarding the USSR political process and Soviet development during the 1960s and 1970s. But the scholar rejected the optimism and pluralistic perspective of American pluralist Sovietologists. Their view of a "dynamic and adaptive" Soviet leadership that was "moving forward cautiously and pragmatically by incremental steps," of a Soviet political system "in which ideas and power flow up the administrative hierarchies as well as down," and of Soviet institutions and groups that were "influential participants in making policies" and "responsive to broader societal forces" was essentially misguided, he argued. "Writing in a society whose political culture places a high value on bargaining, compromise, and subsystem autonomy," American scholars overstated "the forces of pluralism in the USSR," Cocks noted. They overlooked "conflicting forces at work which emphasized] hierarchy, concentrated authority, and system dominance."39 Cocks concluded that western pluralism was an excessive and inappropriate response to Soviet political realities. Washington needed a more realistic understanding of how the USSR worked. In fundamental agreement with Ulam and Barghoorn, Teresa RakowskaHarmstone saw the sharp increase in national consciousness within the Soviet republics as ominous. "Ethnic nationalism exist[ed] among all national groups" including the Russians, the Sovietologist noted, and was "a major problem" for the CPSU leadership. The Soviet nationalities all had established infrastructures, elites, cultures, and economic bases; thus, their viability was "a major threat" to the USSR's "viability as a unified nation-state." In the 1960s and 1970s, ethnic nationalism began "to undermine the foundations of [Soviet] integration," Rakowska-Harmstone added, and "if it continues unchecked, this development may [lead] to the disintegration of the Soviet state." While the Sovietologist saw the prospects of such disintegration as remote, "overall trends point[ed] in this direction."40 A number of realist economists wrote stinging critiques of Soviet central planning during this period. As early as 1974, Robert C. Campbell noted that the Soviets were "badly handicapped for creative effort by their general back-

76

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

wardness and the alienation of the population from the regime." The old Stalinist system of central planning was still in place but clearly had "outlived its original rationale."41 Campbell described Soviet agriculture as "unreliable, irrational, wasteful, unprogressive—almost any pejorative adjective would be appropriate here." Moreover, collectivization was "a colossal policy blunder" that failed to produce growth. Although Soviet industrialization and modernization had "come a long way," a "very large" segment of the Soviet population was still employed in agriculture, which "accounted] for 21 percent of [Moscow's] total [economic] output, compared with only 3 percent in the United States." Agricultural inefficiency led to problems in consumption and in the services sector. In the United States, "high productivity in industry and agriculture" meant that America's needs could "be met with far less than all our resources, and we [could] devote the rest to providing services." Conversely, low Soviet productivity meant that Moscow "had to skimp" on education, health, consumer conveniences, and recreation.42 Campbell believed that almost every sector of Soviet productivity—with the notable exception of defense—was less efficient than it seemed, because a "large portion of total [production] at dollar prices [was] not final product but intermediate goods and primary resources." Thus, it was "a mistake," the economist noted, "not to make some allowance for the lower productivity of those elements of GNP that are actually intermediate goods." For example, in research and development—where the Soviets "use much more labor than we do"—western economists should not have given "their high relative standing in manpower the heavy weight inherent in the dollar price system. Considering how many researchers" Moscow threw "into the breach to make up for the smaller supplies of other inputs, the manpower probably brings diminished returns." Moscow's inefficiency cast fundamental doubt on the question of whether the USSR was a real superpower, Campbell added. To be sure, the Soviet Union's military strength and its plentiful natural resources put it on a level with the United States. Yet its "relatively high resource input, when [its] output [was] only about half [of] ours, obviously implie[d] a much lower productivity for resources in the Soviet economy." According to Campbell, the USSR was "far behind the United States in consumption goods produced and still farther behind in per capita consumption" which was about "one fifth the U.S. level." One reason for this inferiority had to do with the Soviet economy's severe inflexibility; western economists were amazed at "the simplicity and crudity of many decision-making procedures. Statistical forms established in the twenties underwent little change. Bonus formulas and incentive funds continued with the same names and coefficients for many years."43 Indeed, "for all the revolutionary changes the regime [underwent] when it was first established, it thereafter settled into a very rigid and unchanging pattern." Soviet economic innovations had been attempted often and with mixed results—most recently, in the 1960s, by Alexei Kosygin. These reforms failed, Campbell argued, because they were not "sufficiently radical" but were "partial

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

77

and irresolute." Many attempted innovations were in "opposition of vested interests." Campbell saw the Kremlin leaders as fundamentally "cautious about tampering with the central institutions of the system, and torn between decentralizing] and strengthen[ing] centralization."44 Thus, he discounted the likelihood of significant Soviet change in the foreseeable future. Like Campbell, economist Marshall I. Goldman was fundamentally pessimistic about the Soviet Union's capacity to change. In a 1975 essay, Goldman argued that despite Moscow's insistence that "advance planning" did take place in the Soviet economy, there was "good reason to question just how effective it is," and there was further "cause for challenging the claim that planning has rendered [the USSR's] economy and currency immune to erratic events in the West." Soviet agriculture had "suffered considerably from [the] 1972 drought," Goldman indicated, with "imports increasing] by over $1 billion while exports grew by less than $400 million." And based on early economic data for 1975, the Soviets seemed to be enmeshed in "a hard currency crisis of major proportions."45 For the immediate future, Goldman predicted more of the same: 1975 would be "a year of economic recession [and] drought," and "the Soviet Union [would] be lucky if it ends the year with only a $2 billion deficit.46 As a result of the Soviet economic and agricultural problems, the United States had become Moscow's "warehouse of last resort"; the USSR had "transferred] the risk and the higher prices stemming from [its] erratic harvests to [Washington} and the American consumer," Goldman noted. Yet Kremlin officials did not tell their people the extent of their massive grain purchases from the United States in 1972 and 1975. Indeed, "bread prices did not rise in the Soviet Union in 1972," because "the government provided heavy subsidies to prevent political unrest." More ominously, Goldman warned that 1975 would "not be the last time Soviet planners overestimate their grain harvest." Soft Realist Views. In contrast to these hard realist perspectives, a number of soft realist Sovietologists of the 1974-1977 period saw Soviet reform as possible and likely. According to Joseph G. Whelan and Francis T. Miko, "the trend of Soviet [geo]politics" during the Brezhnev era was moving "away from revolutionary" adventurism abroad toward a quieter buildup of the USSR's "strength and influence as a global power." Indeed, the two scholars argued, "changing power relationships in the world, the excesses of Khrushchev, internal economic problems, and the character of the [Kremlin] leadership [had] imposed a certain conservatism, even caution, in [Soviet] foreign policy."47 Still, Whelan and Miko took Soviet and American "ideological differences" seriously. Despite detente, they noted, the Kremlin was "committed to continuing 'struggle,'" while "rejectfing] total reconciliation with any bourgeois capitalist power." Thus, Moscow continued to pursue "the goals of Communism. The relationship [would] remaifn] adversarial." Whelan and Miko believed that Moscow's attraction to detente was rooted in the USSR's need for "economic relief from the high cost of a spiraling arms race" and in a parallel desire to "compensate for mounting Soviet deficiencies."

78

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

In early 1969, the Soviet leaders realized "that they could not surpas[s] the U.S. in per capita production," the two scholars explained. "Stagnation had set in in electronics, computers, petrochemicals—all necessary for success in the scientific/technological revolution."48 Poor harvests and the inability of Soviet science to create "the needed technology to support planned economic development" only exacerbated these problems. On the whole, Whelan and Miko viewed detente as a "hopeful," mutually advantageous, and long-lasting arrangement. The scholars recognized that there were many problems in the Soviet-American relationship, but "as long as there is a willingness on both sides to exercise restraint, crises will be manageable, even if they are not avoidable." Moreover, an important though unintended consequence of economic detente would be political detente, the penetration of western ideas into Soviet society, and liberalization, a softening of Soviet domestic policy. In essential agreement with Whelan and Miko, Washington Post journalist Robert G. Kaiser sought to temper the anti-reformist "criminal" image that hounded the Soviet Union in Europe and the United States. "The West has persistently overestimated" the Soviet military threat, Kaiser wrote, but it "generally ignored the implications of the USSR's weakness in non-military fields"; indeed, western rhetoric about the USSR was often tinged with emotional, moralistic, and one-sided arguments. For Kaiser, such terms as "aggressive" and "expansionist" did not "adequately describe" Soviet geopolitical realities during the Cold War period. "Future historians will have to conclude that it was the United States, not the Soviet Union, which was prone to misjudge its true interests and take questionable risks," he noted. Indeed, "the Russians have behaved like people who want to be taken seriously on the world stage." If Moscow's "eagerness for status and influence" was "troublesome," it was "less worrisome than an actively aggressive, expansionist Soviet policy would be." The Soviets were "principally interested in protecting themselves."49 As for the possibility of future Soviet reform, "confident prediction is impossible," Kaiser cautioned. The Soviet leadership "is not a completely homogeneous group, and one cannot foresee the next generation's reactions to domestic or international issues." The Washington Post journalist guessed that "if Russian nationalism can replace Leninist internationalism, the aggressive implications of Soviet ideology could diminish." Moreover, future leaders could be less insecure than past ones, because the USSR would be militarily strong and because they would lack firsthand experience with Stalinism and terror. Nevertheless, "Russian insecurity [may be] too deeply imbedded to disappear" quickly, Kaiser warned.50 In a 1977 essay, Vernon V. Aspaturian noted that the Soviet leaders were "having second thoughts" about their "encouragement] and suppor[t]" of Third World "revolutions against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism," since such revolts not only attacked the United States but also, inevitably, opposed "the European and developed world, of which the Soviet Union [was itself] a

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

79

part." The scholar believed that ethnonationalistic tensions could bring about the USSR's dissolution. "Demographic trends [suggest] that the Soviet balance between Asian and European populations may shift in favor of the former," he noted—a development "which may give way to racial bipolarization within the U.S.S.R. and territorial dismemberment."51 But Aspaturian was encouraged by the success of detente, which was "likely to influence internal Soviet developments." Indeed, "by creating a less tense international environment," detente was "conditioning future Soviet generations." Political Cultural-Historicist Literature Unlike realist Sovietologists, who were remarkably open during the pre-1974 period to the idea that Moscow could change but who became increasingly pessimistic in the late 1970s and 1980s about the possibility of Soviet liberalization and reform, political cultural-historicist scholars like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Pipes did not significantly alter their commitment to the totalitarianism model or shed their doubts about the likelihood of Soviet reform. Consequently, there was a less than subtle "I-told-you-so" tone in many of their writings, beginning in the 1974 through 1977 period and continuing through the mid1980s—and geopolitical events only seemed to confirm these scholars' criticisms of the USSR. For example, in response to the argument that U.S.-Soviet detente would bring about fundamental reform in Moscow and retard Soviet xenophobic tendencies, political cultural-historicist scholars insisted that no significant change was possible in the USSR because of the stranglehold of Leninism. Besides, Soviet adventurism in Africa and the Middle East proved that detente wasn't working. Thus, neoconservative scholar Gerald L. Steibel was able to argue in 1975 that detente was neither as new nor as beneficial as its proponents insisted, since there had been, in the twentieth century alone, five previous cycles of "detente" (the Lenin detente of 1920; Stalin's detente in 1935; the "devil's detente" in 1941; Khrushchev's detente of 1954; and the first phase of Brezhnev's detente in 1968), during which Soviet goodwill and cooperation toward the West quickly waxed and waned.52 These claims were influential in government and academia, not only because they seemed to accord with geopolitical realities, but also because most political cultural-historicist scholars were not newcomers to the pessimist cause, as the realists were. The fact that these Sovietologists were true believers—their writings had been warning America about the Soviet threat and about an unchanging and totalitarian USSR for decades—gave them a unique measure of moral authority when the early expectations of detente and Soviet reform seemed to evaporate. Oddly, the political cultural-historicist notion of an essential continuity between Tsarist Russia and modern Soviet practice was congruent with both the American neoconservative movement's idea of a permanently xenophobic, hostile, and dangerous USSR and the Soviet Marxist argument that the Russian

80

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Revolution flowed from the logic of Russia's historical processes. Indeed, political cultural-historicist scholars shared with Karl Marx a curiously deterministic view of history. Not insignificantly, nearly all of these Soviet experts argued forcefully that the USSR could not change. In the second edition of his study, The Bolshevik Tradition (1975), Robert H. McNeal applied the totalitarianism model to the workings of the CPSU and Soviet leadership. Impressed by the USSR's political stability, McNeal recalled in his preface that he did not have to alter his original argument significantly— even though a decade had elapsed since the publication of his first edition— because, he noted, not much had changed in party-leadership relations from 1963 to 1974. "The Brezhnev administration has its share of peculiarities," McNeal wrote, "but I was impressed, in trying to write the new chapters of this book, with how readily the main lines fell into place as an extension of the previous six decades of the Bolshevik tradition." This curious statement was loosely related to the scholar's belief that "any political institution that can claim continuous existence since 1900 may be counted as one of the more stable and durable [in] contemporary history." Against the argument that Soviet Communism was "a moribund myth and [that] its united front with Russian nationalism [would] lead in time to fundamental change," McNeal insisted that the Soviet leaders were not about "to give up the faith of their political fathers." Indeed, "the Bolshevik tradition [was] both necessary and functional, regardless of its absurdities and apparent obsolescence."54 Unlike Carl A. Linden, who saw Stalin's successor as an incipient liberalizer, McNeal termed Khrushchev a "re-Stalinizer." This was because "Stalin was the main builder of the party apparatus." Only "in his later years [did] his reliance on his personal authority" and the police "threaten] party supremacy. Khrushchev led the campaign to reverse this trend and to assert [CPSU] primacy. This return to 'Leninist norms' might equally [be] called a return to Stalinism." Thus, McNeal's evaluation of Khrushchev was essentially pessimistic. The Soviet leader "was not a historic figure [like] Lenin or Stalin," he noted; moreover, his tenure was relatively brief, and his "power was subject to serious restraint." Yet "because of his visibility and personal color [he] cut a larger figure [in] the non-Communist world than he deserved." McNeal added this afterthought: "[I]f Stalinism is understood to include the [Soviet] political culture" of the 1930s and 1940s, then the Brezhnev administration that replaced Khrushchev was also "Stalinist in [several] important respects."55 McNeal speculated on the Soviet future, and on the likelihood of Brezhnev's being forced out of office. Although the Soviet leader's position was vulnerable ("a few bad choices on policy matters, and the oligarchs could consign him to Khrushchev's fate"), and younger Politburo members may have had "motivation to organize a retirement conspiracy" against him, "Brezhnev played his hand much more skillfully than did his predecessor, particularly in his concentration on the party and its Secretariat as his seat of authority." Moreover, there was no obvious successor to Brezhnev, and the CPSU elite would rather "avoid the em-

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

81

barrassment of once again kicking out its leader." Thus, "the finale [was] likely to come through natural mortality"—perhaps in the late 1970s, McNeal suggested. Beyond that, the future was uncertain.56 In the end, McNeal rejected the possibility of either a Soviet breakup or genuine radical reform. Confusing political stability with rigidity, he pointed to the constancy of "the Bolshevik tradition" and to Moscow's economic and political difficulties as evidence that the Soviet Union would not change. In essential agreement with McNeal, Robert Conquest addressed the "growing feeling in the West" and in Moscow "that there [were] prospects of a 'New Russia,'" and that Brezhnev's eventual departure would bring "radical and beneficial change." This was not likely to happen, he said, because "the party machine perpetuat[ed] the present order." Soviet managers were "highly conservative both politically and economically, since they [were] precisely the people operating the present inefficient system, and would lose by change." Moreover, "the younger [leaders who were being] promoted [were] the copies or toadies of their predecessors."57 Thus, Conquest anticipated "a successor regime that continued the basic Brezhnev policies" as the most likely future scenario. Conquest posited the intriguing possibility of a different, more enlightened Soviet future—for which he saw "parallels" in the reforms of Peter the Great, in Alexander II's "Emancipation of the Serfs," in "the Stolypin modernization," and in "the Khrushchev episode itself. Thus, it is possible to envisage the coming to power of a single man with enough insight and force of mind to impose on the Soviet Union the new deal it really needs," he noted. But there were two difficulties: first, "one does not see the candidate for this operation," and second, "the apparat has grown apprehensive at the prospect of one-man rule." There was "one other possibility," the scholar noted. "A new faction could come to the top using the 'Khrushchevite' line." This was problematic since "Khrushchev himself had no intention of dismantling party rule," and his approach was idiosyncratic.58 Moreover, Conquest saw no genuine trend toward Soviet-style "liberalism, such as occurred" in Hungary in 1956 or in Czechoslovakia in 1968; thus, "the prospects for a radically favorable evolution" in the USSR were "minimal, except under very heavy pressure indeed." Similarly, Conquest saw the prospects for detente as limited, since its "true characteristics" were, "first, a measure of mutual agreement on arms limitation; and secondly, a Soviet campaign for 'trade.'" In reality, the USSR could not do much in either of these areas, Conquest noted, since it could ill afford the arms race, and it had "practically nothing the West need[ed]": Indeed, just "to maintain the present system," Moscow "needfed] not only western techniques but also 'aid' of the type sent to backward countries: long-term credits at low rates and cheap agricultural products to buttress incompetent local agriculture."59 Conquest concluded that "nothing work[ed]" in Russia "except the armed forces and the KGB." The USSR possessed "vast and efficient fighting machinery, and little else worth boasting about." Thus, detente was a counterproductive process through which "the West equippfed], or indirectly subsidized], armaments directed against itself." Conquest rejected as naive the common as-

82

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

sumption that detente, "trade, [and] cultural exchange [would, in time,] erode the harshness of Soviet policy and lead Russia into the Comity of Nations. There is no sign of this—and little prospect of it either," the scholar said pessimistically. In 1976, Harvard historian Richard Pipes drew a fundamental connection between Soviet and Russian political culture. Throughout history, the Russians have relied on "slyness, [military] force, [the] exploitation of] others, and contempt for those [who could not defend] themselves," he noted. Soviet ideology "reinforce[d] these [centuries-old] predispositions."60 Pipes believed that the Soviets, like the Russian peasants before them, respected only one thing— power. "They know how to use power, but also how to yield to it." This suggested to Pipes that Washington should impress on Moscow the fact "that [America] carr[ied] a sizable stick." Indeed, "the Russians can recognize a superior adversary, and are good at backing down" unashamedly.61 In a celebrated 1977 Commentary article, Pipes rejected the notion that Moscow subscribed to a traditional concept of nuclear deterrence, arguing instead that while Washington emphasized the "deterrent" role of strategic forces, Soviet military doctrine stressed the Red Army's "war-fighting" and "warwinning" capability. Indeed, the Harvard historian noted, Moscow believed that "the country better prepared" for nuclear war, with "a superior strategy," could fight and win such a war, and survive intact.62 This doctrine, and the fact that Moscow was actively preparing for such a war, gave the USSR a marked advantage over the United States, Pipes indicated. Pipes found the idea that Moscow was willing to fight and win a nuclear war credible because, he believed, the harsh conditions that the Soviets endured during the Great Patriotic War had acclimated them to wartime rigors and deprivation. Indeed, "the USSR could absorb 30 million [casualties] and be no worse off," he noted. The Harvard University historian acknowledged that "most Americans" could not comprehend, let alone tolerate, such a widespread loss of life. But he reasoned that the Soviet Union—which had "since 1914 lost up to 60 million citizens" in "two world wars, a civil war, famine, and various 'purges'"—would likely "define 'unacceptable damage' differently from the United States."63 Pipes did not acknowledge an alternate possibility, namely that the Soviet leaders would have defined "unacceptable damage" at much lower thresholds than the United States, precisely for the same reason—because the USSR had lost so many people in various wars, famines, and purges and did not want to suffer the added devastation of a nuclear war. Like many political cultural-historicist scholars, Pipes evidenced a dualistic understanding of the USSR, describing it as being, simultaneously, "immensely strong" and "fatally weak." Thus, Moscow seemed to be making a "relentless advance forward as it in fact move[d] cautiously and slowly." It could not take decisive action unless there was an extremely high "assurance of success"—a rare occurrence at best. Pipes decried the American tendency to mirror-image the Soviet Union. This quintessentially American tendency to want the Soviets "to be like us" and

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

83

"think like us" was exacerbated by detente, he added; thus, in assessing the possibility of Soviet change, Washington needed to be aware of "the intrinsically antidemocratic spirit" of the CPSU, the long history of "Russian expansion," and the Stalinist background and peasant origins of the leadership. Americans also had to remember that "the highest priority" in the USSR was assigned "to political security," to "preventing [a] relaxation of tensions" with the West from undermining Soviet citizens' faith in their regime's legitimacy.64 Thus, Pipes believed that the Soviets were decidedly unlike us; they did not think or act like Americans, and the USSR would not change in a pro-American direction. Another important theme for Pipes was the growth and spread of nationalist sentiment in ethnic and religious groups, in the Soviet republics (including Russia), and throughout the Soviet bloc. According to Carl A. Linden and Dimitri K. Simes, the Harvard historian saw "a highly developed national consciousness among the Poles and the Finns." In Russian-dominated areas, and the Kazakh region, Pipes argued, "the Russians [would] swallow up most of the ethnic minorities," including the Germans, the Bashkirs, and the Tatars—but they could not assimilate the Ukrainians, the Baltic populations, or the Caucasians and Central Asians.65 Thus, Pipes anticipated that "sooner or later the Soviet empire [would] fall apart roughly along the lines of today's republics." He did not know when this would happen, but it would occur "if and when, for any reason, there [was] a weakening of authority within the central government and in the chain of command." Once this process started, it would "proceed extremely rapidly, in weeks, not in months." The logical outcome of this disintegrative process would be "the creation of [autonomous ethnic] states." Pipes's view that the USSR would collapse under the weight of ethnonationalism—and his doubts about Soviet change—were informed by an underlying belief that while the Soviet system seemed stable, it was really unstable.66 "No bureaucratic government can be stable," Pipes noted; it may look stable, "but be profoundly neurotic and unstable inside." The USSR "is strong and is in control, but it is not stable." Pluralist Literature In light of the neoconservative swing in U.S. domestic politics, and the prevailing pessimism in American Sovietology concerning the possibility of Soviet change, not many pluralist writings were published in the United States during the mid-1970s. To be sure, Jerry F. Hough wrote The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (1977) and several important essays during this period (see Chapter 2); however, the majority of pluralist scholars did not write much, and those who did took careful and qualified positions on the question of whether Soviet reform was possible. In 1976, conflict model scholar Carl A. Linden examined the issue of Soviet ethnonationalism, but his conclusions were significantly more sanguine than those of Richard Pipes. Linden described the advent of ethnic patriotism and nationalism throughout the world as "a 'universal phenomenon'" that has hardly

84

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

bypassed the USSR. Still, Russian patriotism posed "a profound dilemma for the Communist leviathan," since the "spontaneous and subterranean rise of [such] national feelings [ran] deeper than the Russian population's identification with the Soviet regime."68 The rise of Russian patriotism derived from the character of the party-state that Lenin founded and from "a defect in its inner structure," Linden added. Throughout Soviet history, the leadership struggled "to contain and harness" democracy, industrialism, and nationalism. But it was a losing battle. For many decades, the Kremlin tried to co-opt Russian nationalist sentiment—"Leninist internationalism and Russian imperial patriotism can be made to overlap," Linden noted—yet the two were "not the same. Spontaneous nationalist [and] patriotic" expressions continued to occur, and these events "not only erode[d] the ideological base of the party-state, but contained] within them the seeds of alternatives to its rule." Moreover, "the danger of such an alternative arising out of the military is an obvious one," the scholar said, and it was an open question "whether the forced welding of Russian patriotism to the MarxistLeninist party-state can hold for long in the absence of supreme dictatorial powers in a single hand."69 Similarly, in 1977, Princeton University Sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen addressed the widely accepted idea that the USSR was impervious to historical change. The belief in a "revolutionary and expansionist Soviet Union" has captured the American imagination, he noted, but this notion was "based on a static, ahistorical image of [an] unchanging Soviet system." Political culturalhistoricist scholars who held such a view "dismissed" significant reforms "in Soviet foreign policy as tactical maneuvers in a relentless drive for world conquest" and saw "internal changes" in the USSR as "secondary to the basic continuities [and] real nature of the Soviet Union." Yet this Sovietological argument was inadequate and "far too simplistic," Cohen insisted. "Behind the crumbling facade of political and social conformity, there is a tremendous diversity and complexity at every level of Soviet life." Disagreeing sharply with the popular view of an "immutable Soviet system," Cohen noted that Moscow faced a variety of difficulties at home and abroad, which should neither be ignored nor minimized by the West. More to the point, Cohen cited a long tradition of reform throughout Russian and Soviet history that suggested "further change" was possible. The Khrushchev era was particularly noteworthy for its liberalizations, the Princeton University Sovietologist indicated, but U.S. scholars, distracted by the totalitarianism model, did not see many of these reforms. Indeed, "virtually every area of Soviet life was affected by the[se] changes, however contradictory and limited" they seemed.70 Cohen's optimism concerning the Soviet future did not blind him to the many Soviet economic, social, and political weaknesses or to the USSR's foreign policy failures in the Third World, in China, in Europe, and with the West. Collectively, these difficulties "impose[d] severe constraints on [Soviet] domestic and foreign policy," Cohen noted, and inspired considerable debate among Soviet citizens concerning the best way to solve them. But ironically, the exis-

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

85

tence of these constraints—and of the popular debates concerning their resolution—were a surprise to many Americans. Cohen's assessment of the Soviet future was considerably more cautious in 1977 than it would be a decade later. Since taking office, he noted, Brezhnev has moved "increasingly toward the party's neo-Stalinist wing, particularly in domestic affairs," and "still greater neo-Stalinist influence cannot be excluded." Yet Cohen expected "another wave of reform" to take hold—during or following a leadership succession. The Princeton University scholar's expectation that any successful change would have to be "reform with a Soviet face" and his hope that a "Soviet innovator" would come along who would try to improve Communism, not destroy it, anticipated the Gorbachev initiatives that would reshape the Soviet system "from above" a decade later. Still, "much [would] depend upon the international environment" and on "American policy and behavior," Cohen added. "Soviet reform has a chance only in conditions of a progressive relaxation of tensions" between Moscow and Washington. Deteriorating international conditions would "drive the [USSR] back into her isolation and past, strengthening reactionaries and further diminishing reformers of all stripes." Accordingly, Cohen did not favor the idea, popular in some American neoconservative quarters, that the United States should intervene directly in Soviet domestic politics in order to force the USSR to change. Americans, he emphasized, did not have "the wisdom or the power, or the right" to involve themselves in internal Soviet politics or to try to impose reform on the Soviet Union. Instead, Washington could "influence Soviet liberalization indirectly" by toning down its ideological rhetoric, increasing U.S.Soviet contacts, and creating a less hostile global environment.71 CONCLUSION: KICKING THE TOTALITARIANISM HABIT In this third chapter, we have been concerned with the degree to which American realist, political cultural-historicist, and pluralist scholars of the 19741977 years responded to the eighteen indicators of change cited in Chapter 1. How and how well did their arguments reflect this evidence? More fundamentally, what did these Soviet experts think of the prospects for Soviet reform? If the Stalinist USSR was generally understood by American Sovietologists to be brutal and expansionistic, both the Khrushchev innovations of the 1950s and the relatively moderate character of the subsequent Brezhnev tenure suggested that significant Soviet reform was possible. Despite Khrushchev's policy shifts and ideological bluster, despite Brezhnev's crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968, and despite both Soviet leaders' "missile rattling" behavior and anti-American outbursts, most U.S. realist Soviet experts of the pre-1974 years understood that Khrushchev and Brezhnev were fundamentally unlike Stalin. Rejecting the totalitarianism model espoused by Zbigniew Brzezinski, these scholars pointed to many of the social and political indicators of Soviet change noted in Chapter 1, including the emergence of polycentrism, the existence of a fundamentally reformative Soviet tradition, various geopolitical developments

86

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

such as detente, and Moscow's temperate arms control and crisis management behavior. To be sure, many of these scholars hedged their bets on reform; while they believed that Soviet innovation was possible, few thought that significant change would occur anytime soon. They saw the USSR as resilient, but they also expected the Cold War to endure. By contrast, most political cultural-historicist Sovietologists envisioned the USSR in terms of Russian tradition and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s. While these scholars acknowledged the reality of Soviet modernization and urbanization, they rejected the idea of a reformist tradition in the USSR. In addition, political cultural-historicist scholars were fairly impressed by Moscow's nationalities problem and by the massive scale of the Soviet Union's agricultural failings and declines in living standard and consumption, which they saw as signs of political and economic instability. But they ignored or downplayed many of the indicators of Soviet change that realists and pluralists found persuasive—indeed, few political cultural-historicists found Moscow's arms control and crisis management behavior acceptable. Viewing the Soviet citizenry as docile and Moscow's international behavior as threatening, many of these scholars saw a Soviet Union that was politically illegitimate and could not reform itself. But if these Sovietologists did not foresee reform, neither did they view a Soviet collapse on the political horizon. What they saw was the status quo: they expected the Cold War to continue, almost into perpetuity. Perhaps the most prescient Sovietological literature of the 1960s and early 1970s was that which argued for a pluralistic understanding of internal Soviet politics. Several pluralist Soviet experts were impressed by the pervasive modernization, educational advances, and openness they saw at work in Soviet government and in society at large. In addition, these pre-1974 pluralists were heartened by the increased political influence of Soviet citizens, by Moscow's moderation in dealing with international crises, by the polycentrist tendencies they saw, by Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign, and by the long tradition of reform in Russian and Soviet history. Nearly all pluralist scholars saw the Soviet system as resilient and legitimate and believed that the USSR would undergo significant reform. But like their realist and political cultural-historicist colleagues, most of these scholars thought that the Cold War would endure and expected no sudden improvement or deterioration in U.S.-Soviet relations. While the first half of the eighteen-year Brezhnev tenure was marked by modernization and important political, military, and economic achievements, the second half, beginning in the mid-1970s, suggested to many American Sovietologists that these advances were ineffectual, counterproductive, and illusory. In the United States, the 1974-1977 period marked the height of the Cold War revisionist movement's influence, and many scholars—mindful of the "lessons of Vietnam"—exhibited an untoward introspection in their writings and blamed American hubris for unilaterally starting and maintaining the Cold War. Meanwhile, other Soviet experts—predominantly hard realists and Cold War liberals

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

87

who had remained committed to a semblance of the old totalitarianism model and believed that revisionist scholarship had acquitted the USSR of all responsibility for cold war tensions—embraced a neoconservative position and accused Moscow of cheating at detente. A war of words quickly ensued between revisionists and neoconservatives, and almost all objectivity about the USSR and the possibility of Soviet reform was lost. In reviewing the scholarly literature of the 1974-1977 years, few clear patterns emerge. In general, realist Sovietologists were pessimists during this period, but political cultural-historicists were even more skeptical about the possibility of Soviet change. While realists cited various geopolitical events, such as detente, to support their conclusions, most political cultural-historicist Sovietologists were impressed by the ethnonationalistic tensions that Moscow faced and by the USSR's declining agricultural yields and consumption rates. These two groups of scholars looked at many of the Soviet Union's economic problems but offered little hope of improvement. Finally, pluralist scholars tended to be indefatigable optimists regarding Soviet reform. These Sovietologists noted such indicators of social change as modernization, urbanization, and increased citizen influence on policy making, and they examined a spectrum of political trends, including polycentrism, the reformist tradition of Soviet and Russian history, and Moscow's arms control and crisis response behavior, but they said little about the Soviet economy. In their views on Soviet reform, there was a subtle intellectual shift among many realist Soviet experts of the 1974 through 1977 period, away from a soft realist or incipient pluralist alignment to a hard realist position that approached neoconservatism and political cultural-historicism. These scholars did not see change as likely—at least not anytime soon. Conversely, pluralist scholars argued in the strongest of terms that Soviet reform was possible. But no Sovietologist of this period anticipated that the Soviet Union would collapse; even political cultural-historicist scholars who depicted the USSR as brittle and illegitimate (and who would in the 1990s condemn pluralist Sovietologists for their "excessive optimism" about the Soviet Union's chances of muddling through) did not foresee such an outcome. Superficially, realist scholars of the 1974-1977 years seemed more willing to shake off old constricting assumptions and to assimilate new information about the USSR than either political cultural-historicist or pluralist Sovietologists of the same period, who remained fixed in their respective positions. That is to say, in Kuhnian terms, realists appeared to be more receptive to new evidence about the Soviet Union. Pluralist and political cultural-historicist scholars, on the other hand, seemed less inclined to welcome new data or to rethink their established paradigms; they seemed instead to be imprisoned by old ideas. But in truth, realists of this period were not necessarily more open to new knowledge about the USSR than other scholars; their willingness to modify their views may have meant, simply, that they were more uncertain of their position than political cultural-historicist and pluralist Sovietologists. Like independent swing voters in modern U.S. electoral politics, realist scholars occupied

88

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

an intellectual middle-of-the-road position, while pluralist and political culturalhistoricist Soviet experts were akin to partisan or straight-ticket voters with relatively fixed points of view. Thus, when Washington tilted in a neoconservative direction in the mid-1970s, and Soviet policies seemed to validate the totalitarianism model and to confirm Americans' darkest suspicions about Moscow's intentions, pluralist scholars remained steadfast in their views, and political cultural-historicist Sovietologists saw no reason to change, because geopolitical events seemed to be vindicating their position. In a sense, both of these Sovietological schools had nowhere else to go. Realist Soviet experts, on the other hand, did not have a single intellectual position which they had to defend at all costs; thus, they had flexibility to maneuver, and they did maneuver—toward hard realist and political cultural-historicist positions. Accordingly, many of the realist writings of the 1974-1977 years evidenced deep suspicion toward the USSR and were fundamentally pessimistic about the possibility of Soviet reform. Which Sovietologists were most willing to break free from the dominant paradigms of the past? Conversely, which Soviet experts remained imprisoned by rigid and frozen ideas? Our study suggests that over the span of the Cold War, a significant number of scholars—many of them realists—oscillated back and forth, from a political cultural-historicist position in the late 1940s, to an incipient pluralist viewpoint during the Khrushchev years, back to a political cultural-historicist stance in the 1970s and early 1980s, and—as we will see in Chapter 6—back again to an incipient pluralist perspective in the mid- 1980s. Most political cultural-historicist Sovietologists, on the other hand, never broke free from the dominant totalitarianism-model paradigm; indeed, their ideas informed Washington's official policy line toward Moscow, and constituted America's prevailing Sovietological attitude, during the entire Cold War era. Thus, it may well be that realist scholars were the most willing to embrace new knowledge and assimilate a new Sovietological paradigm. Finally, one of the more curious findings of this research is the discovery that there seemed to exist many more pluralist Sovietological writings in the pre1974 period than there were in the 1974-1977 years. As we have seen, this imbalance may be related to geopolitical considerations: certainly, it was easier for scholars to embrace pluralist viewpoints before 1974—and particularly before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Conversely, after 1974, Soviet policy seemed despotic, harsher, and more threatening to American interests, and early returns on detente suggested that Moscow was building up its military and making inroads into the Third World in direct violation of its 1972 agreements with Washington. In such a pessimistic Sovietological climate, few scholars were willing to embrace pluralist positions. Explaining the Failure of American Sovietology As we have seen, the question of why U.S. scholars failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet reform during the 1970s and 1980s is multifaceted and can

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

89

be answered in several ways. We can trace this Sovietological lapse to legalistic-moralistic thinking, as George F. Kennan did, and perhaps to the emigre backgrounds of many of our leading Soviet experts. Or we can look for answers in America's Puritan roots—in exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and the "American liberal tradition." Indeed, we can go all the way back to the Platonic-Christian assumptions of western culture. In particular, Plato's bifurcation of reality into spirit and matter, and his theory of eternal forms, have encouraged western scholars and statesmen through the centuries to think of political change in idealized ways and to view diverse authoritarian governments as fundamentally similar. Indeed, the Greek philosopher's antipathy toward politics, and his unwillingness to examine the merits of individual political systems he did not like, was paralleled in the mid-1970s by western Soviet experts who insisted that the USSR was a totalitarian country incapable of reform, but who were not willing to look at the substantial evidence of Soviet change. Similarly, the extreme dualism of early Christian thinkers like Augustine has lent an enduring but unfortunate us-versus-them tone to western culture and politics. The Cold War was but the most recent manifestation of this polarized thinking; during much of the twentieth century, Americans and Soviets demonized each other, divided the world into expansive blocs, and interpreted history as a Manichaean contest between Good and Evil. In 1962, Thomas S. Kuhn published his influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although the relevance of Kuhn's ideas to American Sovietology would not become apparent for another decade, his study offered a rather elegant framework for exploring why U.S. Soviet experts failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet reform. Kuhn argued that scholars do not respond quickly or flexibly to new knowledge; rather, they remain committed to old and familiar ideas. These ideas, or paradigms, are the traditions, rules, and methodologies by which a given scholarly community perceives the world, conducts research, and goes about its work. According to Kuhn, a scholarly community's paradigms "implicitly define" for that community the kinds of questions and problems that may be posed, the kinds of explanations that are to be sought, and the solutions and answers that are acceptable. All "other problems [and questions] are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline," or as too difficult "to be worth the time," Kuhn noted. Indeed, "a paradigm can even insulate the community from socially important problems that are not reducible to puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual" framework of that paradigm.72 In Kuhn's view, all scholarly work is conducted within the framework of established knowledge or "normal science." A dominant "paradigm" legitimates present knowledge, explains Kuhnian scholar Barry Barnes, because "it demands acceptance of the existing orthodoxy in a given field [and] tends to avoid anything which might undermine or offer an alternative to that orthodoxy." In such a way, "unorthodox perspectives are overlooked; and possible weaknesses in orthodox interpretations, fail" to win a hearing.73 But sometimes these weaknesses cannot be brushed aside. Indeed, important

90

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

new scholarly discoveries are triggered by the appearance of a large number of unexplainable facts, findings, and outcomes that contradict the dominant ideas and methodologies of the day, Kuhn noted. Initially, the scholarly establishment may dismiss such anomalies as insignificant or account for them by making slight modifications to the prevailing paradigm. But with time, as anomalies persist and multiply and as it becomes harder to ignore these unexplainable phenomena, a radically new set of dominant ideas and methodologies is sought. Eventually, a new paradigm that satisfactorily explains all known anomalies is discovered and embraced by the scholarly community. This process may occur rapidly or slowly, Kuhn cautioned, but when it does take place, it is a kind of "scientific revolution" or change of worldview. "It is rather as if the [scholarly] community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light." Indeed, such paradigm shifts "cause [scholars] to see the world of their research engagement differently."74 What this suggests is that one reason American Sovietology was slow to revise its view of the USSR was that researchers and scholars were wedded to old paradigms of a totalitarian Soviet Union and were threatened by the intellectual reconceptualization that a new paradigm would require of them. In effect, many U.S. Soviet experts failed to examine new evidence concerning the possibility of Soviet change because they themselves were afraid to change. The broader and more important issues raised by this discussion concern the questions of what triggers attitudinal change, who is likely to adapt quickly to new data, and who is prone to remain imprisoned inside the paradigms of the past. Here, the Sovietological literature seems to corroborate Carl R. Kordig's observation that what a scholar "ends up seeing partly depends on what he is looking for."75 Soviet experts who were looking for indications that reform was possible in the USSR usually saw them, and those who were not looking for such evidence did not find it. Indeed, a significant reason why so many scholars did not anticipate Soviet change during the 1974-1988 years may be that their central focus was not on the possibility of Soviet transformation. They were not looking for Soviet change, and they were not asking the questions we are concerned with in this study; therefore, they did not see reform as possible. Rather, U.S. Soviet experts were asking other questions—about the continued relevance of the Berlin Wall and about who was responsible for starting the Cold War. They talked about superpower relations, arms control, Soviet Third World adventurism, and Moscow's leadership succession. They wanted to know about detente and about what Jimmy Carter meant when he said that Americans needed to do away with their "inordinate fear of communism." U.S. Sovietologists thought about the question of whether 1950s-style anticommunism was still relevant in the 1970s and 1980s. They thought about their individual research concerns, about their students, and about the on-campus parking problem. Many American Sovietologists were highly suspicious of the Soviet Union. When these scholars thought about the USSR, they thought of Stalin, and they thought of Soviet troops stationed in Africa, but they did not think about politi-

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

91

cal, social, and economic reform. The question of whether Soviet change was possible was rarely asked—in part because scholars were distracted, in part because they were mistrustful of the USSR, and in part because they already knew that the answer was no. Thus, while the theme of Soviet reform was implicit in many of the Sovietological writings we are examining in these pages, it was rarely discussed explicitly until the arrival of Gorbachev. Remarkably, this collective denial continued well past 1988. As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, many of these negative scholarly attitudes carried over into the new decade, and many pessimistic U.S. Soviet experts maintained their pessimism about Soviet change. Indeed, with the arrival of Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, American Sovietology seemed to travel back in time to the 1950s. The totalitarianism model—never entirely rejected by U.S. policy makers and scholars to begin with—was given a fresh coat of paint and new respectability; detente was dropped in favor of a more realistic (read more hostile) Soviet-American relationship; and anger over losing the Vietnam War (an important symbol of America's new military weakness) was quickly supplanted by anti-Soviet vitriol. Almost overnight, the USSR became an "evil empire." By 1984, this process of cultural and political reversion was complete. The Reagan reelection campaign told us that it was "morning in America again," but thoughtful observers of American and Soviet politics were also reminded of something Yogi Berra once was supposed to have said—that it was "deja vu all over again." The famous New York Yankees catcher's words didn't make much sense, but somehow, Berra's malapropism was oddly appropriate now, as America reprised the old totalitarianism model.

NOTES 1. Robin Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939—1961 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 59. 2. Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 47. 3. Ibid., pp. 200, 328. 4. Compare ibid., pp. 354-355 with the 1963 edition, p. 421. 5. Ibid. (1963), pp. 584, 598-600. 6. Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1963). 7. Robert C. Tucker, "United States-Soviet Cooperation: Incentives and Obstacles," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 372 (July 1967), pp. 2— 13, in Eric P. Hoffmann and Frederick J. Fleron, Jr., eds., The Conduct of Soviet Foreign Policy (New York: Aldine, 1980), pp. 303-306. 8. Frederick C. Barghoorn, Politics in the USSR (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 42,213,238. 9. Ibid., pp. 74, 79-80, 151-152. Not the least impressive aspect of Pipes's prescient argument was its early date. See Richard Pipes, "The Forces of Nationalism," Problems

92

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

of Communism 13, no. 1 (January-February 1964), pp. 1-6. 10. Frederick C. Barghoorn, Politics, pp. 363, 381-382. 11. Frederick C. Barghoorn, "Changes in Russia: The Need for Perspectives," in Zbigniew Brzezinski, ed., Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 40-41. 12. Donald W. Treadgold, Twentieth-Century Russia (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972), p. 483. 13. Ibid., pp. 499-500. 14. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Press, 1966), p. 593. 15. Charles E. Bohlen, The Transformation of American Foreign Policy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 121-122. 16. Alexander Dallin, "Soviet Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics: A Framework for Analysis," The Journal of International Affairs 23, no. 2 (1969), pp. 250-269, in Eric P. Hoffmann and Frederick J. Fleron, Jr., eds., The Conduct, p. 43. 17. Sidney I. Ploss, ed., The Soviet Political Process: Aims, Techniques, and Examples of Analysis (Waltham, Mass.: Ginn, 1971), p. v. 18. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 3. 19. Ibid., pp. 480-481. 20. Robert Conquest, "Immobilism and Decay," in Zbigniew Brzezinski, ed., Dilemmas, pp. 70, 72. 21. Alfred G. Meyer, "The Comparative Study of Communist Political Systems," Slavic Review 26, no. 3 (March 1967), p. 11. 22. Barrington Moore, Jr., Terror and Progress USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. ix. 23. Ibid., p. 231. 24. Barrington Moore, Jr., Soviet Politics—The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), pp. 396, 400. 25. Ibid., pp. 408, 416. 26. Carl A. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. 1-2, 4, 10, 15, 220. 27. Archie Brown, "Pluralism, Power and the Soviet Political System: A Comparative Perspective," in Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Pluralism in the Soviet Union: Essays in Honour ofH Gordon Skilling (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), p. 71. 28. H. Gordon Skilling, Communism National and International: Eastern Europe After Stalin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 131-133. 29. H. Gordon Skilling, "Interest Groups and Communist Politics," World Politics 18, no. 3 (April 1966), cited in Jeffrey W. Hahn, Conceptualizing Political Participation in the USSR: Two Decades of Debate (Washington, D.C: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1984), p. 3; and "Interest Groups and Communist Politics: An Introduction," in H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 13. 30. H. Gordon Skilling, "Groups in Soviet Politics: Some Hypotheses," in H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, Interest Groups, p. 44. 31. James M. Goldgeier, "Soviet Foreign Policy," in Raymond C. Taras, ed., Handbook of Political Science Research on the USSR and Eastern Europe: Trends from the 1950s to the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992), pp. 226-227.

Breaking Free of the Totalitarianism Model

93

32. Adam B. Ulam, The Russian Political System (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 3, 9, 14,49,51-52. 33. Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-1967 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1968), p. 607. 34. Ulam, The Russian, pp. 53, 57, 103. 35. Ulam, Expansion, pp. 726—729. 36. Ulam, The Russian, pp. 158-159. 37. Ulam, Expansion, pp. 775-776. 38. William Taubman, review of Frederick C. Barghoorn, Detente and the Democratic Movement in the USSR (New York: Free Press, 1976), p. 126, in American Political Science Review 72, no. 3 (September 1978), pp. 1087-1088. 39. Paul Cocks, "The Policy Process and Bureaucratic Politics," in Paul Cocks, Robert V. Daniels, and Nancy Whittier Heer, eds., The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 158-159, 175-176. 40. Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, "Integration and Ethnic Nationalism in the Soviet Union: Aspects, Trends, and Problems," in Carl A. Linden and Dimitri K. Simes, eds., Nationalities and Nationalism in the USSR: A Soviet Dilemma (Washington, D.C: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1976), pp. 31, 33. 41. Robert W. Campbell, The Soviet-Type Economies: Performance and Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), pp. 51, 65, 75, 226. 42. Ibid., p. 102. 43. Ibid., pp. 104-105, 107, 146-147. 44. Ibid., pp. 223-224, 226-229. 45. Marshall I. Goldman, "The Soviet Economy Is Not Immune," Foreign Policy 21 (Winter 1975-1976), pp. 76-77, 79. 46. Ibid., pp. 81,83. 47. Joseph G. Whelan and Francis T. Miko, Detente in Soviet-American Relations, 1972-1974: A Survey and Analysis (Washington D.C: Library of Congress Congressional Research Service, May 1975), p. 15. 48. Ibid., pp. 49, 74, 77-78, 80, 101-102. 49. Robert G. Kaiser, Russia: The Power and The People (New York: Atheneum, 1976), pp. 453, 463. 50. Ibid., pp. 477-478. 51. Vernon V. Aspaturian, "Vulnerabilities and Strengths of the Soviet Union in a Changing International Environment: The Internal Dimension," Soviet Union 4, no. 1 (1977), in Erik P. Hoffmann and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., eds., The Conduct, pp. 711, 714— 715. 52. Gerald Steibel, Detente: Promises and Pitfalls (New York: Crane, Russak, 1975), pp. 4-10. 53. But the American neoconservative movement emerged out of realism, not political cultural-historicism. Disturbed by what they saw as a habitual pattern of Soviet adventurism and arms control violations, as well as by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and the publication of several revisionist accounts of American foreign policy, a number of realist scholars in the late 1960s and early 1970s adopted a neoconservative (essentially, political cultural-historicist) line toward the USSR. 54. Robert H. McNeal, The Bolshevik Tradition: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. ix-x, 192-194.

94

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

55. Ibid., pp. 162-163, 170. 56. Ibid., p. 191. 57. Robert Conquest, "A New Russia? A New World?" Foreign Affairs 53, no. 3 (April 1975), pp. 482, 486, 488. 58. Ibid., pp. 488-489, 59. Ibid., pp. 490^192, 495. 60. Richard Pipes, "Detente: Moscow's View," in Richard Pipes, U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Detente (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981), p. 72. 61. Richard Pipes, "Detente: A Discussion with George Urban," in Richard Pipes, US.-Soviet Relations, p. 112. 62. Richard Pipes, "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," in Richard Pipes, US.-Soviet Relations, pp. 135-136. 63. Ibid., pp. 166-167. 64. Richard Pipes, "Detente: Moscow's View," pp. 64, 68-71, 80, 87-88. 65. Carl A. Linden and Dimitri K. Simes, "Reflections of A Nationality Expert," in Linden and Simes, eds., Nationalities, pp. 9—10. 66. Richard Pipes, in Carl A. Linden and Dimitri K. Simes, "Political Implications of the Soviet Nationality Policy," in Linden and Simes, eds., Nationalities, p. 21. 67. Carl A. Linden, in Linden and Dimitri K. Simes, "The Revival of Russian Nationalism" in Linden and Simes, eds., Nationalities, p. 29. 68. Carl A. Linden, "The Rise of Russian Patriotism and American Policy," in Linden and Simes, eds., Nationalities, pp. 55-56. 69. Ibid., p. 59. 70. Stephen F. Cohen, "Soviet Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy," Inquiry Magazine, December 19, 1977, in Detente or Debacle: Common Sense in U.S. Soviet Relations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 11-13. 71. Ibid., pp. 14, 16-17,22. 72. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 37. 73. Barry Barnes, T. S. Kuhn and Social Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 18-19. 74. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure, p. 111. 75. Our study also supports John Lukacs's acerbic corollary to Kordig's note: When scholars and policy makers "do not see something, this often means that they do not wish to see it—a condition that may be comfortable and profitable to them." See Carl R. Kordig, The Justification of Scientific Change (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1971), p. 30, and John Lukacs, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993), p. 33.

4

Sovietology in a Funk: Neoconservatism emd American Scholarship on the Soviet Union, 1978-1981 AMERICAN SOVIETOLOGY IN THE POST-BICENTENNIAL YEARS For most Americans, 1976 was a year for reflection and taking stock. The prolonged Vietnam conflict and the Watergate scandal were over; a smiling peanut farmer and former Georgia governor was running for president; and America was celebrating her Bicentennial. Journalists and pundits wondered grandiliquently what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin would have thought of the United States if they could "see us now," some two hundred years after the birth of the American experiment. This was, of course, a silly question, this speculation over whether the founding fathers would have liked the United States in 1976. But then again, it was a silly era, or at least a self-conscious one, and Americans wanted reassurance that they hadn't failed their original vision, that they were on the right track. Had Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin been able to see us in the midto-late 1970s, they might well have been distressed by America's muscular globalism and by the prevailing U.S. Cold War consensus. They would have been bewildered by the suspicious and ideological climate of U.S.-Soviet relations and American Sovietology. In its most intense expression, this neoconservative mood denied the possibility of Soviet change and vilified the USSR as a rogue state that was irreconcilably opposed to U.S. interests and to the universal values and goals of western states. Many of these Cold War distinctions and hostilities would have been lost on America's founding fathers. Unaccustomed to the determinism of the totalitarianism model and to the curious idea that a state could not change politically or economically, our distinguished visitors reasonably might have expected U.S. scholars and policy makers to respond flexibly and creatively to Soviet foreign policy and to anticipate the possibility of Soviet reform.1 Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin might not have liked the Soviet Union, but they perhaps would have expected that with the passage of time—with mounting evidence of a po-

96

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

litically active and pluralistic Soviet society and in light of the USSR's remarkable record of modernization; with the aging of the Brezhnev leadership and the erosion of the Soviet economy; and with the positive experience of detente— fundamental Soviet political, social, and economic changes would occur. The founding fathers might well have guessed that if it was difficult for pre1974 Sovietologists to envision the kind of systemic reforms that Gorbachev would unleash in the late 1980s, then perhaps scholars of a later period—say, the 1974 through 1977 years, or the 1978 to 1981 timeframe—would have foreseen the possibility of such innovations with greater clarity. Unfortunately, this was not to be. While a few scholars of the mid-to-late-1970s acknowledged the reforms that were taking place in Moscow, the vast majority did not, and most did not foresee even the possibility of improvement in Soviet political and economic conditions. Realist Literature While the 1978 through 1981 period was characterized by major changes in both American and Soviet domestic politics, much of the realist Sovietological literature of these years focused on Moscow's reaction to geopolitical events. In addition, some realist writings highlighted new evidence of immobilism in the Kremlin leadership and stagnation in the Soviet economy. Whereas in the 1960s and early 1970s the "correlation of forces" seemed to be moving in Moscow's favor, and U.S. scholars saw a political dynamism and a sense of economic and social progress in the Soviet Union, now realists saw the correlation of forces shifting to the West's advantage, and they chronicled the Brezhnev leadership's reactionary and counterproductive efforts to "circle the wagons" by implementing conservative and self-protective policies. Internationally, the USSR's reputation had become tarnished by the Kremlin's aggressive and ineffectual policies in Afghanistan and other Third World regions. These manifestations of "adventurism" soon produced strains in the U.S.-Soviet relationship and led to a renewed East-West arms race that Moscow could ill afford. Hard Realist Views. Although the Sovietological writings in this section offer starkly differing conclusions about the possibility of Soviet change, they were all penned by American scholars who shared a common realist political outlook. Most hard realist scholars were prompted by concern over the Soviet military and political threat against the West and viewed the Soviet leaders, and their foreign and domestic policies, warily. While these Sovietologists did not employ a cultural continuity argument to trace Tsarist political traditions to the modern-day Soviet Union, many of their views approached the political culturalhistoricist perspective and seemed more pessimistic than was warranted by the evidence. In general, many hard realist scholars denied the possibility of radical Soviet reform, favoring instead a gradual "muddle down" or status quo vision of the Soviet future. But other hard realists anticipated a series of perverse outcomes in the Soviet system, including reaction, instability, and collapse. According to Roman Kolkowicz of the University of California at Los Ange-

Sovietology in a Funk

97

les, the Red Army had "clearly established its primacy in the economy [and] in research and development." Kolkowicz noted that Moscow's defense industry comprised "a separate sector of the economy," and "enjoy[ed] first priority in the allocation of materials [and] engineering-technical personnel, who are better paid than those in the civilian economy."2 In addition, the Soviet generals could "impose [their] preferences on the whole production process—[a] privilege possessed by no other group." Reflecting on the USSR's entrenched militarization, Russian historian James H. Billington foresaw a troubled Soviet future. "The sheer [number] of arms combined with [Moscow's in]experience in using them could—if provoked by nationalist unrest or Chinese bellicosity—[bring about the authoritarian] militarized dictatorship that many predict," he noted.3 In addition, the USSR faced a number of other significant problems. Succession itself "raisefd] basic problems of legitimacy." Thus, Billingham anticipated one or more "menacing developments" after Brezhnev left office. In 1979, Hebrew University scholar Theodore H. Friedgut argued that Moscow's numerous efforts to turn local Soviets into vehicles for citizen participation that would generate popular support for the political system had met with "limited success." In particular, Friedgut noted a "chronic recurrence of formal activity devoid of content, accompanied by avoidance of [productive] activity in population groups which should be among the most active participants in Soviet society and politics." The quality of political participation by Soviet citizens was poor, the Hebrew University scholar believed, in part because of the USSR's low living standards. Despite recent modernizations and advances, consumers were still spending a great deal of time waiting in queues to buy food, and much of citizen's nonworking energy was "devoted to producing or obtaining goods and services not readily supplied by the economic system." Still, as Jeffrey W. Hahn notes, Friedgut recognized that Soviet citizens could and did "fight city hall"—at least to an extent. This ability of citizens to "elicit regime attention for [their] demands" was a "significant development," since "the feeling of being able to command attention from the authorities is the precondition of any civic culture."4 Friedgut acknowledged Khrushchev's lasting influence on the political participation of ordinary Soviet citizens: "[M]uch of the vigor of permitted intellectual discussion" in the late 1960s and 1970s, "as well as the courage and outspoken frankness of the various dissent movements [had] roots" in the Khrushchev era, he noted. Nevertheless, by the late 1970s, the Soviet citizen had become "an extra on the stage of politics"; he took "part in the mass aspects of government," and he "interpreted] and color[ed] the workings of the local soviet," but he had "little influence" on the issues, the political setting, or "the flow of events." Indeed, "his influence on policy [was] indirect, often marginal, but cumulative in that he [was] needed, and participate^] in policy implementation at local levels." Friedgut did not believe that the Brezhnev leadership was "under the gun" to increase citizen participation in politics. Regime stability was not in jeopardy, he

98

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

noted pointedly: The "developing system" of the USSR had "existed for half a century and overcome almost every crisis imaginable"; thus, it had "sufficient adaptive capacity to continue functioning and developing." Nor would permanent and significant reform come about through citizen participation. Indeed, Friedgut feared that citizen participation could lead to such "illegitimate" and unwanted activities as "conspiracy and violence." In a 1981 paper, Friedgut described a network of volunteer public groups, clubs, and activities that operated within Soviet communities but were sporadic and disorganized. These included ideological activities, like Red Corner discussions and election meetings; lifestyle clubs devoted to cleanups, plantings, and playground construction; and service organizations such as pensioners' and library clubs. These groups were "voluntary," but there was a sense among the Soviet populace that they were imposed from above. Friedgut explained this contradiction as a function of the Soviets' "Hobbesian outlook." Citizens wanted "the Leviathan of strong government," he noted, "to preserve order and to keep life from being 'nasty, solitary, brutish and short.'" If they "regret[ted surrendering their] sovereignty," they nevertheless "appreciatefd] the necessity" of doing so, and "urged on by the stick and carrot of authority and public opinion, [they] participate[d]."5 A different interpretation of these groups, however, might have seen them as reflecting a kind of political maturation and social modernization that took root quietly within the Soviet system and would blossom under Gorbachev in the fertile soil of glasnost and new thinking. In 1980, Paul Cocks examined Moscow's time-honored "penchant for organizational [tinkering]. Almost by reflex," he noted, the USSR "reached for reorganization as an all-purpose cure." During the 1970s, Soviet scientists and engineers embraced the "systems revolution" and formed a number of new "complex organizations," but most of these changes were superficial, amounting to little more than the adoption of new "institutional nameplates. Many of the new complexes and associations failed to take the intended 'structural leap'"; they amounted to "mechanical aggregations of autonomous units that [bore] the imprint of pre-existing organizational forms and manuals of operation." In large measure, this failure was due to "the impoverishment of creative thinking," Cocks argued. While there was much emphasis on research and production, there were no "criteria for evaluating performance and progress." Thus, a "trial-and-error method prevailed, resulting in an interminable process of reorganization upon reorganization or, in the Soviet vernacular, 'administrative troop movements.'" The leadership hoped that '"in time everything will work itself out and fall into place.' When this did not happen, even after years of [tinkering, managers and workers were reticent] to admit the[ir] mistake[s]," Cocks said, "since such admissions would [require holding] specific parties responsible" for their failures and could lead to unpleasant repercussions. Often, "the interests of [Soviet administrators], rather than organizational goals determined the extent and shape of structural [changes]. Old managerial forms [were] mechanically [applied] to new organizational models without eliminating their deficiencies or examining their suitability under changed conditions. The

Sovietology in a Funk

99

[Soviet] tendency [was] not to transform the basic building blocks, but simply to move them around, almost constantly."6 Cocks faulted the timidity of the Brezhnev leadership for many of these problems. Throughout the 1970s, innovation occurred slowly and in piecemeal fashion, if at all. Such a cautious approach helped Brezhnev avoid Khrushchev's blunders, but it stifled technological innovation. Cocks concluded that Moscow's fundamental problem was not one of organization or new nameplates but of technological obsolescence and ineptitude. The USSR "lack[ed] both the power and the technique for dealing with complex problems. The administrative arsenal, built [to] prope[l] the Soviet Union into the steel age, [was] hardly adequate for moving it into the computer age." Turning the arguments of pluralist Sovietologists like H. Gordon Skilling on their head, scholar Dennis Ross posited a "coalition maintenance" model of Soviet decision making. Ross saw "a kind of pluralism of elites and a related oligarchical rule" rising, phoenixlike, from the ashes of Soviet totalitarianism, "as terror [was] abandoned and revolutionary changes from above [were] forsaken." But Ross's coalition maintenance model suggested that change would be "of a limited nature"; that is, "since the accommodation" of one elite group's "demands often requires restriction on another's, changes must be gradual and incremental." The Brezhnev leadership's priorities, of avoiding conflict and assuring personal and bureaucratic security, also minimized the possibility of radical reform. Indeed, "the polity [cannot] cope with broad Soviet problems," Ross argued, and it will not tolerate "frontal assaults on the interests of important institutional actors. Should this happen, the consensus that underpins Soviet incrementalism [will] fall apart."7 A panoply of problems threatened the Soviet leadership consensus, Ross noted—the biggest of which was the weakened Soviet economy. The USSR was hampered by low productivity, inefficiency, technological lag, a reduced labor force, and "the need to satisfy popular welfare." If "the 'delivery of the goods' has bred support for the regime," it also created a popular mood of expectancy that could "be a source of real danger to the system." Yet any attempted reforms would be sidetracked by the coalition maintenance or rule-bycommittee decision-making approach. Since wholesale change would "violate the ideological norms of the system" and "threaten important vested interests," each reform was forged through "basic trade-offs and compromises," which in turn "cancelled out the reforms." This was troublesome, since "without the needed changes, the elite consensus that underpins coalition maintenance" would likely "break down." In short, the Soviet leaders could not live with change, but they also could not live without it. In the event of a breakdown, Ross guessed that the former ruling coalition would be.replaced, either by a new leadership consensus that agreed economic change "must take precedence over other tasks in the system" or by a dominant and charismatic leader who would "cut through" the USSR's "inherent conservatism by exciting the masses to support his great objectives." This observation came a full five years before Mikhail S. Gorbachev's rise to power—but Ross's

100

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

prescience was qualified by his subsequent claim that it would be almost impossible for any top leader "to develop the kind of authority or charisma necessary to be successful." Thus, Ross saw "more muddling through and stop-gap measures" as the likeliest future course in Soviet politics. A number of hard realist scholars wrote about the troubled Soviet economy during the years from 1978 through 1981. Looking at the USSR's energy prospects, University of California economist Gregory Grossman warned that accessible energy resources were "being rapidly depleted, requiring large and costly investment in Siberia." This meant that Soviet energy deficiencies would increasingly inhibit "growth for at least another decade, despite the [USSR's] enormous reserves of fossil fuel."8 Several factors undergirded Grossman's dire assessment, including the "serious lag" in oil field exploration and development, related difficulties with coal in Siberia, the expense of "building [natural gas] pipelines," and the difficulties of finding non-petroleum "sources of energy" and conserving energy "at reasonable cost." Despite impressive Soviet accomplishments in weaponry and space, "the overall technological gap" between East and West was as wide as it had been twenty years ago, Grossman added. Still, Moscow would probably "muddle through," so long as "the scale of the crises" was not so severe as to destabilize the Soviet economic and political system. Similarly, University of Tennessee economist George Feiwel surveyed a cornucopia of "flagrant inefficiencies" plaguing the Soviet economy. These included overcentralization, "inertia," rigidity, poor workmanship, the "accumulation of idle equipment" and "unwanted consumer goods," "a cumbersome supply system," unreliable product delivery procedures, the "hoarding of materials" by manufacturers, the "waste of capital" and other resources "in illconceived construction projects," "[unproductive employment," "underutilization of capacity," high "labor turnover" and the "mismanagement" of labor, and a lack of incentives for technical improvement and progress. Thus, Feiwel saw significant change as unlikely: the Soviet system was too rigid and inflexible for reforms to work. Feiwel admitted that some minor changes had taken place; "in only 60 years," the USSR had transformed its economy, made significant technological advances; improved health, education and culture; reduced working time; and raised its living standard. Still, "the results would have been better, with lower costs in human and material resources," had Moscow been more receptive to "change and innovation."9 One of "the system's greatest failure[s]," Feiwel noted, "was that it depressed [workers' desire] to 'do a good day's work.'" Soft Realist Views. Like hard realists, most soft realist scholars of the 1978— 1981 period saw the Soviet Union as one of several great powers in the international system, and they interpreted Soviet foreign policy as rational, driven by practical balance-of-power considerations. But unlike hard realists, these scholars saw Soviet social, political, and economic innovation as likely. Less worried about the international and domestic constraints on Soviet action, most soft realists were fundamentally optimistic about the possibility of reform, and they viewed geopolitical events and Soviet domestic policy as conducive to such

Sovietology in a Funk

101

change. In contrast to the hard realist analyses of such Soviet military scholars as Roman Kolkowicz, Air Force General W. Y. Smith observed that even in the late 1970s, when the USSR's power was at its zenith, the Red Army still lagged behind technologically—especially "in areas relevant to strategic nuclear force effectiveness." Nevertheless, the general added, "Technology [in the USRR] is improving [and] we anticipate still further improvements in the accuracy and reliability of Soviet strategic nuclear missiles in the 1980s."10 In other words, present day (1978) Soviet missile technology was not very accurate or reliable. The Soviet armed forces had a number of problems, General Smith noted, including a "declining manpower pool"; cultural, ethnic, national, and linguistic differences; increased "disciplinary problems," such as drunkenness and "hooliganism"; limited and inadequate training; low initiative among officers, exacerbated by a rigid doctrine and operational style; and an inadequate logistics capability, tailored to peacetime requirements. Similarly, Marshall D. Shulman of Columbia University argued that Moscow did not view detente merely as a diplomatic strategem with which to defeat the West; rather, the Soviet leaders embraced coexistence with the West because they genuinely saw their country as militarily and economically inferior, and they believed that they needed a SALT II agreement. The USSR had "committed itself since the middle sixties to the proposition that the most urgent requirement for future Soviet power is the repair of its economic problems," Shulman noted—"the problems of productivity and lag in advanced technology." If Moscow was "obliged now to divert more resources into the military sector instead of into technology," it would hinder growth. The Columbia University scholar added that the USSR was "still striving" in the late 1970s "to overcome [its] inferiority," but it faced significant obstacles in technological innovation, an area in which the United States had the lead. Thus, Moscow "sought to offset" both the U.S. advantage and its own inability to miniaturize electronic components by building heavy missiles. Shulman concluded that the USSR was hardly the imposing and fearsome military juggernaut that Washington made it out to be.11 In scholar Richard F. Kaufman's view, the substantial disagreement between such Soviet military experts as Kolkowicz, Smith, and Shulman was fostered by a combination of "Soviet secrecy and incomplete statistics," which forced American scholars "to rely heavily on the intelligence community for information about the Soviet economy." Rejecting Kolkowicz's near hagiographic depiction of Soviet military power, Kaufman complained that the U.S. intelligence community had falsely characterized the Soviet defense industry as being "vastly more efficient than its civilian counterpart." This extreme depiction of efficiency, it was argued, "partially explained how Soviet defense could cost only one-fifth more than U.S. defense, and represent about the same share of GNP, though total Soviet GNP was half the size of U.S. GNP." In reality, such estimates were grossly inflated, Kaufman noted; indeed, the CIA admitted as much, in 1976, by revising upward its figures for Soviet defense spending,

102

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

"based on new information indicating [that] Soviet defense industries are less efficient than was previously believed."12 Many neoconservatives found the CIA estimates alarming because they seemed to suggest that the USSR was devoting even more of its resources to defense than western observers had previously believed; but the more serious implication of these figures was that defense expenditures were "a greater drag on the Soviet economy than was previously supposed." Indeed, Soviet growth rates had reached a high point of 6 percent per year in the 1950s, Kaufman noted, but they had been "declining gradually" since then. Several factors accounted for this continuing slowdown, including labor force shortages, chronic agricultural problems, and difficulties in the energy sector. There seemed to be "universal agreement," Kaufman argued, "that the Soviet military] lag[ged] behind the West" technologically. "Only in ground equipment" was there an approximate parity, but "even here, Soviet tanks are considered inferior to NATO's." In all other areas, including missiles, electronics, and aircraft engines, "the Soviets are years behind the West." Kaufman attributed this technological lag to Moscow's lack of "the kind of civilian technology base that exists in the West"; to the "absence of [defense industry] competition [and] incentives for technological risktaking" in the USSR; to the "laborintensive" character of Soviet industry; and to a military doctrine that stressed quantity over quality. Thus, while "Soviet defense industries appearfed] more efficient" than their civilian counterparts, "defense production costs [we]re very high and the sophistication and quality of Soviet weapons" was low.13 Kaufman dispelled the common western notion that there were two separate Soviet economies—a decrepit one for the civilian sector and a highly efficient one for defense. "The Soviet defense industry is not as different from the civilian industry as is commonly believed," he noted. Even if "defense gets priority treatment with respect to resources, it does not get as much as it wants. Defense priorities are established in the context of overall economic constraints." Thus, "bottlenecks, shortages, and delays, which plague the entire industrial sector, exist at the advanced technology level in defense as well as in civilian industries." Kaufman cited the inexact nature of economic forecasting and the USSR's presumed stability as contributing to the mistaken American notion that no matter how badly Moscow's economy faltered, the USSR would weather the storm and continue to threaten the West militarily. Indeed, he concluded, many European observers had criticized Washington's Soviet policy for assuming, "schizophrenically," that the U.S. economy was "both superior to and in danger of being overtaken by the USSR." One indication of the extent to which U.S. scholars and policy makers misperceived the USSR was that by the mid-1970s, many Soviet experts had adopted this dualistic and contradictory view of the USSR as very-strong-yetsomehow-very-weak. As Robert Legvold noted astutely, the "common" American depiction of the USSR saw a "military leviathan, in the bloom of expansion," proud to have achieved superpower status and parity with the U.S., "and fascinated by the potential rewards in the continued accumulation of arms. But

Sovietology in a Funk

103

most [Americans also saw] the Soviet Union [as] a seriously flawed power" that was "economically disadvantaged, technologically deficient, bureaucratically sclerosed, and something of a deformed giant."14 In the end, said Legvold, Americans' schizophrenic depiction bore "little relationship to the Soviet Union's self-image because it is so thoroughly our view of the world." Perhaps the most prolific American realist scholar of the 1978-1981 period was Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University. In 1980, on the heels of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, Bialer completed Stalin's Successors. The central theme of this work was suggested by its title: the Kremlin was still influenced by its Stalinist past, and Khrushchev and Brezhnev had not broken free of the wartime dictator's policies or legacy. Bialer charged that the "principal link between Stalin's rule and the Soviet present (and a major source of Soviet stability)" was the "tenacity of [the Brezhnev] generation." This group's hold on power had "set the limits of change in the period since Stalin's death."15 But by 1980, "the rule of this favored generation [was] ending," and its departure offered "genuine and pressing impulses for change." While both Stalin's Successors and Jerry F. Hough's Soviet Leadership in Transition (also published in 1980) dealt with the problems of generational change and the post-Brezhnev succession, Bialer's study was fundamentally more pessimistic than Hough's analysis. If most pluralists (including Hough) saw Soviet foreign and military policy as defensive in character, Bialer argued that the Kremlin was prompted by opportunism, and he saw the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan as an ominous turning point in Moscow's foreign policy. Rejecting the idea that the USSR stumbled into Afghanistan "precipitously, without realistic anticipation of the long-range implications" of Moscow's military action for East-West relations, Bialer characterized the Soviet military action as a "watershed" event that revealed "a new confidence, self-assertiveness, and expansionist drive," and a sinister "reordering" of Kremlin priorities. Despite his pessimism, Bialer acknowledged that the Brezhnev leadership was more concerned about domestic issues than about external expansion; that the Soviet leaders were prone to minimize risks; and that Soviet foreign policy behavior was, if not defensive in nature, then certainly prompted by legitimate national security considerations. In addition, Bialer recognized that military spending and the Afghan war had imposed a significant burden on the Soviet economy and that, reciprocally, Moscow's economic woes made it harder for the Red Army to operate. While the Columbia University Sovietologist hardly expected the Soviet generals to demobilize their troops or scrap their weapons anytime soon, he saw, "for the Soviet side a significant disincentive for an unrestricted arms race, apart from the dangers that such a race would entail."16 Bialer believed that it was "primarily with regard to [its] military resources that the [USSR] excelled." While the Soviet defense program had significant weaknesses, Moscow deemed the costs of deploying its armed forces abroad to be "low, their effectiveness high, their returns impressive, and their preponderance in the balance of Soviet foreign policy resources pronounced." Citing CIA statistics, Bialer pegged the Soviet military burden at 11 to 12 percent of GNP.

104

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

While this cost was "significant," Bialer thought that if Moscow could maintain GNP growth at about 3 percent per year, it would be able to continue raising "military expenditures at a rate similar to that of the last decade" without significantly burdening the civilian economy.17 Bialer characterized the first decade of the Brezhnev era as "the most successful period of Soviet international and domestic development" and a time when the USSR "achievefd] strategic parity with the United States" and became a superpower. Indeed, "for the first time in its history," the Soviet Union "pursue[d] successfully and simultaneously a policy of guns and butter as well as growth," he noted. Consequently, Moscow saw the "correlation of forces" as particularly favorable during the early 1970s. But sometime in the early-to-mid 1970s, this trend began to go the other way. The Columbia University scholar noted five ominous developments: "a secular decline in [Soviet] growth rates in almost all sectors"; the inability of the economy to increase "productivity of capital and labor"; "unfavorable demographic trends," including a "projected decline" in Russian workers and an increase in non-Russian manpower; a series of energy shortages; and the failure of agriculture. Bialer added that the 1980s would likely be a "harsh decade" for the USSR, which could "well pass through the worst period it has seen since the death of Stalin.18 Bialer saw ethnonationalism as "potentially [Moscow's] most devastating" problem and "the deepest challenge" to Soviet regime legitimacy. Indeed, "the polarization of the Soviet peoples along ethnic lines [was] increasing faster than their identification with a new Soviet nationhood." This difficulty was complicated by Moscow's intractable economic problems. "The era of extensive Soviet development, when high rates of growth were assured through growing increments of labor and capital," was over, Bialer said, "and an already poor situation is aggravated tremendously by an impending energy crisis" in oil production, coal, and nuclear power. The USSR was not prepared for these crises; indeed, "the future [was] catching up with the Soviet Union" in the most "unpropitious" way possible, leaving "little room for economic maneuverability." Moscow's difficulties were especially ominous for consumer and military spending. To add insult to injury, the Polish, East German, and Czechoslovakian economies were also in disrepair, and with the Kremlin "running out of incentives for enticing, rather than compelling" Eastern Europe's allegiance, the USSR's economic weakness could "translate quickly" into instability and turmoil.19 Bialer lamented the tendency of scholars to speculate endlessly over the Soviet future. During the past decade, he noted, a number of scenarios had been put forth, featuring various outcomes: "revolution," "progressive degeneration and decay," "a military coup," "neo-Stalinism," "convergence" with the West, "far-reaching liberalization and democratization, "ethical-religious re-birth, evolution toward a socialist democracy, and a continuation of the present system with no change whatsoever. Bialer rejected any view of the Soviet future that saw the Soviet system as unchanging or prone to disintegrate; that depicted Soviet leaders in a villainous, crude, or oafish light; that equated Soviet stability

Sovietology in a Funk

105

with rigidity; that doubted "that the Soviet leaders and [people] actually believe what they profess to believe"; or that anticipated a Soviet "liberal democracy or convergence" with the West.20 Bialer saw the Soviet system as fundamentally stable and unlikely either to collapse or to undergo radical reform in the foreseeable future. But the Columbia University Sovietologist detected "sound rational elements behind the expectations of change," including the recognition that the USSR faced severe political, social, and economic problems, and the pervasive anticipation among Soviet citizens that conditions had to improve following Brezhnev's departure. These expectations were based on an implicit social contract that regarded economic performance and an improved living standard as a "cornerstone" of Soviet stability. Thus, Bialer saw political and economic change as an unstoppable force that would not leave the Soviet Union unscathed. According to Bialer, "the superstability of personnel" in the Soviet leadership and bureaucracy under Brezhnev derived from "an unwritten agreement" between Brezhnev and the elite "to provide the security denied them" under Khrushchev. As a result of this understanding, the gates to career advancement had been "closed for very long," and there was, by the late 1970s, "great impatience" for change "among the younger members of the elite."21 Thus, while the Columbia University scholar did not anticipate significant reforms to occur for the remainder of Brezhnev's tenure, he fully expected such change in the postBrezhnev succession. Bialer guessed that an interim leader would replace Brezhnev and govern for two to four years; then, a younger leader would step in and consolidate his rule by the mid-1980s; finally, serious reforms would begin in the late 1980s. This forecast was remarkably prescient and anticipated Mikhail Gorbachev's elevation to power five years after Bialer's study was published. Over time, the Columbia University Sovietologist migrated intellectually from a soft realist position in the mid-1970s to a hard realist stance in the early 1980s. Whereas his earliest writings (including Stalin's Successors) were fundamentally sanguine concerning the possibility of Soviet reform, his later work was tinged with the same pessimism that would capture many political culturalhistoricist scholars in the early 1980s. Thus, Bialer argued ominously that Soviet consumption would decline sharply in the 1980s, and he questioned whether "existing police controls and the management of mass expectations [could] keep the working class docile" or whether Moscow would have to tighten the authoritarian grip of the party-state.22 Bialer expected the new post-Brezhnev leaders to be like previous Soviet rulers in their commitment to the "cult of the state" and to a high level of defense spending. The new men would shun "the highly ideological, frantic, campaign-like reforms" of Khrushchev or any Dubcek-style liberalizations. Moreover, they would be no "easier to deal with" than their predecessors and "less cautious [and] more prone to take risks than the present leadership." As Bialer's assessment of the USSR grew darker and more ominous, the Sovietologist envisioned a number of dire foreign policy outcomes. The USSR's

106

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

mounting energy problems could prompt Moscow to initiate a military "movement" into the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Alternatively, the Soviets could negotiate a "barter agreement" to buy oil from friendly Arab regimes such as Iraq and Libya, or they could attempt to intimidate pro-Western regimes like Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the USSR's economic woes and its desire for "high technology on favorable terms" could prompt the Soviet leaders to pressure Western Europe or to dominate Eastern Europe through intimidation and force.23 Unhappy with both the totalitarianism model and Jerry F. Hough's institutional pluralism, in 1980 Valerie Bunce and John M. Echols III embraced corporatism as a new model, adapted from Latin American and European studies, that combined features of both totalitarianism and pluralism and took into consideration the inherent complexity of Communist systems. Corporatism was conceived as "a decision-making structure in which major functional interest groups are incorporated into the policy process by the state and its leaders," the two scholars noted. "The [Soviet] state takes an active role" in decision making—it is not, "as in the pluralist model, simply a passive broker."24 This means that "only those groups deemed necessary to making the system work are included": business and labor "are the centerpiece of a corporatist system"; other "attitudinal groups" are excluded. "Under corporatism," Bunce and Echols argued, "groups and the state [work together] to pursue rational procedures" for political and economic decision making. By contrast, pluralist systems do not, and "indeed, cannot, plan." Analogously, a corporatist system works toward "explicit policy goals," whereas "a pluralist polity has no explicit goals," since "the pluralist process is [itself] the major concern." The corporatist model viewed Brezhnev's Soviet Union as fundamentally stable, resilient, able to change, and likely to survive into the next century. There would be no political or economic turmoil under corporatism; the party would remain both powerful and intact. Concerning the economy, "the current [annual] growth rates of 3-5 percent" would probably continue, and agricultural productivity would be adequate. Bunce and Echols anticipated that Moscow would institute wholesale material improvements and a kind of "goulash Communism" in the consumer sector. In addition, the Kremlin would ease political pressures on dissidents who kept their complaints and criticisms to themselves. Like Bialer, William F. Hyland characterized the Soviet Union as "a very careful regime, one that consistently rechecks its moves" and "is rather conservative and prudent."25 Regarding the Soviet future, Hyland anticipated "more of the same." Although he sensed "growing pressures to ge[t] the country 'moving again,'" on balance, he discounted reformist scenarios. Hyland did not expect "a wholesale reversal" toward totalitarianism, or "the emergence of another Stalin," but he noted pointedly "that the bureaucracy [was] triumphing," and only "an enormous effort" could "reverse this trend."26 Despite the economic and political stagnation that troubled so many western critics of the USSR, Hyland termed "the Brezhnev era a highly successful one." He saw the rise in the Soviet standard of living as "impressive." Moreover, "in-

Sovietology in a Funk

107

ternal political dissent [was] relentlessly suppressed. And, above all, [the Soviet Union] has emerged as a great power of global proportions, the military equal" of the United States.27 Indeed, "the balance of power, for decades dominated by the United States and its allies, is now in danger of shifting to the U.S.S.R.," Hyland warned. Meanwhile, "Soviet [djominance in Eastern Europe continues and severe challenges do not appear likely." Yet Hyland also noted "a malaise" in the Soviet Bloc: "[T]he more liberal regimes—Poland and Hungary"—were rapidly moving away from "strict Soviet discipline. And all East European governments [we]re forced by economic necessity to look increasingly westward." Hyland recognized that the Soviet economy was in trouble and that "no analysis fores[aw] a bright outlook." Fundamental reform—basic decentralization of decision making and the creation of new incentives—was needed, but "given a new leadership unsure of its mandate and political base, the likelihood of [such change was] remote." In the event of an economic crisis, Hyland added, a sharp defense cut may be "too inviting a melon to be ignored by the Politburo." On the other hand, "the costs of challenging the defense establishment [were] even greater than tinkering with reforms. What new leader would try" to win office or "consolidate power" by trimming military spending? "Given the respective political fates" of Khrushchev who tried to cut defense and Brezhnev who did not, "a successor [was un] likely" to confront the generals. Yet if the new Soviet rulers did not reduce military spending, Moscow would "for a long period need to import technology, grain, and perhaps even oil" from the West. Hyland concluded that the new leaders would remain "tied to conservative elements, doomed to maneuver within narrow limits, [and] caught up in an economic crisis" which they could not solve.28 Hyland guessed that a successor to Brezhnev would "emerge" before 1985 and that the new leader would be "an official serving in Moscow, with experience mainly in the party rather than the government, including service in the secretariat and some experience in directing a major Soviet republic, or a large oblast or subdivision therein." Hyland identified several candidates for the top job, including Gregory Romanov, Peter Masherov, Vladimir Shcherbitskiy, Vladimir Dolgikh, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Even if the identity of the next general secretary was in doubt, Hyland agreed with Bialer and Hough that significant generational change was coming. "The man who takes charge will never have known pre-revolutionary Russia [or] the pre-Stalin Soviet Union," he noted. Most of the new leader's "political career will have been after Stalin's death," and his most important "assignments will have been in the postKhrushchev period."29 Similarly, scholar John C. Campbell anticipated a Soviet leadership change that would come "before the mid-1980s." This transition would be "significant" because it would herald "simultaneously a shift at the very top [and] a thorough turnover in [both] the Politburo and the political elite." The members of the Brezhnev generation who witnessed "the Stalin purges and the Second World War [were] passing from the scene," Campbell noted, and were being replaced by younger men who had begun their careers under Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

108

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Under these new leaders, "the pendulum [would] swing toward [domestic] innovation and change," since the "problems the Brezhnev regime has avoided or postponed will demand it."30 The new rulers would be unburdened by Stalinism, "confident in the future, and better acquainted with the [West] than any leaders since Lenin." Campbell anticipated ongoing debate between advocates of modernization and proponents of orthodoxy, but he guessed that, in the end, Soviet foreign policy would not change appreciably. The USSR would remain "an imperialist power," and the new rulers would "regard control of Eastern Europe as vital to [their] security," he noted. Further, Moscow would still "impose its will on border countries, [apply] pressure on Western Europe," try to "overawe China, and seek new client states in the Third World." Analogously, the Soviet arms buildup of the 1970s would keep pace in the 1980s, Campbell wrote, despite the fact that military power was not the only—or the best—index of the USSR's impact on world affairs. A more telling indicator was trade, and here, Moscow's global influence was "quite modest for a country of its size, population, resources, and industrial development." Moreover, the Soviet Union's "nonparticipation in international financial institutions" further diminished its "weight in world affairs." Campbell concluded that the Soviet economy would rely "increasingly on the less-developed, non-Russian republics"—a development fraught with danger. Scholar Lawrence T. Caldwell's evaluation of the Soviet economy was somewhat more upbeat than Campbell's: The USSR was "the second largest power in the world," he wrote, and its economy had grown steadily—these were "hard facts on which American policy must be based." Admittedly, Soviet growth had declined in recent years, but this downturn reflected the USSR's earlier successes: the "sheer size and complexity of the economy make almost inevitable the same kind of decelerating growth already experienced by other developed countries."31 Defense spending was not "an issue of significant disagreement within the Politburo," Caldwell added: Brezhnev gave Soviet military leaders virtual carte blanche, as he sought to fund both guns and butter— military armaments and the satisfaction of consumer demands. Thus, Moscow's economic problems would not impair Soviet defense spending or readiness; indeed, "the military sector [was] isolated" from the strains of reduced GNP growth. Still, Caldwell rejected the common western assumption that the Soviet defense economy was wholly isolated from, or significantly more efficient than, the civilian economy. "'Non-military' categories such as machine building [constituted] a heavy component of defense production," he noted pointedly. "These sectors performed well in the past" and would continue to do so in the future. Thus, Brezhnev was able simultaneously to finance "impressive improvements" in defense and in the living standard. In retrospect, it is easy to see that Caldwell overstated the Red Army's staying power. Western perceptions of Moscow's military might were blinkered for decades: first, by a lack of reliable Soviet economic data, which forced U.S.

Sovietology in a Funk

109

policy makers and economists to devise imaginative Rube Goldbergian extrapolations to supply the required numbers for their worst-case scenarios; second, by the USSR's relative economic vitality in the 1960s and early 1970s, which lulled scholars into thinking that the Soviet economy would remain strong throughout the 1970s and 1980s; and third, by the giant shell game put on by Soviet propagandists who claimed that the USSR could have both guns and butter. As a result, many U.S. Soviet experts thought that Moscow's economic troubles alone would, in Caldwell's words, "not [force] the Soviet leadership to control military costs." Like Campbell, Caldwell guessed that wholesale Soviet reforms would be undertaken during the early 1980s; the advanced ages of the present leaders made this "probable." Moreover, "economic decline[s]" would subject the USSR to "considerable stress." Thus, in the 1980s or 1990s, the USSR would "experience one of three variants of change"—"radical transformation, including, [perhaps,] an abandonment" of Communism; "adaptation of the [political and economic] system to changing requirements"; or "bureaucratic entropy." Caldwell could not wholly reject the first of these options, but he deemed it unlikely. "The real question is whether the system will adapt or stagnate," he said.32 Caldwell saw an "incremental transformation" occurring in Soviet Bloc relations since 1968. He noted that increasing liberalization in Eastern Europe, along with ongoing Sino-Soviet tensions and the "vitality" of Eurocommunism had prompted Moscow to "permi[t] some devolution of power and shared decision making" and to "tolerate more independent national policies" among its allies. While this new tolerance fell short of western-style pluralism, the Warsaw Pact and Comecon were developing "habits of consultation and institutional diversification," Caldwell wrote.33 This new Soviet attitude was facilitated by detente, by the need for "'mature' political and economic institutions reflective of increased confidence and stability," by Moscow's desire to blunt the attraction of the European Community, and by the need to offer Eastern Europe "a palliative for higher prices of Soviet raw materials." Like many realist scholars, Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson believed that "the very nature of the Soviet system [had] set limits on how far detente [could] go." The Sovietologists recalled that Khrushchev's report to the Twentieth Party Congress contained two significant modifications to Communist doctrine, that were important indices of Soviet change—first, a rejection of the thesis that war with the West was inevitable, and second, the idea that Communism could be achieved by parliamentary or peaceful means. Stalin's death opened the door to new leadership and opportunities for the Kremlin, Nogee and Donaldson argued—and it introduced a more civil diplomatic style characterized by "a flexibility [not] seen in Moscow for some time." But Moscow's "aspiration for superpower status, strategic superiority over the West, and undisputed [bloc] leadership" also led to greater risk taking and adventurism. In the 1980s, the USSR's economic decline and the coming Brezhnev succession would have significant foreign policy implications.

110

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Nogee and Donaldson agreed with Bialer that the post-Brezhnev transition would occur in "two stages. Brezhnev's immediate successor" would be an interim leader and "one of his own generation," but "given the vicissitudes of age," younger leaders would eventually emerge. Real change would come in this "second stage of the succession," once the present leaders had passed on.34 Underlying this expectation was a belief that the members of the Brezhnev generation, who were now in power, "share[d] a common experience and perception" and were unlikely to favor significant change. But "those born after 1930, whose political careers [were] not linked to Stalin, could bring new approaches and attitudes" to the USSR. In the end, the two scholars depicted the Soviet Union schizophrenically, as being powerful but also weak. Tensions would continue between the USSR and its adversaries, they noted; the Red Army would stay in Afghanistan until it had "stabilized a pro-Soviet government in Kabul." In addition, there would be "no lack of upheavals" in other Third World countries; the USSR was "determinfed] to have a voice in the resolution of major conflicts anywhere in the world with a decisive voice in regions close to Soviet borders." Indeed, "Soviet power today [was] greater in a relative and an absolute sense than at any other time in history." Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was "a considerably weaker power" economically, Nogee and Donaldson admitted, and "the gap is even greater when the strengths of both alliances" are compared. Political Cultural-Historicist Literature The political cultural-historicist outlook gained mainstream acceptance in American Sovietology during the 1978-1981 period, in no small measure because of the new neoconservative mood that swept through the United States. This mood fed on lingering dissatisfaction over the Watergate scandal and on frustration with the Nixon-Kissinger detente policies and Washington's alleged condominium with Communist countries. Equally, the new neoconservatism was aggravated by continuing bitterness over the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the 1975 fall of Saigon. The Vietnam syndrome—a pervasive sense that U.S. foreign policy was adrift and that America had suddenly become weak and could be pushed around by small Third World countries—culminated in the tragicomedy of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1980. The insult of the botched 1980 rescue attempt, added to the injury of the hostage impasse itself, fostered a sense of helplessness in Washington and came to symbolize everything that was wrong with America in the 1970s. Finally, the new neoconservative temper was facilitated by Jimmy Carter's tactical rightward shift in foreign policy during the same period—a virtual admission that the conciliatory Soviet policies of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had failed and that what was needed now was the tougher, more visceral "we'remad-as-hell-and-we're-not-going-to-take-it-any-more" anti-Sovietism of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Reinforcing this new determination to "get tough on Moscow," Carter ordered up a massive U.S. military

Sovietology in a Funk

111

buildup. Carter's conversion to the right did not get him reelected—perhaps not even a successful hostage rescue effort could have done that—but he was succeeded in 1981 by Ronald Reagan, who was a real neoconservative. Under Reagan, the new rightward political mood, Carter's military buildup, and Washington's virulent anti-Sovietism all continued unabated. According to senior Congressional aide Jay Winik, since the early 1970s, cold war liberals and former liberals turned neoconservatives—identified predominantly with the realist and political cultural-historicist schools of American Sovietology—have "had a greater hand in shaping the ideological underpinnings and execution of [Washington's Soviet] policy than any other [U.S. political] group."35 By and large, these scholars were quick to criticize American foreign policy for mirror-imaging the USSR, that is, for viewing the Soviet enemy as a slightly different version of the United States, and thereby excusing away Moscow's bad behavior. If Sovietological tradition and the majority of American Soviet experts before the 1970s were prompted by a fundamental desire to understand the USSR, to find common ground with the Soviet leaders, and to engage in a constructive dialogue with Moscow about East-West differences, most neoconservative and political cultural-historicist Soviet experts of the 1978— 1981 period wanted nothing to do with such naively optimistic exercises in "appeasement." Indeed, their reflexive antipathy toward the USSR, as well as the political Zeitgeist of the late 1970s, prompted many of these scholars to view the Soviet leaders in a harsh, Manichaean light, as monstrous and wholly different from Americans and unable to communicate productively with Washington. Analogously, most political cultural-historicist scholars of the late 1970s and early 1980s were deeply pessimistic regarding Soviet change. Thus, in 1978, the neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger (CPD)—which included Ronald Reagan as a member—argued in a brochure entitled, "What is the Soviet Union Up To?" that the USSR was "radically different from our society. It is organized on different principles and driven by different motives." Those who "failfed] to understand these differences and to take them seriously" endangered democracy itself. The CPD brochure added that while most Americans naturally wanted "to think of others as being like ourselves and likely to behave as we would under similar circumstances," such "'mirror-imaging' [led] many Americans to ignore [or] underestimate the Soviet challenge."36 But the CPD argument that the USSR was "radically different" from the United States implied that the two systems were incommensurable. That is, if the Soviet Union was as different from the United States as the CPD claimed, then Washington would not be able to communicate at all with Moscow, and American scholars could not learn anything about the USSR; indeed, CPD adherents themselves could not possibly know "what the Soviet Union was up to." In addition, the CPD's admission that "the Soviet Union [could] only with difficulty support its population," grow its own food, extract its "mineral resources," or create an adequate "transportation network" painted its members into a logical corner: if the USSR could "only with difficulty support its population," then how could it threaten the U.S., militarily or otherwise? The CPD

112

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

brochure tried to circle the square by arguing that the United States' current lead "in both productive capacity and weapons technology, may not last forever" and that "the U.S.S.R. [could] within several years achieve strategic superiority over the United States," but this explanation was unpersuasive. The CPD statement rejected the old orthodox chestnut that Moscow had a "blueprint for [world] domination," but it only rejected the blueprint; it continued to embrace the old totalitarianism-model idea that "the Soviet elite exercise^] total control of the country's political institutions, economic resources and media," and "pursue[d its] objectives in an organized and decisive manner, taking advantage of every opportunity to enhance its power in the world." Likening post-1945 Soviet militarization to "Nazi Germany's rearmament in the 1930s," the CPD condemned the SALT I agreement and detente for having "no effect on the Soviet buildup." In essential agreement with the CPD's claims, scholar Peter Reddaway adopted a pessimistic line regarding the possibility of systemic Soviet reform. Dissent in the USSR was growing, he noted, because the Kremlin leaders, who were fearful of change, were suppressing "political, cultural, and religious freedom." Consequently, "authority is gradually ebbing away from the regime, which derives legitimacy neither from elections, which are not free, nor from the official ideology, which is dead, nor from the national church, which it harasses," but "from the inertia of its subjects and from a lightly disguised appeal to Russian nationalism."37 Although the Soviet leaders resisted change, reform was probably an inevitable process, Reddaway admitted, if only because "the Soviet system cannot remain immune forever from the pace of change." The scholar called for western economic and political intervention—"forcing the Politbureau to face up to its profound internal problems and come to terms with its own people"—as the "best hope for a peaceful evolution of Soviet society." Similarly, University of Massachusetts scholar Marshall S. Shatz argued presciently that Soviet dissidents and citizens were unable "by themselves to force any major liberalization" on the USSR. "If the Russian past, from Peter the Great to Khrushchev, is any guide to its future," Shatz noted, "fundamental reforms will come not from below but from above, on the initiative of the state." Indeed, it would take "a major external crisis, an economic catastrophe, [or] a succession struggle [for] the Soviet rulers to implement far-reaching changes." Shatz doubted whether the leaders "would respond effectively to such a challenge," let alone initiate wholesale reforms, but he emphasized that no transformation could come about without their involvement. At the same time, the scholar conceded that if there was a crisis, popular pressure for change "could be a highly significant factor" in bringing about systemic reform.38 Shatz's argument was one of the few from a political cultural-historicist perspective that seemed to anticipate the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1981, Richard Pipes brought together a number of his old journal articles, dating from 1970 to 1980. The publisher's blurb inside the front cover of U.S.Soviet Relations in the Era of Detente traced the unifying theme of these writings. Americans, it said, saw peace as a "normal" geopolitical condition, "occa-

Sovietology in a Funk

113

sionally interrupted by war, which should be ended quickly [in order] to return to 'normalcy.'" But Pipes believed that Moscow viewed "peace [as] an interlude between wars, a time to [re]arm for the next [conflict]." In his preface, the Harvard University historian argued that militarism was inherent "in Russian Communism."39 Thus, while Americans saw nuclear weapons as "a nightmare," the Soviet leaders perceived them as "an opportunity." Pipes argued that Moscow's "detente strategy" consisted of two simultaneous efforts. First, the USSR sought the abandonment of "dangerous confrontations" with the West in favor of "less risky proxy" wars in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Second, the Soviets wanted to prepare for World War III by initiating "a major rearmament program." To do this, they would "projec[t] a peaceful image" to lull the West while "moderniz[ing their] military" capability. Moscow was more interested in aggravating hostilities with the West than in undergoing peaceful domestic change, Pipes noted. This argument was fundamental to the Harvard historian's sensational 1977 claim that the Soviet Union thought "it could fight and win a nuclear war" against the United States. The Soviets probably did not want to fight a nuclear war, Pipes admitted, but if EastWest tensions escalated and war became unavoidable, Moscow would try to prevail—most likely by launching "a devastating preemptive strike."40 In 1976, Pipes argued that Washington had "consistently underestimated [Moscow's] willingness and ability to [fund] a large and [modern] military establishment."41 Continuing this discussion in a 1980 essay, the scholar acknowledged the paradox of a military superpower that was economically weak, but he rejected the notion that the Red Army was significantly constrained by Moscow's economic problems. If it seemed inconceivable that a country with the low living standards of the USSR could seriously threaten the West, Pipes reminded his readers that economic robustness and "technical inventiveness do not [automatically translate into] military might unless they are harnessed in the service of defense."42 Thus, the USSR's low living standards did not reflect Moscow's "incapacity but rather [its] deliberate diversion of industrial resources" to military priorities; Moscow could pour into "the defense sector manpower and resources in [whatever] quantities required, and let consumers] fend for [themselves]." In retrospect, of course, the Harvard historian's argument was inadequate; the USSR's economic problems were profound and led to the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991. Pipes characterized the Soviet Union as an adversary that was prompted "by aggressive impulses," that was politically "innovative," and that "selects [its] victims carefully, with long-term objectives in mind." Like Reddaway, the Harvard historian called on the United States to "compel" the Soviets to change, presumably through political and economic—but not military—means. "Only by blunting" its propensity for expansion could the West force Moscow to "give an account of its policies" to the Soviet people, Pipes noted. Whenever previous "Russian governments had suffered serious setbacks abroad they were com-

114

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

pelled to grant the citizenry political rights." Accordingly, "we should help the [Soviet people to] bring [their] government under control," Pipes argued. "A democratic Russia would be less expansionist and easier to live with." Like other realist and political cultural-historicist Soviet experts, journalist Hedrick Smith was disturbed by the USSR's military presence in Angola, Ethiopia, and other undeveloped countries. While Soviet adventurism did "not imply a grand design for world conquest," the journalist nevertheless believed that Moscow's foreign policy was based on "cold, hard decisions to seize upon targets of opportunity, to push out imperially from the Russian heartland, or to extend the Soviet reach as a global power." Smith saw the "invasion" of Afghanistan as shocking, and "different qualitatively from previous Soviet involvements in the Third World," because, first, Soviet troops—not proxies—were engaged; second, the fighting occurred in areas contiguous to the USSR and Europe—not in distant Africa or Asia; and third, the clashes were both intense and prolonged.44 Indeed, for Smith as for other political cultural-historicist and neoconservative scholars, the West's nonplussed response to the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan raised the specter of Munich, and of Neville Chamberlain blithely tapping his walking stick, even as the Wehrmacht proceeded to pick off one European territory after another. Accordingly, these scholars called on Washington to confront and punish Moscow for its aggressive behavior. As we have seen, the neoconservative argument—and to an extent, political cultural-historicism—often featured a dualistic "have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too" view of the USSR as both militarily powerful and vulnerable to U.S. toughness and resoluteness. Thus, in 1981, scholar Robert Emmet Moffit argued that the United States' military advantage over the Soviet Union had vanished and that Soviet power now rivaled American might. So what did Moffit propose to remedy this problem? A U.S. "counterimperialist" policy of confronting Moscow and "neutralizing Soviet [military] power beyond its traditional sphere of influence in Eastern Europe!" The ultimate goal of such a policy should be "the compelling of the [USSR] to abandon [its] global imperial ambitions." Was Moffit serious? Apparently so: In the face of Soviet power, he wanted Washington to "wag[e] the same kind of 'protracted conflict'" against Moscow "that the Soviet empire has adopted toward the [United States] and the West."45 To be sure, Moffit did not advocate a purely military American response—he expected the United States to "employ a combination of economic, political, military and psychological measures" in this undertaking. Still, the scholar did not address the logical dilemma inherent in his argument, namely that if the USSR was so powerful, Washington should try to diminish U.S.-Soviet tensions, not aggravate them. Throughout the period of 1978 through 1981, a number of realist scholars took the neoconservatives and political cultural-historicists to task for demonizing the Soviet Union and its leaders. Thus, policy-maker Paul Warnke rejected both the CPD view that the Soviets were wholly unlike Americans and Pipes's notion that Moscow wanted to "fight and win a nuclear war" as simplistic. In place of such arguments, the former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

Sovietology in a Funk

115

(ACDA) director endorsed a rational actor understanding of Soviet leadership. "No matter how ideological [the Soviets] are, they are not crazy," Warnke noted. "If you hypothesize insanity on the part of your adversary, then deterrence loses [all] meaning." The Soviets "have a very healthy respect for nuclear weapons, and they have a far greater appreciation than any American of the ravages [of] even conventional war."46 Warnke concluded that "crazy statements" originated from "both sides of the Atlantic." Indeed, some of the testimony of Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger, at their 1981 confirmation hearings, seemed to suggest that the United States was preparing to "fight and win a nuclear war" against the USSR! Similarly, scholar William Zimmerman noted pointedly that post-Stalin Soviet foreign policy was qualitatively "different" from Stalinist policy, both in substance and in the manner in which it was conducted. "While elites on each side [still] regardfed] the other side as expansionist, there [was] much less disposition" after Stalin's death "to believe that the other side is bent on destroying its opponent," Zimmerman wrote. Each side now sought to "creat[e] an environment in which the pursuit of narrow 'possessive' interests can be undertaken at less risk." Indeed, "the American-Soviet conflict has become routinized and expressed in ways that were inconceivable" during the Stalin years.47 Moreover, in insisting that Soviet foreign policy lacked moderation, neoconservatives and political cultural-historicists were using value-laden language, Zimmerman argued. Thus, one could "define moderation in such a way as to mean a situation," recalling Walter Lippmann's apt metaphor, "in which Soviet children were born singing 'God Bless America.'" In the 1970s, some critics of detente seemed to have exactly this extreme definition in mind when they condemned the USSR for failing to moderate its policies. Rejecting the arguments of Hedrick Smith and other political culturalhistoricist scholars who viewed the Red Army's incursion into Afghanistan as an act of geopolitical barbarism, and on that basis proclaimed that detente was finally and completely revoked, Raymond L. Garthoff insisted that even an imperfect Soviet-American agreement was "vastly preferable to a relationship [of] confrontation, tension, and misunderstanding." Indeed, "a rise in tensions" should not "eclipse" the need to reduce hostilities; rather, while making "the task of detente more difficult, it also makes it more necessary." Garthoff rejected the notion that Soviet foreign policy was barbaric or imperialistic. "The overriding Soviet aim" of putting troops into Kabul, he noted, "was to prevent the collapse or defection of [Moscow's] Afghan satellite and its replacement by an unstable, hostile, regime."48 In retrospect, the fundamental disagreements between Pipes and Smith and their critics demonstrated how easy it was for Soviet experts to misperceive seemingly obvious historical evidence and talk past each other. Not only were American scholars and policy makers demonizing the Soviets; they were also attacking each other. Thus, political cultural-historicists argued that the evidence of Soviet change cited by pluralist Sovietologists was trivial and superficial. In turn, realists and pluralists responded that the examples of Soviet stub-

116

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

bornness and Russian continuity cited by political cultural-histotoricist Sovietologists were more the product of Manichaean assumptions and totalitarianismmodel thinking than of an objective analysis of Soviet political and economic data. Pluralist Literature During the 1978-1981 period, American pluralist Sovietology was dominated by two major works by Jerry F. Hough—How the Soviet Union Is Governed (1979), and Soviet Leadership in Transition (1980). These writings, and three Hough essays of the same period, were examined in Chapter 2. Pluralist scholars like Jerry F. Hough rejected both the pessimism of the political cultural-historicist school and the extreme determinism of the Russian cultural continuity argument. They insisted that while it was important to be aware of Russia's historical tradition and unique geopolitical legacy, the processes of modernization had created new patterns in Soviet society with marked resemblance to much of the developed world. If Russia's political culture and history had left deep imprints on contemporary Soviet institutions, pluralist Sovietologists were quick to point out that much that was left of "Russian tradition" was merely the remnant of a vanishing peasant culture, which itself had more in common with other peasant cultures throughout the world than with the modern Soviet state. The changes wrought by urbanization, industrialization, and universal secondary education were etched far more deeply in the USSR than were these increasingly faint residues of the past. In addition, some pluralists claimed—perhaps illogically, in light of their rejection of cultural continuity arguments—that there had always existed in Russia a fundamental reformist tradition that carried over into the Soviet period. Indeed, these scholars argued that some of the early Bolsheviks were themselves democrats in thought, if not always in deed, and that even Stalinism contained certain democratic features, such as the ideal of upward social mobility for workers. By and large, pluralist Sovietologists in the years from 1978 through 1981 were outnumbered and their voices drowned out by their boisterous neoconservative colleagues. The pluralists, in turn, saw the neoconservative movement— and political cultural-historicism itself—not as a legitimate political response to Soviet foreign and domestic policies, or to new geopolitical realities, but as an emotional reaction to events and changes occurring within the U.S. and in American politics. They knew that the Brezhnev leadership was aging, and they understood that Moscow faced many challenges, but they did not see the Soviet leaders as ruthless, anti-American, or opposed to reform. More significant than the economic and political dilemmas the Soviet Union faced were its manifold strengths, they noted. Reflecting a pluralist understanding, Benson L. Grayson acknowledged in 1978 that Americans' image of the Soviet Union had "changed often." Early in U.S. history, "Russia was considered a distant but potentially friendly power that

Sovietology in a Funk

117

might provide support against Great Britain." By 1900, "relations with Russia cooled, as a result of [friendlier] attitudes toward Britain, and increased distaste for [Tsarist] authoritarianism." Finally, after "a brief honeymoon in relations between the establishment of the liberal Russian Provisional Government in March 1917 and its overthrow by the Bolsheviks eight months later," Washington "came to regard [the USSR] as a threat to democratic institutions" and to global peace.49 Grayson's overview of U.S.-Soviet relations suggests that something other than Soviet international behavior or ideology—perhaps something in the U.S. character and foreign policy-making ethos itself—was responsible for these pendulum swings in America's Soviet policy. Grayson saw upturns in Washington's view of the USSR occurring whenever the United States faced serious domestic crises, such as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, which prompted U.S. business interests to regard the Soviet Union as a large and potentially lucrative market for expanded trade; whenever American and Soviet security or economic interests were threatened by a major international crisis, as in World War II; whenever a U.S.-Soviet crisis or spiraling arms race compelled both sides to seek a cooling-off period, as in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis and in the detente era of the early 1970s; and whenever reformist leaderships came to power, as in the Khrushchev, Andropov, and Gorbachev eras. Downturns in U.S. perceptions of the Soviet Union occurred, generally, whenever the above conditions did not exist and whenever Washington viewed Soviet behavior as barbaric or threatening, as after the deaths of millions of peasants in the collectivization campaign and the purges of the 1930s became known, or when Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan in December 1979. Alexander Dallin noted several "genuine developments in Soviet society— affecting attitudes and values—which [were] largely autonomous of the authorities." This meant that "changes [did] occur and [would] continue to occur" in the USSR; "the widespread myth of immutable Russian attitudes and behavior [revealed] more about our [own misperceptions] than about present realities." The Sovietologist rejected both the idea that Kremlin policy was "impervious to domestic needs" and criticism and the opposite notion that open dissent in the Soviet Union was "only the tip of a political iceberg" that would bring the USSR to the point of "disintegration."50 Sovietologist Vojtech Mastny rejected both the revisionist theory that the United States was responsible for the Cold War and the orthodox western argument that Stalin started the Cold War out of a "master plan to rule the world." Mastny's middle course saw Stalin as "the principal player, but more as a slave to the Soviet political system than as its master." Stalin "subordinated the interests of the international proletarian revolution to those of the state," and he revised his "diplomatic and military strategy with every shift of Russian fortunes." Thus, Mastny believed that most U.S. assumptions about Stalin's "grand strategy"—his alleged "determination to regain" territories lost in the pact with Hitler, his supposed "quest [to divide] Europe into spheres of influence," and the notion that he wanted "to establish dependent regimes in neighboring coun-

118

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

tries"—were incorrect. "Behind the formidable facade of Stalinism, there loomed inefficiency, opportunism, and drift. Yet never did the totalitarian ideal of a fully regimented body politic come closer" to fruition than in Stalinist Russia. In connecting Stalin's World War II policies to the start of the Cold War, Mastny drew some pointed conclusions about the modern Soviet regime. "In both absolute terms and in relation to the West, the power [of] Soviet leaders today [was] dramatically superior to Stalin's" power, he observed. But in their exercise of power, modern leaders were "significantly more restricted" than Stalin. No postwar leader "has approximated the dead tyrant in his sheer wickedness. Unable to match [Stalin's] authority," today's leaders were "more susceptible to diverse pressure. Under their guardianship the Soviet Union has, for all its abominations, grown more human and responsive to change."51 In short, Moscow was capable of real learning. The "obvious lessons of the Cold War" for the USSR included "the cost of underestimating adversaries, the burden of [maintaining] empire, and the ultimate futility of repression," Mastny concluded. Similarly, in a review article, George Washington University Sovietologist Carl A. Linden praised Roy and Zhores Medvedev's depiction of Khrushchev as a "radical innovator and reformer" who redefined the role of the CPSU "not just in agriculture but across the whole spectrum of policy, [including the inner structure of the party itself." But Linden criticized the Medvedevs for not giving enough attention to the political—as against the technical and economic— complexity of the task that Khrushchev set for himself. Their suggestion that agriculture was the primary cause, rather than an important contributing factor, of Khrushchev's downfall was not wholly convincing, since the Soviet leader's "reforms arose logically from and capped all of [his] earlier innovations]—his de-Stalinizations, decentralizations, his varied attempts at loosening up the Soviet system." Indeed, Khrushchev's latter "reforms simply brought to a head the classic dilemma of all political reformers, namely, how to consolidate reform before the forces opposing change [can] gather and defeat it." In missing the political dimension of Khrushchev's downfall, the Medvedevs "praise Khrushchev's good intentions but damn him as a bungler," said Linden. Such a conclusion wrongly "depreciates Khrushchev's Sysyphean labors, political skill, intelligence and energy with which he pursued renovation for eleven years before he finally succumbed to massive odds."52 Indeed, Khrushchev "deserves credit for a titanic attempt and a magnificent failure" that continued to influence the USSR toward political and economic reform in the 1970s and 1980s. Recalling the 1964 Khrushchev succession, scholar Donald R. Kelley argued that Brezhnev's "trust in cadres" policy had been instituted in response to a specific need—the demoralization and career uncertainty of party members following Khrushchev's upheaval of the Soviet leadership and his subsequent forced retirement. Brezhnev's new policy "assured middle level party personnel that their prerogatives would be respected, and that their careers would be secure," Kelley maintained. Accordingly, American scholars should not have interpreted the "deliberate and cautious style" of Khrushchev's successors as "innate conservatism" or "immobilism"; rather, Brezhnev demonstrated "a consistent re-

Sovietology in a Funk

119

formist tendency" in ordering "economic and administrative reforms" and in modernizing "the party's leading role."53 Indeed, the Soviet leader's "cautious, partly conservative, partly reformist style," and his ability to act as a "'broker' among competing factions," were responsible for "his continued dominance, despite [his] recurring illness." Kelley believed that the USSR had retained many of the pluralistic features that Jerry F. Hough described in his writings, but he also noted that the Soviet Union was resistant to change. "Quite independently of Brezhnev's dominance" over the state and party, the scholar argued, "the evolution of the Politburo into a shadow cabinet" and "the development of'corporatist' politics" have produced a "stalemate" that no one was able to overcome. Adding insult to injury, Kelley noted "the inherent ability of bureaucracies] to resist change." The "problems of control, coordination, and leadership [were] endemic" in all complex organizations, including the USSR; "skilled bureaucratic entrepreneurs, while professing adherence to reforms" and appearing to be "productiv[e], simply found ways of doing business as usual."54 Many found it "easier to change the goals and policies of party and state activity than to change deeply ingrained procedures and work styles." Like Linden and Kelley, Princeton University Sovietologist Robert C. Tucker took a cautious approach on Soviet change. The Soviet economy was characterized by a kind of "supermonopoly capitalism," he wrote; the USSR was a "gigantic conglomerate incorporating industries and other state-controlled activity, under unified management at the Politburo level." But despite its imposing industrial and military institutions, the Soviet system was "a spent society"—it was culturally and "historically played out because [its] belief system has lost its meaning. The rulers wield[ed] power in order to wield power."55 Change was inevitable after Stalin's death, Tucker argued, yet the post-Stalin leaders "were divided over how far and fast it should proceed, in what directions, and who should preside over it." Khrushchev knew that Stalin had "bequeathed to Soviet society" a "widespread failure of belief and that the system would not work "unless belief was rekindled in the minds of citizens." Moreover, "after decades of privation accompanied by promises of future bliss, the [Soviet] people [had to see] that the econom[y] could be made to work for their welfare, and soon," the Princeton scholar noted. "In a literal sense it was time to deliver the goods." Khrushchev wanted to reverse Stalin's policy priorities away from war preparation and defense spending to "competitive coexistence" and consumer needs, Tucker wrote. But like Linden (and quite unlike Hough and Cohen), the Princeton University Sovietologist saw Brezhnev's rise to power as a virtual foreclosure of reform. "If Khrushchev had the reform impulse without a coherent overall design, his successors lacked the impulse," he noted. "They restored [Stalinism], minus the autocracy and police supremacy"; "they undid Khrushchev's innovations and reestablished the centralized economic ministries."56 Under Brezhnev, the nomenklatura "could, finally, breathe easily, [since] the new [rulers] would be protective of its interests."

120

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

According to Tucker, Khrushchev's departure "led to a resumption" of Soviet militarism; in effect, if Brezhnev could not overtake the United States in producing meat, milk, and butter, he would do so with tanks, missiles, and warheads. But this new policy would leave fewer resources for the civilian economy and a diminished hope of improved conditions. Thus, Tucker saw detente in a perverse light: Whereas "Khrushchev sought accommodation with the West in order to economize on military [spending], Brezhnev [did] so for the opposite reason—to provide more for the population without skimping" on defense or "making fundamental changes in the Soviet system." Above all, said the Princeton Sovietologist, Brezhnev needed detente to ensure "the regular flow of American grain to Russia." Tucker weighed the Soviet Union's economic strengths and weaknesses, and he found the weaknesses to be dominant. While the USSR was "second only to the United States in gross national product" and was a world leader in the harvesting of its natural resources and in the production of steel, cement, aerospace technology, and armaments, its citizens were "lean" and did not enjoy "a decent standard of living"; agriculture could not "feed the country." Tucker refused to attribute the worsening food situation to a single cause, but he viewed "state-run agriculture" as "a legacy of Stalin's reenserfment of the peasantry by brute terror" and "an unmitigated disaster." The Princeton University Sovietologist saw other problems in the consumer sector—including graft, corruption, the shortage and "shoddy quality" of factory-produced goods, and the vitality of the second economy—and he concluded that Soviet citizens were "underfed, underhoused, and under-almost-everything except underruled, underpoliced, and underpropagandized." Tucker took sharp issue with Seweryn Bialer's euphoric claim in 1981 that the Soviet standard of living and consumer economy had risen in the early Brezhnev years "in an uninterrupted upward trend." The truth was, he noted, that any gain in the "supply of durable goods is counterbalanced by the serious deterioration in the central element of Soviet living standards—food supply."57 If there was a bright spot in Tucker's analysis, it was in the fact that he saw, "in the middle rungs of the Soviet establishment, an emergent middle class of factory directors and others" who recognized that the system had "reached an impasse" and that fundamental innovation was urgently needed. Such change would be "peaceful [and] evolutionary, not an upheaval," Tucker indicated. "Given [Soviet] historical traditions and political culture," it would be triggered by "strong political leadership from above." Borrowing a political culturalhistoricist argument from Marshall S. Shatz, Tucker insisted that change "from below" would not last: "[T]he one part of the Soviet system that truly works efficiently is the police and the military which cannot make the system perform well but can keep it from being changed." Thus, the regime would block its own reform—unless that reform comes "from above." Tucker believed that change would not be introduced by "the aging [Brezhnev] oligarchy." For that matter, it was uncertain whether it would "emerge when new leaders take over in the not distant future, but we should not rule it out as unthinkable."

Sovietology in a Funk

121

CONCLUSION: WHEN SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL, USE A LONG SPOON In 1979, the world was rocked concurrently by two international hostage crises. One crisis occurred in Iran and dramatized the demands of an Islamic fundamentalist resurgence that condemned the United States as a "great Satan" and threatened to destabilize the Middle East and the international order. The other crisis took place in the United States and pointed to an ideological resurgence by the American right that demonized the Soviet Union and threatened to undo U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Events in Teheran received most of the attention throughout 1979 and 1980, but the neoconservative revolution—and the way American Sovietology was taken hostage by the new right—may well be remembered by future political scholars as the more significant event. It is the thesis of this chapter that most American scholars, of all Sovietological persuasions, were taken captive during the 1978-1981 period by an elemental pessimism concerning the possibility of Soviet change. Thus, even Russian Labor Party leader and democratic socialist Boris Kagarlitsky recalled how most "western observers" viewed "Soviet society at the end of the 1970s [as] hopelessly conservative" and talked about "the unreformability of Communism." Worse, "there seemed no prospects for the future of the country other than an expectation of slow decay."58 But the truth was far different, Kagarlitsky noted; "Soviet [politics and] society [were] never as monolithic as [they] were presented" by Soviet Stalinists and American political cultural-historicists who oddly agreed on this one point—that the USSR was unreformable. Indeed, "numerous interest groups within the apparatus of power, have always exerted influence on decision making and engendered a variety of conflicts." A number of interesting patterns can be traced throughout the Sovietological literature of this period. Most political cultural-historicists and some hard realist scholars of the 1978-1981 period cited various demographic shifts, the outbreak of ethnonationalism, increased citizen influence on policy, and slowed economic growth to suggest that Soviet reform was unlikely. Conversely, most pluralist Sovietologists and soft realists believed that there existed within the USSR a fundamentally reformist political and cultural tradition and argued that such social and political phenomena as modernization, polycentrism, and Moscow's restrained crisis management style strongly pointed to the possibility of systemic change. Similarly, while few Sovietological works written before 1974 identified problems in the Soviet economy, most of the Soviet experts who wrote during the 1978-1981 years devoted significant attention to Moscow's glaring economic difficulties, and many realist scholars saw the USSR's lowered living standards and consumption rates as ominous indications that the Soviet Union needed to change. Conversely, a few political cultural-historicist and pluralist Sovietologists were untroubled by Moscow's economic problems, albeit for different reasons. Some political cultural-historicist scholars assumed that Moscow's stagnant economy would not constrain Soviet defense spending or impel the Kremlin to give up its Eastern European empire, while pluralists believed

122

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

that the USSR was reformative in character and resilient enough to weather its economic troubles. Scholars of all Sovietological schools cited geopolitical events and Soviet military readiness to support their respective positions, but pluralists and soft realists saw detente as the dominant international reality of the 1970s. Many of these Sovietologists believed that Soviet adventurism was constrained by Moscow's economic weakness and that substantive reforms were both possible and likely. Meanwhile, political cultural-historicists and hard realist Soviet experts downplayed the significance of detente and emphasized other geopolitical events, like the crackdown on the Prague Spring and USSR "adventurism" in the Third World, to suggest that Soviet change was unlikely. Some of these scholars argued that the USSR could sustain almost any military burden, despite its economic troubles. Fewer, but a still substantial number of scholars saw ethnonationalism as a growing concern. Some hard realists and political cultural-historicist Sovietologists predicted that Soviet nationalistic tensions would lead, eventually, to political dissolution. Other soft realist and pluralist Soviet experts thought that the strains of ethnonationalism, while substantial, would be endured, and that the USSR would survive intact. Indeed, Jerry F. Hough believed that ethnonationalism—short of leading to a Soviet collapse—would facilitate the process of pluralism and hasten political transformation. Scholars were similarly divided on Soviet reform. While many scholars embraced the new neoconservative mood, a number of realists were willing to entertain the possibility of political, social, and economic change occurring in the USSR. Thus, Michael Mandelbaum noted, in 1979, that the peaceful resolution of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis "was an example, albeit [an] unorthodox one, of successful nuclear diplomacy."59 Mandelbaum's clear implication was that Soviet reform and learning were possible. As a whole, pluralists and soft realists viewed Soviet change as likely and saw the Soviet system as both legitimate and resilient. But political cultural-historicist and hard realist Sovietologists, predictably, took opposite positions on these questions. Even so, no Sovietological school anticipated a political or economic collapse. In light of the scholarly literature we have examined in this chapter, we may conclude that American Soviet experts were not particularly quick to abandon totalitarianism-model thinking. As the 1960s rolled into the 1970s and 1980s, Sovietologists did not get better at anticipating fundamental improvements in Soviet political and economic conditions. Indeed, there was little or no correlation between the passage of time, the discovery of new scholarly data about the USSR, or the occurrence of significant events in Soviet foreign and domestic policy and the development of an American Sovietological consensus that reform was possible in the USSR. Rather, other factors, like the dominant paradigms of scholars and the cooptative influence of the American Cold War consensus, seemed to determine Sovietological attitudes about the possibility of Soviet change.

Sovietology in a Funk

123

The Cold War on Main Street and on Campus Why did so many American scholars fail to anticipate the possibility of Soviet reform during the 1978-through-1981 years? Much of the answer has to do with the extraordinary influence of the Cold War consensus in American society and on university campuses. The Cold War and its attendant mood of anti-Sovietism touched every aspect of American life during the mid-to-late twentieth century. According to Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, Washington's global struggle against the USSR brought great changes and significant benefits to the United States, including the development of atomic energy, aeronautics and space exploration, and the construction of the interstate highway system. Because of the Cold War, the federal government called whole industries into existence and quickened innovation in science and math education.60 America's military rivalry with the Soviet Union also led to such advances as the G.I. Bill and racial integration in the armed forces and within society. The Cold War was good for business and good for the U.S. economy, noted William H. McNeill, emeritus professor of history at the University of Chicago: "[T]he arms race with the Soviet Union allowed diluted forms of deliberate management of the American economy, which had worked wonders between 1941 and 1945, to continue indefinitely in peacetime. During World War II," the federal government applied "rationing and high-handed and unpopular political intervention in the marketplace; but in the postwar period, arms expenditure^] and the manipulation of tax and interest rates" led to "a long period of prosperity." Perhaps "a different basis for American prosperity could have been devised," McNeill concluded—"but in fact, it was the arms race with the Russians that provided the political stimulus for [a] remarkably effective political management of the economy" throughout the Cold War period.61 McNeill did not suggest that the Cold War was invented in Washington as a way to justify direct government intervention in the U.S. economy or to bring about other domestic benefits; East-West tensions were based on genuine differences between the Communist Bloc and the western democracies. Yet the intense U.S.-Soviet rivalry quickly became the backdrop, and provided the opportunity, for a vital national economic policy. Indeed, Rutgers University scholars Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken were not wrong when they noted that "since the Depression, preparing for warfare has been a permanent and potent American preoccupation." The economic benefits of military spending were incalculable: billions of Pentagon dollars were pumped into local economies, and hundreds of thousands of new defense jobs were created. But the down side of this economic robustness was that the Cold War and the industries it supported became a habit that was hard to break. Over the decades, entire American "communities [and] cities became increasingly defense-dependent."62 According to New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman, virtually

124

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

every U.S. government department and agency participated in the forty-fiveyear struggle against Soviet communism. In addition to the Department of Defense, the State Department, and various intelligence agencies, other organizational players, such as the Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, the Department of Agriculture, the Export Administration of the Commerce Department, the Information Security Oversight Office of the General Services Administration, and the Energy Department, helped coordinate various domestic Cold War activities and provided international assistance to countries in "areas of Cold War contention." Indeed, "throughout the Cold War, antiSoviet sentiment was the engine that drove America's domestic policy," Friedman said.63 The Cold War seduced Americans with its predictability and order, argued Catholic University scholar John Kenneth White. This was just as President Eisenhower had warned in his prescient January 17, 1961 farewell address, concerning the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Over time, Americans "became comfortable with the Cold War," White noted, "comfortable with our enemies, [and] comfortable with the government [and politics] it created." Citing a 1989 Gallup Poll in which 52 percent of all respondents blamed Communist infiltrators "for a lot of the unrest in the United States today," White concluded that "up to the Cold War's abrupt end Americans continued to believe" that Moscow was responsible for many of America's problems.64 A number of prominent Sovietologists drew a firm connection between the Cold War and U.S. militarism and anti-Soviet attitudes. George F. Kennan believed that Soviet-American tensions were fueled by a Cold War consensus and by other "formidable interests in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union that prospered" because of the East-West competition and did not want a thaw to break out.65 Similarly, Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley saw the Cold War as "a major organizing principle of American life." Soviet "weaknesses and hesitations made little impression" on Washington, Robert V. Daniels added: "[0]nce on the path of confrontation," the United States found the Cold War to be "convenient."66 Robert W. Tucker of Johns Hopkins University agreed: "[A]n entire worldview was conditioned by the great conflict that dominated the postwar period," he wrote. "Such was the pervasive influence of the Cold War."67 Analogously, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations admitted in 1984 that the American "military establishment depend[ed] upon building up fears of [a] Soviet threat." In "stressing the danger of the Communist menace," the Pentagon "presented] images of the Soviets which reflected its] own interests."68 Not surprisingly, the Cold War's influence was felt on campus. In his 1987 study of the intertwined relationship between American academia and the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]), Robin Winks recalled how easy it was at the end of World War II for Washington and the universities to turn their residual animus against Germany and Japan into a stark anti-Sovietism. "Nearly everyone thought there was going to be trouble with the Russians," Winks noted, "and

Sovietology in a Funk

125

many [scholars] simply redirected the focus of their research. The tone of urgency that had pervaded the campus" in the 1940s "was in no way stilled." Thus by 1950, a broad cross section of American colleges and universities was engaged in national security work. No one worried much "that a professor who acted as a [CIA] contact point might be engaged in a conflict of interest," Winks added. "The urgencies of the wartime campus simply extended into the Cold War."69 This pattern continued for several decades (with only slight interruption in the early 1970s, stemming from the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and lingering antigovernment sentiments on many campuses). While some scholars were quick to recognize the inherent dangers in these university-government ties, others were not. Well into the 1970s and 1980s, a virtual revolving door existed between government service and the university, and many Soviet experts rotated between various government departments and agencies, the classroom, and the university Russian research center throughout their professional careers. In retrospect, it is easy to understand why so many Cold-War-era scholars were seduced by the prospect of government contacts and employment. Quite simply, they wanted to be where the action was, and they wanted to influence the highest echelons of government. Such enticements were hard to resist, but they often led to disastrous policy choices. Thus, Louis Halle explained in a May 3, 1961 letter to Walter Lippmann how President Kennedy could have allowed the flawed Bay of Pigs operation to proceed, despite the presence on his staff of such eminent scholars as McGeorge Bundy, Eugene Rostow, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: "I can imagine how the President got such bad advice from such good advisers," Halle wrote. "The decision on which they were asked to advise was presented as a choice between action and inaction," and "none of the President's advisers" wanted his colleagues to think "that he loses his nerve when the going gets hot." Halle added that "the Harvard intellectuals [were] especially vulnerable," because they were "new on the scene," and they knew "that the tough-minded military suspect[ed] them of being soft-headed. They ha[d] to show that they [we]re he-men too, that they c[ould] act as well as lecture."70 This same dynamic was in play in the late 1960s, as Lyndon Johnson's military and political braintrust (dubbed "the best and the brightest" by David Halberstam) found itself unable either to win or to abandon the Vietnam War. Recalling his own participation at a Camp David seminar hosted by President Clinton in 1995, University of Maryland political theorist Benjamin R. Barber noted that "power is an elixir, whether aspired to, possessed, or envied." Proximity to the top echelons of government—the chance to influence the President of the United States—can "intoxicate" even "mature scholars otherwise devoted to the life of the mind." Indeed, "in taking on the powerful," one always "assent[s] to playing power's game on power's terms," Barber noted. "As you take it on, it takes you on, takes your measure." Barber admitted candidly that he was co-opted: "[A]t Camp David, I had already stepped well over the line. I had grasped the insider's cup and, sip by sip, was draining it."71 According to Louis Menand of the City University of New York, "[T]he

126

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Cold War was very good for universities. From 1940 to 1990, government funding to research universities increased by a factor of twenty-five."72 Former Stanford University president Donald Kennedy added that this "huge windfall came" as Washington "relocate[d] the elaborate machinery for supporting military science" to the campus. "Federal agencies with a mission orientation," such as the CIA, the State Department, and the Department of Defense, routinely tried "to move researchers toward their goals by supporting particular lines" of scholarship. Such inducements were all too effective, Kennedy noted: "[S]ome scholars scan[ned] the available opportunities and selected] one that coincide[d] with their own interests and purposes." Others "alterfed] their own aims to qualify for unusually attractive programs." None of this [was particularly] surprising, in light of the pressure on faculty to keep active and productive." Assistant professors seeking tenure were encouraged to adapt their research "to the requirements of funding sources," while tenured professors "need[ed federal] support to keep large programs afloat."73 As a result of its ties with Washington, the university quickly developed "a new importance in national affairs," wrote David D. Henry, president emeritus of the University of Illinois, and higher education became "an instrument of national policy."74 Government subsidies conferred upon scholars "considerable financial and non-financial rewards," including summer salaries, student assistance, travel funds, and office space and equipment. In short order, American universities and scholars found that they could not function without federal and state aid, added former Harvard University dean Henry Rosovsky. "That mean[t] being owned in some fashion by government."75 To be sure, most government subsidized university research was in "practical" disciplines like the hard sciences, aerospace, and biomedicine; nevertheless, the influence of governmental was never far removed from the political science classroom. There was significant interest in Washington in understanding what the Soviets were up to, and consequently, as policy maker and scholar McGeorge Bundy observed, there was "a big measure of interpenetration between universities with area programs and the information-gathering agencies of the United States." Indeed, a number of graduate-level area studies programs "grew out of the structure of the foreign service, the OSS," and other federal departments and agencies. Many area scholars "received a major boost in their profession, and in their access" to information, "because of the personal contacts, the travel abroad, and the access to [research] materials that their work provided them," while others "published books on subjects close to their [OSS] assignments" after leaving government service.76 If academia benefited from government funding, the devil was in the details. As John Kenneth White recalls, postwar Washington quickly imposed "a loyalty oath provision" on universities, "requiring recipients of federal dollars to pledge that they did not belong to, or support any 'subversive organization.'" Those scholars who sympathized with such causes were fired. Thus, federal funding of university research effectively became wed to the maintenance of an anticommunist and anti-Soviet point of view.77

Sovietology in a Funk

127

Most colleges and universities were only too happy to comply with these new requirements. Indeed, whether the campus-wide anticommunist fervor and loyalty oath campaigns were the result of a coherent national security policy or merely reflected the opportunism and cowardice of college administrators and boards of trustees, the easy facility with which academia accommodated itself to the demands of the state was both extraordinary and troubling. The American Association of Universities responded to the new tensions with Stalin by asserting that the main threat to academic freedom was "worldwide Communism." The effect of McCarthyism on colleges and universities was dramatic, Henry noted: "[A]fter much soul-searching, consensus developed" among administrators "that the Communist Party was a conspiracy rather than a political party, and that no card-carrying member of the party should be employed by a college or university."78 In such an environment, "normal faculty activities were disrupted," Henry wrote with considerable understatement. The new mood prompted "caution among colleagues, impaired relationships with students," new constraints on faculty members' extracurricular political activities, "and the endangered self-respect of the professor." Many professors "felt intimidated" and/or "deterred by fear of attack and harm to their careers that might result from a free expression of their views."79 Robin Wilson and Ana Marie Cox of The Chronicle of Higher Education add that throughout "the red scare of the 1950s and during the Vietnam War, tenured professors were dismissed and even jailed for espousing views many considered antiAmerican."80 Admittedly, the virulent McCarthy campaigns of the early 1950s and the political controversy ignited by the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s were unique and limited phenomena in American history. Nevertheless, anticommunism became a kind of political and cultural touchstone in America, and as such, it has had a profound and lasting impact on academia. Its lessons were deeply etched in scholars' collective consciousness: you can't be too careful; political activism is risky; the state can pry into, and severely punish, your political affiliation with the explicit cooperation of the university. Thus, the academy's commitment to freedom of expression and open intellectual enquiry were among the first casualties of the Cold War. Indeed, Wilson and Cox note the emergence of a new wave of academic hysteria in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. "The notion of the 'marketplace of ideas' notwithstanding, unpopular opinions have never gone down with perfect ease on campuses," they argue. "National crises only exaggerate the American impulse toward antiintellectualism." Thus, "some universities acquiesced," in the days following the attacks, "in the view that objectionable speech should be restricted." In addition, there was renewed pressure to silence faculty members with controversial ideas. Princeton University Sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen was correct in noting that McCarthy's "'loyalty-security' crusade" and "the fervor of anticommunism and Sovietophobia as an official and popular American ideology" had a notably

128

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

perverse impact on Sovietological scholarship. Cohen recalled that throughout the Cold War, academic Sovietologists were required to obtain "security clearances" before they could have their articles published in the prestigious journal, Problems of Communism. Remarkably, this policy remained in effect until 1977! Similarly, any scholar seeking a government job or applying for a federal research grant had to affirm in writing that she was not sympathetic to Communist causes.81 David Caute adds that even "the right to hold a passport," which Sovietologists needed in order to conduct research in the USSR, "was denied to American Communists, sympathizers, and strong critics of the Pax Americana."82 This threat had its desired effect: all but the most politically obdurate of scholars were encouraged to be model citizens; the vast majority cooperated with the government's hyperbolic campaign to root out Communism and identify those with un-American loyalties. Virtually all Sovietologists continued, through the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s, to abide by the various federal, state, and university loyalty oath requirements. This near universal acquiescence, over the span of three decades, to the official Washington line strongly suggests that American Sovietology was co-opted by government. Not unrelatedly, a great many of the Sovietological works that we are examining in these pages, spanning the entire 1974 through 1988 period of this study, contain important discussions on strategic themes, East-West military comparisons, and the intensions and capability of the Red Army. The dominance of such themes in these writings suggests that American scholars were significantly influenced by the militarization of the Cold War. As Jonathan R. Adelman and Deborah Anne Palmieri note in their undergraduate text, both Soviet and American scholarship "tended to portray an adversarial and negative perspective of the other" and to "justify the foreign policy behavior of one country at the expense of the other." There was "little doubt," the two scholars added, "that changes of political climate or the increase of tensions affect[ed] scholarly work." Adelman and Palmieri explained these hostile views in terms of American political culture. Anti-Sovietism and Russophobia had long been influential in U.S. thought, they argued, because of its potent "strain of puritanism which turn[ed] opponents into enemies, enemies into devils, and devils into ugly monsters." Adelman and Palmieri likened this argument to Alexander Dallin's view that a "Communist devil" image was deeply imbedded in the official U.S. view of the Soviet Union.83

NOTES 1. To be sure, most of America's founding fathers were hardly intoxicated by revolutionary fervor. Still, their pessimism was isolationist in temper: it sought the avoidance of entangling alliances with other countries, not the pursuit of global ideological crusades against a single country. By contrast, the U.S. attitude toward the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s was both hostile and militant. 2. Roman Kolkowicz, "The Internal Role of the Soviet Military," in The U.S.S.R. and the Sources of Soviet Policy (Washington D.C: Council on Foreign Relations and Ken-

Sovietology in a Funk

129

nan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1978), p. 38. 3. James Billington, "Soviet Attitudes and Values: Prospects for the Future," in The U.S.S.R. and the Sources, p. 110. 4. Theodore Friedgut, Political Participation in the USSR (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 64, 240, 289, 297, 302, 321. See also Jeffrey W. Hahn, Conceptualizing Political Participation in the USSR: Two Decades of Debate (Washington, D.C: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1984), p. 10. 5. Theodore Friedgut, On the Effectiveness of Participatory Institutions in Soviet Communities (Jerusalem: Soviet and East European Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981), p. 25. 6. Paul Cocks, "Rethinking the Organizational Weapon: The Soviet System in a Systems Age," World Politics 32, no. 2 (January 1980), pp. 231-232, 240-241, 256. 7. Dennis Ross, "Coalition Maintenance in the Soviet Union," World Politics 32, no. 2 (January 1980), pp. 268-271, 274-275, 278-280. 8. Gregory Grossman, "The Domestic Economy," in The U.S.S.R. and the Sources, pp. 62-64. 9. George Feiwel, "Economic Performance and Reforms in the Soviet Union," in Donald R. Kelley, ed., Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980), pp. 74, 101. 10. W. Y. Smith, "Soviet Military Capabilities: Status and Trends," in The U.S.S.R. and the Sources, pp. 46, 51. 11. Marshall D. Shulman in "How Shulman Views Soviet Motives and Strategies," New York Times, April 16, 1978, in Fred A. Sondermann, David S. McLellan, and William C. Olson, The Theory and Practice of International Relations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 149-150. 12. Richard F. Kaufman, Western Perceptions of Soviet Economic Trends: A Staff Study Prepared for the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 2, 4. 13. Ibid., pp. 9-10, 17. 14. Robert Legvold, "The Nature of Soviet Power," in Erik P. Hoffmann and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., eds., The Conduct of Soviet Foreign Policy (New York: Aldine, 1980), pp. 674-675. 15. Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors: Leadership Stability and Change in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 1-3. 16. Ibid., pp. 264-265, 293-295. 17. Seweryn Bialer, "The Politics of Stringency," Problems of Communism 29, no. 3 (May-June 1980), pp. 24, 26. 18. Seweryn Bialer, "The Harsh Decade: Soviet Policies in the 1980s," Foreign Affairs 59, no. 5 (summer 1981), pp. 999-1000, 1002, 1004-1005. 19. Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors, pp. 207-208, 286, 291-292, 296. 20. Ibid., pp. 283-285. 21. Ibid., pp. 95, 301. 22. Seweryn Bialer, "The Harsh Decade," pp. 1008-1010. 23. Ibid., pp. 1013-1015, 1017-1018. 24. Valerie Bunce and John M. Echols III, "Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era: 'Pluralism' or 'Corporatism'?" in Donald R. Kelley, ed., Soviet Politics, pp. 3-6, 16, 20. 25. William G. Hyland, preface to Dimitri K. Simes, ed., Soviet Succession: Leader-

130

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

ship in Transition (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage, 1978), p. 7. 26. William G. Hyland, "Implications for U.S.-Soviet Relations," in Dimitri K. Simes, ed., Soviet Succession, p. 80. 27. William G. Hyland, "Brezhnev and Beyond," Foreign Affairs 58, no. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 56, 58, 60. 28. Ibid., pp. 63-65. 29. Ibid., pp. 62-63. 30. John C Campbell, introduction to Lawrence T. Caldwell and William Diebold, Jr., Soviet-American Relations in the 1980s: Superpower Politics and East-West Trade (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 4-8, 10. 31. Lawrence T. Caldwell, in Lawrence T. Caldwell and William Diebold, Jr., SovietAmerican Relations, pp. 40, 46, 57-60. 32. Ibid., pp, 71,73-74. 33. Ibid., pp. 147-148. 34. Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson, Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II (New York: Pergamon, 1981), pp. 28, 86-88, 289-292. 35. Jay Winik, "The Neoconservative Reconstruction," Foreign Policy 73, no. 2 (Winter 1988-89), p. 135. 36. Committee on the Present Danger, "What Is the Soviet Union Up To?" in U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Perceptions: Relations Between the United States and the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office), 1978, pp. 319-320, 322-324. CPD members were drawn mostly from the ranks of aging Truman and Johnson Democrats, but included several dozen younger scholars, policy makers, and journalists. These Cold War liberals and neoconservatives were attracted to the CPD by a common antipathy for detente, arms control, and Kissingerian balance of power diplomacy, but they soon adopted a sharp anti-Soviet tone, arguing that the Kremlin had attained superiority over the United States in nuclear and conventional weapons, and was bent on world conquest. 37. Peter Reddaway, "Notes from Underground," Times Literary Supplement, June 16, 1978, in Ferdinand Mount, ed., Communism: A Times Literary Supplement Companion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 174—175. 38. Marshall S. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 182. 39. Richard Pipes, preface to Richard Pipes, U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Detente (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981), pp. v, xi-xii. 40. Richard Pipes, "Soviet Global Strategy," in Richard Pipes, US.-Soviet Relations, p. 183. 41. Richard Pipes, "Detente: Moscow's View," in Richard Pipes, U.S.-Soviet Relations, p. 92. 42. Richard Pipes, "Soviet Global Strategy," pp. 181-182. 43. Ibid., pp. 191-192. 44. Hedrick Smith, "Russia's Power Strategy: Reflections on Afghanistan," in Erik P. Hoffmann and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., eds., The Conduct, pp. 738-739. 45. Robert Emmet Moffit, "Soviet-American Relations in the 1980s—Taking 'Peaceful Coexistence' Seriously," in Robert W. Whitaker, The New Right Papers (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), pp. 228-229. 46. Paul Warnke interview, Los Angeles Times, September 29, 1981, quoted in Robert

Sovietology in a Funk

131

Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York: Random House Publishers, 1982), p. 201. 47. William Zimmerman, "The Soviet Union and the West: A Critique of Gati," in Erik P. Hoffmann and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., eds., The Conduct, pp. 666—667. 48. Raymond L. Garthoff, "Detente and Afghanistan," in Erik P. Hoffmann and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., eds., The Conduct, p. 759. 49. Benson L. Grayson, ed., The American Image of Russia—1917—1977 (New York: Frederick Unger, 1978), p. 1. 50. Alexander Dallin, "Soviet Attitudes and Values: Current Perspectives," in The U.S.S.R. and the Sources, p. 95. 51. Vojtech Mastny, Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. xvi-xvii, 311-312. See also the publisher's back cover blurb. 52. Carl A. Linden, review of Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), in "Book Reviews: Comparative Politics," American Political Science Review 73, no. 2 (June 1979), pp. 644-645. 53. Donald R. Kelley, "The Communist Party," in Donald R. Kelley, ed., Soviet Politics, pp. 28-29, 31-32. 54. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 55. Robert C. Tucker, "Swollen State, Spent Society: Stalin's Legacy to Brezhnev's Russia," Foreign Affairs 60, no. 2 (winter 1981-1982), pp. 414, 434. 56. Ibid., pp. 424-428. 57. Ibid., pp. 430-431, 433-434. See also p. 430 (n. 14). 58. Boris Kagarlitsky, The Dialectic of Change (London: Verso, 1990), p. 337. 59. Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Question: The United States and Nuclear Weapons 1947-1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 134. 60. Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "After the Long War," Foreign Policy 94, (spring 1994), p. 22. 61. William H. McNeill, "Winds of Change," Foreign Affairs 69, no. 4 (fall 1990), p. 160. 62. Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken, Dismantling the Cold War Economy (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. xvi, 1. 63. Thomas L. Friedman, "Cold War Without End," New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1993, pp. 29, 45. 64. John Kenneth White, Still Seeing Red: How the Cold War Shapes the New American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 6, 16. 65. David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 297. 66. Alan Brinkley quoted in Robert V. Daniels, The End of the Communist Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 158. 67. Robert W. Tucker, "1989 And All That," Foreign Affairs 69, no. 4 (fall 1990), p. 95. 68. U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Perceptions, p. 23. 69. Robin Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 36, 55. 70. Louis Halle, quoted in Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 204.

132

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

71. Benjamin R. Barber, "Scholars and the Truth of Power," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 10, 2001, pp. B8-10. 72. Louis Menand, "The Demise of Disciplinary Authority," in Alvin Kernan, ed., What Happened to the Humanities? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 213. 73. Donald Kennedy, Academic Duty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 28, 181-182. 74. David D. Henry, Challenges Past, Challenges Present: An Analysis of American Higher Education Since 1930 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975), p. 69. 75. Henry Rosovsky, The University: An Owner's Manual (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 221. 76. McGeorge Bundy, quoted in Robin Winks, Cloak & Gown, pp. 114, 447. 77. John Kenneth White, Still Seeing Red, p. 112. 78. David D. Henry, Challenges Past, p. 96. 79. Ibid., p. 97. See also P. F. Lazarsfeld and W. Thielens, Jr., The Academic Mind (Glenco, III.: Free Press, 1958), pp. 192-236. 80. Robin Wilson and Ana Marie Cox, "Terrorist Attacks Put Academic Freedom to the Test," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 2001, p. A12. 81. Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 12, 16-18. 82. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 245. 83. Jonathan R. Adelman and Deborah Anne Palmieri, The Dynamics of Soviet Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. xvi, 306. See also Alexander Dallin, "Bias and Blunders in American Studies on the USSR," Slavic Review 32, no. 3 (September 1973).

5

Looking in a Mirror Dimly: American Soviet Experts and the Three Post-Brezhnev Successions, 1982-1985 AMERICAN SOVIETOLOGY IN THE EARLY TO MID EIGHTIES The one thing that virtually every American Sovietologist who wrote during the early 1980s had on her mind was the Brezhnev succession and the likely character of the post-Brezhnev USSR. The 1982-1985 period began with the death of Leonid Brezhnev and ended with the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet general secretary. Due to the singular importance of these events, and of the brief Andropov and Chernenko interludes bracketed by them, an extensive Sovietological literature was written and published in the United States during these years. To a significant extent, these new writings reflected the widespread uncertainty and anticipation of Soviet reform that existed, both in the USSR and in American Sovietology, in the early 1980s. For the first time in eighteen years, real change seemed to be occurring, and several U.S. scholars gave riveting accounts of what it was like in Moscow during this relatively condensed period, as power and leadership transferred quickly from Leonid Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov to Konstantin Chernenko to Mikhail Gorbachev. If dramatic changes were exploding throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during this time, a new conservatism was settling on the West, as Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party and Ronald Reagan's neoconservative coalition won sweeping electoral victories and assumed power. In Washington, the 1982-1985 period coincided with the first Reagan administration, when U.S.Soviet relations reached their nadir. In 1983, President Reagan pronounced the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and talked of building an intricate "star wars" missile defense system in outer space—thereby triggering a new arms race. Simultaneously, U.S. scholars and policy makers embraced a hostile antiSovietism that saw virtually any Soviet change as unlikely or damaging to U.S.

134

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

interests. Throughout the early 1980s, there were three competing American images of the USSR, corresponding approximately to the realist, political culturalhistoricist, and pluralist Sovietological outlooks. Many scholars saw the Soviet Union as a tough, resilient international rival to the United States. This was a superpower that could change but was not likely to do so. Other Soviet experts viewed the USSR as inherently limited by its Russian past, its stagnant economy, its apathetic labor force, and its petrified leadership. In this view, the Soviet Union was a Potemkin superpower that could not repair its political and economic institutions. Finally, some Sovietologists depicted a Soviet leadership that was capable of change and was, in fact, changing.. Realist Literature James Billington once noted that the fundamental Soviet contradiction was its profound contrast between outward power and inner weakness. This conflict was evident in much of the realist Sovietological literature (particularly in those writings that touched on the Soviet economy and military) of this period. Not unrelatedly, a second contradiction was highlighted in these writings, in the way American realist scholars perceived the Soviet Union. While some "hard" realist Sovietologists doubted that any significant Soviet change could occur, other "soft" realists were cautiously optimistic about the Brezhnev succession and the possibility of reform. Still other realists were essentially conflicted, caught up in the tension between the inherent optimism of the remarkable events unfolding in Moscow and the gripping pessimism and anti-Sovietism of official Washington. Several factors contributed to this hard-soft polarization among realist Soviet experts in the early 1980s, including the contradictions within the Soviet system; the ideological temper and anti-Sovietism of Ronald Reagan's neoconservative revolution; the emigre status of some U.S. Sovietologists; and the philosophical and methodological divisions within Sovietology, notably between scholarship and policy making, but also between interdisciplinary "social science" emphases and "area studies" approaches. Several hard and soft realist works will now be considered, as they touch on the question of whether Soviet reform was possible. Hard Realist Views. Hard realist Sovietologists minimized the possibility of Soviet transformation. Many of these scholars tinged their arguments with political cultural-historicist and neoconservative appeals, and most were alarmed by Soviet military developments. Thus, in 1983 Coit D. Blacker cautioned his readers that while Moscow had "consistently underscored" its hope of preventing a Soviet-American war, it was preparing for war, just in case. Since the 1970s, improvements "in strategic nuclear weaponry have permitted Soviet authorities" to discuss how "the[y] could avoid defeat" in a nuclear superpower war.1 The Kremlin concluded that in the event of war, the USSR could prevail by launching "crippling 'counterforce' nuclear strikes" on the West, and undertaking a massive "civil and industrial defense program." Moscow's new confidence and aggressive intentions were being written into Soviet strategy, said

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

135

Blacker—as was the realization that a Soviet-American war would be "protracted." Blacker did not indicate whether he thought these strategic reformulations could have been prompted by Soviet military leaders' vested interest in increasing the Red Army's budget, nor did he question whether a new, more militant Soviet strategy for nuclear warfighting actually existed. But he conceded that Richard Pipes's views on this subject were extreme. Moscow's alleged ability to attack and destroy American forces and to shield its citizens" was not "a convincing rationale to initiate nuclear war," he noted. It is unlikely "that a surprise attack would proceed as intended"; moreover, "industrial 'hardening' would prove ineffective," and civil defense "would be difficult to implement." Blacker concluded that the Soviet military was unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, and the Red Army's "privileged [social and economic] status" would be maintained. According to Columbia University Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer, "the most important domestic political event" in the USSR during the 1980s was the Brezhnev succession. Pessimistic about the Soviet economy, the scholar predicted in 1983 that Moscow would "experience [its severest] economic crunch since the 1930s." Bialer agreed with Stephen F. Cohen that the spirit of change had not died under Brezhnev and that professional groups would strongly support economic and political reform, but he rejected Jerry F. Hough's view that the bureaucrats would welcome change. The "vested interests against change"— particularly among the central planners—were "powerful" and would remain so in the future, he noted.2 Bialer guessed that "several years" would pass before Yuri Andropov consolidated power and initiated important changes. Moscow would probably "tinker" with the economy but not institute systemic change for the remainder of the decade. The USSR would "muddle down," but it would not collapse. "What has been built" over six decades "with much blood, sacrifice, [and] ruthlessness, will not disintegrate or radically change because of critical problems." Sometime in the future, there could be "a leadership and economic crisis," Bialer admitted, but such a crisis—one that endangered the Soviet Union's existence—did not exist now and would not in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the USSR had "enormous reserves of stability."3 Moreover, "gigantic economies" like Moscow's "do not go bankrupt." Several realist scholars wrote incisively about Soviet foreign policy. In Dangerous Relations (1983), Adam B. Ulam enumerated five crises which, he believed, had convinced the Soviets in the mid-1970s that the correlation of forces was on their side and that the Third World was ripe for Moscow's picking. These were the October War in 1973, which revealed the "fragility" of detente; the American leadership paralysis caused by the Watergate crisis; the NATO allies' reluctance to allow the United States to use their facilities for airlifting military supplies to Israel; the oil embargo; and the 1975 collapse of Vietnam. These events suggested to Moscow that it could avail itself of Third World opportunities and still maintain good relations with the West.

136

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Ulam saw detente, and its promise of improved U.S.-Soviet relations, as a mixture of pluses and minuses. On the one hand, the Soviets "profiled] by more extensive trade with the West and easier access to advanced technology." Additionally, Moscow expected detente to "loose[n] the [strategic] ties" that bound "the U.S. [to] its Western European allies." More important, detente was a sure sign of change: "For the first time in a generation the two superpowers were able to survey the whole realm of international relations without mutual vituperations and accusations." Detente was "thus a harbinger of more efficacious communication and a more civil dialogue" between the two Cold War rivals" than had existed "since their collaboration in World War II. On the other hand, Ulam was unenthusiastic about the actual achievements of detente: its benefits to the West were slight, and it strengthened the Soviets militarily, since "increased savings and efficiency in the consumer goods sector"—a key benefit of detente—could easily "be translated into additional resources for the military."4 Implicit in this criticism was the notion that the only way to avoid helping the Red Army was to stop trading any goods and commodities to Moscow—for even shipments of wheat could end up in soldiers' stomachs! Ulam recalled that throughout detente the USSR had made a number of inroads into the Third World by exerting its influence and providing military and economic aid to various countries. No one in Washington expected detente to stop such Soviet adventures outright, Ulam noted, but American policy makers had hoped that USSR-Third World ties would become "less explicitly antiwestern" in tone—and those hopes were dashed. While most realist scholars viewed the Soviet Union as essentially cautious and opportunistic, Ulam concluded that caution was "not the outstanding characteristic" of Kremlin politics. Indeed, the Soviets had become adept at "nibbling at the edges" of western "spheres of interest" in southern Africa, Ethiopia, and Arabia; Moscow had taken unfair advantage of detente through its pursuit of "unilateral" military gains and by exploiting "every conceivable loophole in the [1972] agreement."5 But despite these gains, Moscow's self-congratulatory mood faded quickly, Ulam noted. By 1979, the "correlation of forces," long thought to have favored the USSR, began to swing the other way. Economic problems, ethnic unrest, an aging leadership and a looming succession crisis, trouble in Eastern Europe, unfavorable demographic trends, and a tough new line in Washington (backed by a massive U.S. military buildup) clouded the Soviet horizon. Overseas, the Soviet Union's Third World allies proved to be expensive and politically unreliable. To add insult to injury, the Polish crisis of the early 1980s disabused the USSR of the idea that detente—"opening" the Soviet bloc "more widely to the West"—would "strengthen rather than endanger the political stability and popular appeal of Communist rule."6 Indeed, the Kremlin leaders deemed a "communized" Russian nationalism "essential" in preserving Soviet territorial integrity and keeping "the non-Russian nationalities within the Russian state." This Russian nationalism—in the guise of "Soviet patriotism"—was "the first line of defense" of the Communist system, Ulam said. "Until this line was breached,"

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

137

the USSR could not change.7 Despite Ulam's acknowledgement that nationalism and anti-imperialism were double-edged swords that were just as liable to hurt Moscow as Washington, an implicit assumption ran through many of his writings that Moscow had better control over its destiny than the western capitals had over theirs and that Third World regimes were more responsive to Soviet than to western political overtures.8 In the end, Ulam's answer to the problem of Soviet Third World expansionism involved a return to George F. Kennan's idea of containing the USSR through American economic and political influence. But Ulam rejected the "militarized" containment doctrine of the early 1950s, which "virtually dismissed diplomacy as a means of altering Soviet behavior." Ulam did not expect the USSR to change much—no matter what the West did or did not do. It was "unrealistic," he said, to think that the next leaders would alter "the traditional pattern of Soviet foreign polic[y] and/or seek genuine cooperation with the West; [W]hoever replaced [Brezhnev would] likely have different priorities and a different outlook" from past leaders, "but otherwise keep things unchanged." The Harvard Sovietologist speculated that a "new Khrushchev" might come along, who was "willing to shake up the ossified state and party" and introduce wholesale "reforms and innovations."9 But there was no assurance that these changes would be liberal in character; indeed, since the new leader's "formative years" will have coincided with the Cold War tensions of the 1950s and 1960s, the new administration could impose harsher and more militant policies. If change was in doubt, so was the Soviet Bloc's viability: neither the Red Army nor "economic palliatives" could "ensur[e its] stability," Ulam argued. "The costs and risks of the [USSR] standing armed guard over the fragile Communist systems of six European nations with a combined population of over 100 million" would only become "greater and more complex" in the years ahead. Abroad, "Communism in power [was] no longer a dependable servant" to Moscow; rather, it was an outright "threat, as in China, or a heavy burden, as in Poland. Nor was there much interest in Marxism-Leninism"—the present Soviet rulers "retained little" of their revolutionary predecessors' ideological fervor and were "entirely cynical on the subject." Still, they could not "abandon MarxismLeninism," Ulam added. Any attempt "to discard the old formula and halt" the struggle against capitalism would threaten "the cohesion of the Soviet system." In essential agreement with Ulam, Sovietologist Harry Gelman saw "a purposeful pattern of Soviet behavior hostile to western interests" in diverse international settings. Both the "Soviet propensity to expand" throughout the Third World during the 1970s and Moscow's relentless pursuit of military strength were "disturbing, destabilizing, and threatening to the United States," Gelman wrote. In Europe, the USSR wanted to "perpetuate a military imbalance" that would disrupt the Atlantic Alliance. "From the very outset of detente, a strong tension existed between [Moscow's] interest in bilateral dealings with the [United States] and the Politburo's determination to preserve [its] political and military" gains overseas. Indeed, detente allowed the Soviet Union to reach

138

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

desirable arms control agreements with Washington while continuing its massive missile-building program.10 In the early 1970s, the notion of detente with the West was "superimposed on a number of Soviet political realities that were unlikely to change," Gelman noted. These included Brezhnev's "alliance with the military [industrial] establishment"; the 1965 decision "to expand the Soviet armed forces, linked to a 4 percent annual [military budget] increase;" the "ideologically-conservative" views of the Soviet communist party (CPSU); and the belief that Soviet and U.S. Third World interests were "incompatible." Accordingly, Moscow's "increasingly assertive" military and arms trade practices "created for Washington a series of embarrassments" in Vietnam, the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan. During this period, the Brezhnev regime did not operate according to a "master plan" for world domination, Gelman said: "[I]nstead of a blueprint, [Moscow] had a consistent world view centered on the unblinking expectation" of lasting East-West struggle.11 Gelman thought that "Brezhnev's legacy to his successors" would be a mixed one. The Soviet leader espoused two priorities simultaneously— investing in agriculture and giving the military whatever it wanted. Brezhnev's "public demeanor toward the military contrasted] vividly" with that of Khrushchev, who did "not hesitat[e] to complain publicly and repeatedly about military demands" and characterized defense leaders as "'greedy and self-seeking.'" Brezhnev was careful "never to talk this way," Gelman noted, and he maintained good relations with "Soviet military industry."12 By the late 1970s, Moscow's economic problems had prompted "a growing sense of malaise and exasperation among the oligarchs"; the Soviet Union was "beset by deteriorating social morale and corruption." The September 1983 shooting down of "a South Korean civilian airliner that had strayed [into] Soviet [airspace]," and the Kremlin's extraordinary self-justification and refusal to apologize for the mishap, exemplified both a kind of "fortress mentality" and "the beleaguered pugnacity of a ruling party perpetually insecure as to its legitimacy." The CPSU could neither "drop [its] pretense of infallibility" nor "abandon [its] eternal search for legitimacy through struggle against external enemies." Gelman concluded "that the next Soviet leaders" would probably maintain this "traditional Soviet offensive posture toward the United States in the world arena."13 In Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War 7/(1985), scholar Alvin Z. Rubinstein outlined his core assumptions about Soviet diplomacy. First, he noted, an aggressive, adventuristic foreign policy "is not peculiar to the Soviet Union; it is a trademark of [all] powerful" states. Second, "Soviet diplomacy is flexible, adaptive, and open to [making] deals." Not unrelatedly, the "Soviet leaders [are pragmatists], careful to avoid war with the United States." Third, "Soviet resources are limited but the Kremlin has the wherewithal and the will to preserve its system" and Third World forays. Fourth, Soviet foreign policy is informed by geopolitical considerations—not by "ideological and economic" ones. Finally, while differences over issues exist, "an essential consensus is shared by

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

139

the Soviet leadership"—especially regarding military power.14 This was a classical realist conception of Soviet foreign policy that rejected political culturalhistoricist and pluralist interpretations in favor of a balance of power emphasis on leadership rationality, flexibility, and pragmatism. In a discussion concerning Moscow's flagging relations with Eastern Europe, Rubinstein echoed Kennan's 1961 argument that acquiring empire is significantly easier than maintaining it. "Nationalism remains strong, even among avowed Communists in Eastern Europe [and] is permeated with an antiRussian tinge," he noted. If Moscow wants to keep Eastern Europe in the Warsaw Pact, it must give these countries "a substantial measure of economic, cultural, and political autonomy." Currently, "Soviet control in Eastern Europe" is "preserved only by military force, not [by] ideology."15 Thus, Eastern Europe was a dubious "asset to the Kremlin"; East European troops were largely unreliable, and "the area represented] a material drain on Soviet resources." Although he was a realist, Rubinstein's nearly-hagiographic depiction of Soviet military power was consistent with the views of political cultural-historicist and neoconservative scholars. Thus, in his estimate of the East-West military balance, he "assign[ed] the Warsaw Pact a margin of two to one over NATO forces." This meant that "in the event of a crisis or an opportunity in Europe," Moscow could easily "influence[e] a preferred political outcome with its army," which was "widely accepted as the most powerful in the world." Rubinstein commended the Soviet military for "its battle readiness, and its ability to [operate] for several weeks without reinforcements."16 Similarly, the scholar was impressed by Soviet doctrinal and strategic writings. Like Richard Pipes, he believed that "Soviet doctrine regards nuclear war as a war that has to be won, like any other"; accordingly, Moscow "invested heavily in civil defense" and "trained the Red Army to cope with nuclear attack." But Rubinstein differed from neoconservative and political culturalhistoricist scholars in his optimism about Moscow's economic resilience and political viability. The Soviet Union was "not on the verge of internal crisis," he insisted, and it should "sustain growth" into the next century. While Moscow faced "numerous and difficult" social and political problems, none of them were insurmountable. Its economic "weaknesses [were] far outweighed by [its] strengths," which included "a large, well-trained, labor force"; a technologically -oriented educational system; abundant natural resources; "a basic selfsufficiency [in] food," despite "large imports of grains and other foodstuffs"; and the economy's sheer immensity. Like many hard realist and political cultural-historicist scholars in the mid1980s, Rubinstein saw no liberals or reformers—and no Gorbachev!—vying for top leadership posts in the Soviet Union. "Chemenko's successors" would not "usher in major changes" in foreign policy, the scholar warned. One could imagine various reformist scenarios, but future leaders would likely use "repression rather than relaxation" to solve their problems.17 Thus, "the notion of an internally troubled Soviet Union gradually democratizing its society and softening its policies was] as chimerical as that of the convergence of capitalis[m] and

140

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Communisfm]." A more likely scenario entailed an "essential continuation of Brezhnev's foreign policy—an amalgam of low-level risk-taking" and a continuation of detente, combined with opportunistic advances "to expand [Moscow's] influence and weaken the United States." Several insightful Sovietological appraisals of the 1982-1985 years came from realist economic analyses. In 1983, Harvard University economist Marshall I. Goldman depicted a Soviet economy that was encumbered with the dead weight of Marxism-Leninism and Russian political tradition. Marx "never intended" that "the first Communist revolution" take place in a "backward" country like Russia, Goldman complained. Since pre-Revolutionary Russia was unindustrialized, "the [new] Soviet state had to build up the country's" economy— and do it quickly. "Instead of dividing] the wealth of an already industrialized state," the CPSU "bec[a]me the economic accumulator, the brutalizing force, the head-knocker of the workers, the source of alienation." Predictably, this arrangement had deleterious consequences, Goldman noted. Initially, Moscow hoped that the workers would go along with Stalin's plan to turn the state into an engine of industry because it was "for their own good." But in practice, the workers could not tell "the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat" apart. Before long, "the same [workermanagement] antagonisms" found in the capitalist West became evident in "the relationship of the Soviet proletariat and the dictatorship of the proletariat"— that is, between the workers and the Soviet state. In effect, the revolution ushered in, not change but the status quo. This entrenched mind-set blocked any Soviet leader who sought to institute reform.18 In order to hasten industrialization, Stalin imposed central planning, which emphasized heavy industry, Goldman argued. Inevitably, this meant that "factory managers would be judged [by] how much more they produced in the current year [than in] the year before." Soon, the economy's focus shifted from quality to quantity, and Russia—"among the most industrially backward nations of Europe" before the 1917 revolution—became one of "the strongest in the world." But this was a dubious accomplishment, because "the rest of the world [had gone] off in a different direction, emphasizing finished products and standard of living, not individual industrial commodities."19 The USSR kept "producing steel and machine tools" when what was needed was better "food, consumer goods and technology." Industrially strong, the USSR was far from being technologically advanced. To make matters worse, even the Soviet lead in industrial commodities was shrinking. Particularly hard hit were energy, steel and machine tool production, and agriculture. Yet the Stalinist economic model could not be changed, said Goldman, because of Moscow's "reluctance to tamper with the status quo." Soviet planners knew "what to expect from their model and [were] comfortable with it." Most believed "that the system had [not] performed badly," and "even those who [favored] change" worried "about moving too fast" and precipitating "an uncontrollable avalanche." Goldman summarized his argument with a Chinese proverb: "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount." In other words, as

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

141

bad as Moscow's economic situation was, trying to reform it could be worse. Thus, leadership change was postponed "as long as possible." Although the Harvard economist was a realist, he attributed these maladaptive attitudes to Russian political and revolutionary culture.20 Goldman believed that "if the Soviet Union [was] to continue" as an economic superpower, it would have to embrace innovation and become a world leader in such technologies as "computer aided design and manufacturing, microprocessors, fiber optics, ceramics, electronics, robots, lasers, optics, and bio and medical technology." The longer the leadership waited, the harder it would be for the USSR "to catch up" in these areas.21 Goldman termed Moscow's "inability to produc[e] such products" the Soviet Union's "most serious economic shortcoming." Indeed, the USSR was caught in a kind of "systems trap"—as though the rest of the world had adopted an AC electrical system while Moscow was still on DC. Conversion to AC would require "a complete overhaul, not just the installation of one or two AC appliances." Thus, Soviet computerization required "a good communications system, particularly telephone lines. In turn, [installing] an advanced communications system" in the USSR "require[d] the extensive use of computers," the Harvard economist argued. But since both technologies were antiquated, it was "difficult to bring in one advanced component" because it would "be incompatible with the rest of the system." Goldman's discussion of Moscow's economic and technological difficulties raised anew the question of the USSR's relationship to the outside world. The Soviets could not "continue to isolate themselves if they hope[d] to keep abreast of current technology and export something other than raw materials," the scholar said. But "interaction with the outside capitalist world" would "expose Soviet products to enormous competitive pressures" and the Soviet people to "foreign ideas." For this reason, Goldman expected minimal improvements: the Soviet Union would "fall further and further behind" and might not keep up even with the East Asian countries; on the other hand, the Soviet system would probably not collapse.22 While the Soviet economy was "ill-suited for consumers]," it was ideal for the military, Goldman argued; thus, the USSR was "especially well positioned to increase its relative world strength." Nevertheless, Soviet military leaders realized "that the rest of the world ha[d] gone off to run a different kind of world power race"—one in which Moscow's economy and armed forces could not compete. Western technology and resources were needed to maintain Soviet competitiveness, said Goldman.23 Like many neoconservatives and political cultural-historicists, Goldman depicted the Red Army as powerful and weak at the same time. Thus, the USSR was "innovative]" in the production of military hardware, and it ran "the military sector in a flexible and imaginative way." But military readiness was poor, and Moscow's "ineptitude with computers" was a serious weakness. The Harvard economist explained the contradiction of a strong Soviet defense sector coupled to an anemic economy obliquely by insisting that Moscow had two separate production pipelines, which produced "good quality, innovative prod-

142

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

ucts" for the Red Army and inferior goods for civilian consumption. Moreover, "Soviet citizens willingly endure[d]" domestic hardships "and allow[ed] their leaders to divert [massive resources] to defense with [little] protest." Incredible as these claims were, Goldman's military-civilian distinction was weakened by his admission that "most factories producing military equipment also produce consumer goods." Moreover, Soviet military equipment was hardly "the most advanced in the world; far from it." Soviet hardware was "less sophisticated and more bulky than comparable western products."24 Goldman viewed the intense mutual resentments of the have's and havenot's in Soviet society—and especially the rivalry between Russians and Central Asians—with alarm. The economist believed that the changing demographic composition of the USSR had serious implications. The shrinking Russian population meant that more Central Asians would have to enter the Soviet labor force. This would require either that Central Asian laborers move to the European part of the Soviet Union, where most of the jobs were—which they were unwilling to do—or that Soviet industry relocate to Central Asia, where most of the laborers were. Either way, there would be a reduction in workmanship, because many Central Asians were unskilled and could not speak Russian. Goldman added that these same cultural tensions could degrade the Red Army.25 More dramatic and equally problematic were several "worker demonstrations and strikes [in the] early 1980s" at the Togliatti Auto Factory, the auto and truck plant in Gorky, the Kama River Truck Plant at Naberezhnye Chelny, the tractor plant at Cheboksary, a tractor factory in Estonia, a Donetsk coal mine, and in Kiev, Ordzhonikidze, and Odessa. While most of these protests were over "local issues" such as food shortages, some were fueled by "the same concerns that [ignited] the Polish [Solidarity Movement in] Gdansk."26 In the end, Goldman did not think that Yuri Andropov would be able to soften (let alone democratize!) the Soviet system; the new leader had come from a background similar to Brezhnev's, and would resist change—indeed, a return to Stalinist extremism was possible. The Harvard economist saw hope for the beleaguered Soviet system only in the chance that someday a "bold leader"—a Mikhail Gorbachev who was willing to take the necessary political risks to reform Moscow's economy—might assume power, but such a development was unlikely: "[T]he Stalinist model" was "[in]capable of producing such a leader," he wrote. Thus, major change was "unlikely"; there would be "more of the same."27 According to University of Virginia economist Gertrude E. Schroeder, the USSR had tried, throughout the Brezhnev tenure, "to 'reform' its economy. Many of [these reforms were] successive revisions of previous arrangements that had failed to produce the desired outcomes or had produced new aberrations."28 Indeed, "nearly two decades of walking a treadmill of reforms have reinforced those very features of socialist central planning that have created the present economic mess," Schroeder said. As a result, "planning is more centralized, rigid, and detailed than ever before." What kind of reform was needed? Schroeder advocated "thorough marketi-

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

143

zation" and the abandonment of "central planning and dictation of the output mix of factories and farms." Businesses needed "autonomy" and freedom from government oversight. "Decentralization" was "urgently" needed in agriculture, which had become a "drain on scarce labor and investment resources." Nevertheless, systemic changes would "not be undertaken," Schroeder guessed, both "for ideological reasons and because the short-term costs would be great and the long-term payoff uncertain." Indeed, "such a 'baptism of fire'" might occur only if Moscow "found itself in a profound political and economic crisis." Schroeder was almost certain that the USSR would "not face such a disastrous situation." Even if new policies were instituted quickly, a turnaround in the Soviet economy would not occur immediately because "most machinery and equipment [was] technologically obsolescent." In addition, some "plants [were] too large," while "others [were] too small," and still others were "mislocated. Numerous farms and factories produc[ed] the wrong products or in the wrong mix."29 Thus several years would pass "before new, market-oriented investment allocations could alter the structure of the capital stock in major ways," Schroeder concluded. Meanwhile, the USSR would "have to cope with a low economic growth [rate]—perhaps averaging 2-3 percent" annually. "Such a situation [would] be difficult, but [not] a crisis." Soft Realist Views. Soft realists believed that Soviet social, political, and economic reform was possible and even likely. Indeed, these scholars often agreed with pluralists in their anticipation of innovative change. Although USSR military expert Roman Kolkowicz had maintained a hard realist line during the 1970s regarding Soviet change and the primacy of defense in Moscow's economy, by 1985 the University of California at Los Angeles scholar had come to reject the popular U.S. view of the Red Army as being, in Joseph L. Nogee's words, a "compliant tool of the party, thoroughly subordinated and without any institutional conflicts" with other governmental entities. Kolkowicz argued that western analysts had long been beholden to a totalitarianism model of Soviet civilian-military relations, which featured a complete military subordination to party authority and saw Communist countries as "mortal enemies" threatening "our vital interests] and survival." Such a view was onedimensional, Kolkowicz complained, because it implied "that Communist countries ha[d] escaped sociopolitical forces" that affect "most other political systems. It is as if some kind of immaculate conception had occurred" in 1917, giving birth to "a wondrous, conflict-free system of [Soviet] institutions and bureaucracies." This "notion defie[d] understanding, particularly [since] almost everything is politicized in the Soviet Union." Kolkowicz noted that most American notions about the Soviet political process were based on Cold War hostilities and misperceptions: "[W]e rarely concerned ourselves with the military's internal role and policy influence," he wrote. "We saw the Red Army as metal eaters, weapon carriers, and trigger pullers for the party." But the truth was, as Nogee argued, that "since Stalin the military has come to play [a key] role in Soviet politics, particularly as an arbiter

144

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

among contenders" in leadership transitions. Although Moscow's diplomacy was often seen in the United States as "aggressive, militant, and unyielding," Kolkowicz reminded his readers that "the substance of Soviet foreign policy is dissonant with this aggressive style. The Soviet Union has never committed its forces to an area outside its direct contiguous sphere of influence"; indeed, the Soviet leaders preferred policies of "non-confrontation, rejecting commitments to uncertain outcomes." If Soviet foreign policy was "essentially expansionist]," it was "careful" to "avoi[d] frontal assaults on [U.S.] vital interests."31 In 1985, Robert V. Daniels asked whether the time had finally come for western scholars to abandon the totalitarianism model altogether. The University of Vermont Sovietologist identified several interest groups and "power centers" within the Soviet bureaucracy, including "the military, the police, the industrial chiefs, scientists and academics," and various regional party organizations. Even so, it would be "misleading" to liken Soviet politics to "the freewheeling interplay" of American interest group politics, Daniels argued. The USSR featured "little evolution" away from Stalinism. There were few "citizens' rights," and no "constitutional restraints on those who rule." Individuals could pursue "career and family life" freely, but "no public discussion [could] take place without the sanction of the authorities."32 Moreover, Moscow showed no sign of curbing its opportunistic foreign policies. For these reasons, the Sovietologist could not discard the totalitarianism model completely. If Marxism-Leninism was still used by the Kremlin to "justify [its] policies and legitimize [its] rule," Daniels agreed with Ulam that Soviet ideology was a political fig leaf, a mere pretext that allowed the Moscow leaders to do whatever they wanted. The "real source of emotional support for the regime" was nationalism. Thus, President Reagan's prediction that "Communism [was] destined for the ash heap of history" was beside the point: "Communism" as an ideology was "already on [history's] ash heap," said the University of Vermont Sovietologist. "What is not on the ash heap or likely to end up there is Russia as a major power with aspirations to worldwide influence." Indeed, "Russia's problem [was] not that it [was] Communist," Daniels concluded. "The problem [was] that it [was] not Communist, but [could not] dispense with the pretense." Daniels saw the Soviet habit of totalitarian control as a fundamental "barrier to change," for it brooked "no challenge to its supremacy." Moreover, "Russian nationalism" would never "accept either the separatism" of the Central Asians or the loss of Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, some change was likely, Daniels argued, if only because the Soviet leaders were dying off. "Time alone is accomplishing a sweeping renovation of the Communist leadership," and replacing the Brezhnev generation with younger leaders who are well educated, flexible, and sophisticated. Still, Daniels did not expect major changes; thus, he ruled out the possibility of systemic Soviet reform or of a Prague Spring occurring in Moscow anytime soon.33 Daniels cited Soviet academician Tatiana Zaslavskaia's unsettling "Novosibirsk report" of 1983—which "attacked the planning system" and its "doctrinaire reluctance to change," and "called for decentralized market socialism"—as

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

145

evidence that reform was needed. But he defended the Soviet economy against western criticism that it was an abject failure. "A country that outproduces the United States in steel, coal, oil, even wheat, can hardly be a failure, even if the quality and quantity" of the food and consumer goods available to its citizens was often inadequate, Daniels argued. Nor was the USSR just a Third World country with nuclear weapons—such an image was insulting and grossly misleading. Daniels concluded that the Soviet economy was "not a failure," but "a paradox of industrial plenty in the midst of consumer poverty."34 Daniels recalled that some U.S. scholars had been excessively optimistic about the USSR's economic viability because they were unaware of the true Soviet military burden. Indeed, it was "difficult to establish" how much Moscow was spending on defense, since much of the military effort was classified or hidden in the budgetary fine print of various industrial ministries, "and the ruble-dollar conversion [was] arbitrary." Daniels guessed that in "recent years," Moscow had spent "the equivalent of $150 billion out of a trillion dollar GNP"—that is, "an absolute level of defense spending" as great as that of the United States, "out of a total economic performance that [was] only half of the American." In any event, Moscow's relative defense burden "(12-15 percent) [was] far greater than the American commitment (around 5 percent)."35 Over time, Daniels's estimate of Soviet defense costs would prove to be highly optimistic, and Moscow's true military burden would be shown to be twice the amount he suggested—as high as 25 to 30 percent of Soviet GNP. In agreement with Robert Jervis's argument concerning the propensity of states to misperceive their enemies, Daniels recalled that throughout "four decades of confrontation," neither Moscow nor Washington had "a realistic understanding of the other." Thus, the Kremlin saw the United States "as a counterrevolutionary aggressor"; meanwhile, Washington "oscillate[d] between fear of a moribund ideology and naive faith in [Moscow's] expressions of peaceful intentions. Each side [tried] to fit the other into its own preconceived [world]view," and failed "to appreciate" its adversary's unique history, culture, and perceptions. In the end, Daniels guessed that the USSR would change, albeit slowly and to a limited extent, and he urged that Washington try to influence this process of transformation. However belligerent Moscow's rhetoric was toward the West, the University of Vermont scholar agreed with Richard Pipes that Moscow would "respon[d] readily to [U.S.] pressures [and] inducements."36 Still, Daniels believed that the superpower rivalry would continue to dominate world politics in the foreseeable future, and he minimized the possibility of future U.S.-Soviet cooperation or of a Soviet convergence with the West. In 1983, Robert F. Byrnes argued that the USSR had no choice but to change with the times, particularly in light of the social and economic openness created by the revolutions in technology, information, and communications. The scholar agreed with Goldman that the Soviet Union could not continue to censor information, restrict the use of photocopiers, prohibit automated long distance phone calls, or "isolate itself from the West without "slip[ping] toward decline." Indeed, isolation from the West would be "virtually impossible and costly,"

146

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Byrnes said. "Maintaining a wall with carefully monitored turnstiles is difficult, ineffective, and perverse[ly], increases fascination with the outside world."37 Characterizing the Soviet leaders' resistance to change as "powerful and determined," Byrnes guessed that the USSR would respond to the unfolding technological revolution with "increased repression and cultural isolation" in an "effort to obtain the fruits of western advance without the infections." In addition, Moscow would likely try to "reassert authority" over Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact. For the foreseeable future, the Soviet Union would "muddle through" and "dela[y] fundamental decisions"; but Byrnes held out hope that a "future leader"—maybe Andropov—would "recognize the need" for innovation and major policy shifts "after [decades] of immobility." As for a possible U.S. role in bringing about Soviet change, Byrnes disagreed with Daniels and other advocates of intervention: the West "can have little or no direct influence" on Soviet internal affairs, he said. Like Schroeder, Georgetown University Sovietologist Thane Gustafson believed that Soviet economic and political change, once implemented, would not take effect immediately. In part, he noted in 1985, this was because of the weakened power of the general secretary. Moreover, decisions made by Brezhnev had effectively constrained what Andropov and subsequent leaders could do; thus, in military spending, in energy, and in food policy, the Soviet leadership had to carry out or live with the policies of previous rulers. In addition, the bureaucracy inhibited change: the general secretary was "obliged to proceed by slow consensus-building against entrenched" enemies of reform— "and most of his efforts [were] frustrated." Despite these difficulties, the brief Andropov term suggested to Gustafson that fundamental change was possible. The new ruler "brought vigorous youn[g] leaders into top positions"; Andropov's "ideas commandfed] allegiance"; he was "a man of ability." Gustafson concluded that "the Soviet system, given the right man and circumstances, can concentrate enough power into the top leader's hands to generate a meaningful program of change."38 In 1982, William G. Hyland damned the totalitarianism model by association when he suggested that its emphasis on a monolithic and unchangeable Soviet Union had "subconsciously accepted some key premises of Marxist determinism." Both Marxism and the totalitarianism model argued, curiously, "that only the system" and its "massive momentum, laws, institutions, and dynamics" mattered. "Leaders come and go; it does not matter who is on top. Soviet policy will turn out the same." Hyland criticized this deterministic argument—and the totalitarianism model itself—as "nonsense. Leonid Brezhnev is not Nikita Khrushchev, nor was Khrushchev Stalin," he noted. Hyland argued that Moscow would soon have to institute significant defense cutbacks and that Brezhnev himself had "la[id] the groundwork" for such reductions when he "assaulted" Red Army doctrine. For years, Soviet military leaders believed "that nuclear war was winnable." In 1975, however, the general secretary characterized the strategic balance as "entrenched." Two years later, Brezhnev announced "that the USSR did not seek strategic superiority" over the

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

147

West and that Moscow was not "intent on a first strike." By December 1977, "Brezhnev was insisting" that Moscow did '"not want to upset the [military] equilibrium between the USSR and the United States.'"39 Finally, in 1981, Brezhnev "denounced [Soviet] aspirations for victory in nuclear war as 'dangerous madness,'" Hyland noted. Despite Hyland's criticism of the totalitarianism model, he saw the Soviet system as fundamentally Stalinist in character; it was "a heavy bureaucracy administered by careerists" with "vested interests in maintaining the status quo." As such, the system formed "a massive bulwark against change." Admittedly, "there were flickers of change" following Khrushchev's ouster, the scholar noted: "[A] reform program was sponsored by Kosygin in 1965. But the Brezhnev era was not a time of change." During the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union became "a superpower. But there was a price. Stability became stagnation; the economy ran down."40 Hyland concluded that the status quo could not hold for long: "[B]y the early 1980s it was time for a change." In 1985, Hyland captured the pervasive excitement that was evident in Moscow and in European capitals during Gorbachev's ascendance. "For the first time," he wrote, "the leadership of the party has passed to a man born after the Bolshevik revolution. Change is in the air. A new generation is taking power." But Hyland knew of the difficult challenges that the new leader would face: "[A]t some point," Gorbachev would "have to grapple with strategic realities"— "a potential explosion" in East Europe; "an endless war in Afghanistan; infectious religious fanaticism [on the USSR's] southern borders"; and "vibrant adversaries in China and Japan." Yuri Andropov had been "a surprise," Hyland recalled. Although he "represented] the old orthodoxy by virtue of his [KGB] service," Andropov emerged as "a potentially disruptive force—but as a reformer." Hyland anticipated a similar mind-set, and a speedier consolidation of power, in Gorbachev. While "the conventional wisdom in the West" was that "we should not expect change until Gorbachev [had] consolidated his position," the new leader acted "like a man in charge," and there was "good reason for his self-confidence." Yet there were many unanswered questions, Hyland said. The Stalinist system could not be "easily reshaped"; moreover, the USSR was "not Hungary," and "reforms that are possible in a small economy" were "not applicable" to the USSR. More to the point, "even if Gorbachev [was] determined to make changes, what would be their essence?" Could the CPSU "apparatus institute a dynamic reform program that would threaten [its own] legitimacy? Or [would] the party have to be reformed as well? This was Khrushchev's downfall, [as] Gorbachev surely remembered]." Thus, "it remain[ed] to be seen whether [Gorbachev had] the ruthlessness" needed to be general secretary, Hyland concluded. In 1983, University of California at Berkeley scholar Gail W. Lapidus observed that Soviet nationality studies had been virtually ignored in western Sovietological textbooks during the 1950s and 1960s—in large measure because of the totalitarianism model's dominance. This traditional emphasis "on the capacity of a monolithic state to bring about a well-nigh total atomization of society,

148

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

left no room for exploring] the potential bases of social solidarity," including ethnicity, Lapidus noted; instead, the focus was on Moscow's "domination and exploitation" of the non-Russian nationalities. While admitting that "a resurgence of nationalism among the non-Russian and Russian nationalities pose[d] a growing threat to long-term [Soviet] stability," Lapidus rejected the political cultural-historicist claim of Richard Pipes that, in her words, "the scope and intensity of rising ethnonationalism" would fracture and destroy the USSR. Pipes's argument contained several flaws, Lapidus noted, including a "tendency to treat national identity as a primordial, objective fact rather than as a subjective condition"; the idea that "the preservation of distinct national identities [was] fundamentally incompatible with Soviet goals" and citizenship; and a "fail[ure] to distinguish national sentiment [from] nationalism."41 In contrast to Pipes's view, Lapidus argued "that the political salience of ethnicity in the USSR [was] not self-evident and automatic but varie[d] over time and among contexts"; that Moscow's "capacity to manage ethnonational assertion" and "reduce instability" was significant; and that the Soviet Union no longer sought "the total eradication of national distinctiveness" but acknowledged "the ubiquitousness and durability of national identity." The University of California Sovietologist was not alarmed over the possibility of a rebellion among the Soviet nationalities. Central Asians had "multiple and overlapping identities and roles," she noted, "of which ethnicity [was] only one and not necessarily the most salient"; accordingly, "it [was] difficult to imagine a politically significant grassroots movement crystallizing] around a single [ethnic claim]."42 Indeed, ethnic communities and dissident groups were "internally divided over key issues"—often "within the same national republic." Thus, neither the Baltic states nor the Central Asians would cause problems for Moscow "in the short run." The "nationality problem" would not lead to the USSR's demise; rather, the Soviet willingness to tolerate ethnic diversity demonstrated that Moscow was more resilient than its western academic critics believed. Lapidus characterized the Soviet ruler-citizen relationship as a kind of social contract in which citizens were "expected to support the regime and its policies." But this arrangement would be challenged severely in the 1980s and 1990s, when Moscow would face economic, political, and social difficulties of unprecedented "scope [and] complexity."43 These "constraints on regime performance"—which threatened to destabilize the USSR—included "declining economic growth," an inability to meet rising social expectations, lowered Slavic birthrates coupled with high reproductive rates among Muslim populations, continuing succession difficulties, a hostile geopolitical environment, and the collapse of detente. Of all these difficulties, Lapidus noted, the "most critical" was economic decline, which would prevent the regime from raising its living standard. Of particular concern were the USSR's sluggish agricultural performance and the shortage and inferiority of "consumer goods and services." Lapidus rejected the notion that the USSR's domestic difficulties would

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

149

tempt Moscow to pursue "a more aggressively expansionist foreign policy." Such a scenario tended "mechanistically to project outward from domestic conditions" without considering the international environment or the likely challenges the Soviet leaders would encounter in future years. There was "no historical precedent" for believing that Moscow "use[d] external adventures to compensate for domestic difficulties." Rather, the opposite was true: domestic crises have often triggered "partial withdrawals] from international involvement." In addition, the costs of geopolitical confrontation would aggravate the USSR's already profound economic and domestic problems. Thus, discounting a crisis in Sino-Soviet relations, it was "difficult to imagine a foreign policy scenario that would mobiliz[e] the Soviet [citizenry in] a popular and unifying national cause," Lapidus argued.44 The Sovietologist saw important changes occurring—and having already occurred—in the USSR since Stalin's death. These included a lessening of terror, increased reliance on the rule of law, and greater flexibility in the "use of incentives to elicit desired social behavior." Indeed, in the past it had made sense to "speak of a 'revolution from above,'" guided by a Soviet state that "dominated over] a largely passive society." Today, that image was no longer appropriate. Lapidus considered the many political, economic, and social difficulties that continued to plague the Soviet system. Cumulatively, these problems "complicated" Soviet decision making and "reinforce[d] a siege mentality" in Moscow, she noted; moreover, they signaled a deleterious attitudinal shift within a Soviet population that had become accustomed to detente and aware of the affluence of the West.45 "The variety, quality, and sheer quantity of western goods established new standards for evaluating Soviet life and invited increasingly negative evaluations" of Soviet "consumer goods and services," even of features of the Soviet system that were once "highly regarded," like health care. Such dissatisfactions could translate directly into strong pressure "from below" for change, Lapidus concluded. In 1985, economist Ed A. Hewett reflected pessimistically that Gorbachev's program would merely "enhance central control and initiative and responsibility at lower levels." The new leader had "no intention whatsoever of introducing radical reforms in the Soviet economy," Hewett argued. Gorbachev was "apparently convinced" that his economic goals could "be accomplished with partial reforms designed to improve the operation of the existing system." The economist concluded that the twelfth five-year plan (1986—90) could collapse due to the weakness of Soviet industry. Hewett identified several negative influences on the Soviet economy, including stagnant capital-stock and labor-force growth, increasing costs in the exploitation of natural resources, and "windfall losses" from trade. Accordingly, he doubted whether Gorbachev's initiatives would "bring about the technological revolution he [was] hoping for." They were "more likely to foster simulation ('new' products which are not new), waste, and an acceleration in hidden inflation." Hewett guessed that "during 1987—1988, as the unattainability of the targets" in the twelfth five-year plan "became evident, the debate over economic

150

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

reform [would] once again gather speed. If Gorbachev [was] still General Secretary, and if he [was] willing to learn from experience, then in the 1990s, a truly interesting and far-reaching reform" could take shape.46 Political Cultural-Historicist Literature Political cultural-historicist Soviet experts tended, during the 1982—1985 period, to look at the Brezhnev succession and the possibility of Soviet change through a single intellectual prism—that of Russian political and cultural tradition. If realist scholars were fundamentally torn between the pessimism of the American neoconservative movement and the optimism inherent in the leadership transition taking place in Moscow, political cultural-historicist Sovietologists showed no such ambivalence. Rather, they seemed to interpret Soviet politics in an elemental anti-Soviet light. Many political cultural-historicist scholars argued that Brezhnev's passing would not eliminate the Soviet threat against the West but, rather, would intensify it. Concerning the possibility of fundamental reform occurring in the USSR, including the adoption of western-style political and economic institutions, many of these scholars agreed with RAND Corporation consultant Paul B. Henze that Soviet backwardness was endemic and that it was "difficult to find any field where important trends in the USSR and the U.S. [were] converging." Indeed, the productivity of American agriculture and "the dynamism of the industrial and service sectors" of the U.S. economy stood "in sharp contrast to the situation in the Soviet empire."47 Henze saw the USSR as stable, but in a "brittle" sort of way; it was "durable" but "inflexible. Only a foolhardy [scholar] could rate this empire as a strong prospect for survival into the 21st century without basic change," he concluded. Henze's argument typified the critiques of most political cultural-historicists from 1982 through 1985. While many of these scholars focused almost exclusively on pessimistic data and trends suggestive of regime instability or collapse, more positive indicators of Soviet modernization and urbanization, educational attainment, increased citizen participation in civic life, and productive capability were like the Holmesian dog that did not bark: they were glaring in their omission. At the same time, Henze's analysis—like the arguments of other political cultural historicist scholars—was a significant, if backhanded, admission that reform was necessary. Several political cultural-historicist writings on Soviet domestic and foreign policy, from 1982 through 1985, will now be examined. In 1983, Walter Laqueur traced a fundamental continuity from Tsarist thought to Soviet military doctrine. Like its Russian predecessor, the Red Army "has always emphasized quantitative superiority because of the suspicion of qualitative inferiority," he noted. "This was Stalin's prescription" for military and industrial backwardness, "and it persists" today. Laqueur defined the parameters of Soviet military intentions accordingly: Moscow sought "to avert war" with the West, but the leaders "believe[d] that the antagonism between the two world systems [was]

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

151

irreconcilable and [could not] be removed by good will and cooperation." Indeed, "even Communist countries [could not] be trusted unless they [were] under [Moscow's] direct control. A Communist North America would [still] be a formidable antagonist" and "perhaps even a more dangerous one." Thus, the U.S.-Soviet rivalry would "continue in the foreseeable future," Laqueur noted. "[T]he prospect for a radical improvement in [East-West] relations [was] nonexistent."48 Laqueur acknowledged that the USSR's political and economic problems were serious, but he believed that "a modern dictatorship," like the Andropov regime, had "powerful instruments with which to assuage, to suppress protest, to postpone the day of reckoning for a very long time." The scholar dismissed the idea that a Soviet economic crisis might prompt reform. Rather, the USSR would "muddle through." The only changes that Andropov or his successors would introduce would be "palliatives"—mild political and economic improvements "unlikely to affect the deeper source of the evil." They might get the Soviet Union "through another decade," but the bureaucracy would not tolerate deeper reforms that threatened its interests.49 Laqueur believed that the USSR was still a totalitarian state and that it would remain so in the foreseeable future: "[N]o [internal] dissent [was] tolerated which [would] endanger the perpetuation of the regime" or the CPSU's hold on power. Thus, "basic political reform [was] not possible in the short or mediumrange perspective." Still, Laqueur acknowledged that "in circumstances which no one can foresee today the Soviet Union might several decades from now begin to transform itself." Indeed, the USSR's "profoundly Utopian faith [is] bound to founder eventually," as it clashes with Moscow's economic difficulties. In addition, a few minor economic reforms could take place quickly—for example, Moscow's "resistance to some harmless western fashions, intellectual or sartorial, might cease." But the scholar was emphatic: "[TJhere are no cogent grounds for believing that economic reform or the introduction of rock music will [prompt] a democratization of Soviet politics."50 Hedrick Smith's The Russians (1976, 1983), and David K. Shipler's Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (1984), belong to what Michael Mandelbaum calls "the Russian travel book" genre. These books shared a common image of the USSR as "ominous, exotic and virtually impenetrable"—their authors saw Soviet society as "cut off from the rest of the world."51 Although most of these accounts were balanced in tone and avoided vilifying the Soviet Union, there was a self-fulfilling quality in the way they popularized the notion that the USSR was starkly different from the United States—mysterious, unknowable, and unchangeable. This Sovietological agnosticism became a kind of logical trap, for as long as readers—including policy makers and scholars—subscribed to this view of a "different" and "unknowable" Soviet Union, they could not acknowledge that reform was possible. Essentially unaltered since it was first published in 1976, Hedrick Smith's work characterized the modern-day Soviet state as a cultural and historical continuation of Tsarist Russia. "Russia is a very old nation, but we are quick to

152

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

forget its past when we think about its present and its future," the New York Times journalist noted. Indeed, "the longer I stayed in Moscow, the less impressed I was by how Communist the country was and the more I thought how Russian it was." The journalist saw "nothing new" in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s: it was "the same under the Tsars," and its citizens were "the same people." Accordingly, the USSR would neither collapse nor change. Moscow's economy had shown "considerable resiliency and durability in spite of internal strains and outside pressures," Smith added, "just as Russian national character had [withstood a] determined Bolshevik drive to transform the old realities into the new Soviet man and Communist society." Thus, economic reforms would not work, because the Soviet bureaucracy would sabotage or dismantle them and because the leadership feared that "a dispersal of power" would polarize ethnic Russians and other nationalities. As for political reform, the western democratic model was "simply too foreign for Russians accustomed to authoritarian rule" to adopt.52 The growth of Soviet ethnonationalism was troubling, but Moscow would successfully bottle it up, Smith thought; despite "a global trend toward selfdetermination, the Kremlin [had] effectively managed nationality frictions" in the past, "through a mixture of repression, measured tolerance for cultural diversity, and constant appeals to Soviet national pride and power." Such methods probably would work in the future as well. Smith cited a number of statistics and data that suggested a Soviet collapse or ameliorative change were equally possible, but he warned western observers not to "overread" the implications of such data.53 Soviet leaders were "skillful at rallying their populace to bear unusual hardships," and citizens were accustomed to deprivation and suffering. Thus, there was "no reason to expect that the ancient patterns of Russian life will be fundamentally altered." In 1984, David K. Shipler of the New York Times characterized Soviet society as pluralistic, sophisticated, and significantly "more complex than it appears from outside." The political thinking was "more extensive, the literature and theater and film more creative and truthful, [and] the press more critical than Americans imagine," he argued. But instead of concluding from this evidence, as we would expect, that the Soviet system was undergoing profound change, Shipler pronounced the USSR unknowable and unfathomable. Like so many other western writers, he invoked Winston Churchill's metaphor of Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Soviet officials and citizens went to great "lengths to foil discovery," he wrote. "Every foreigner who approaches Soviet life" is like one of Kipling's "blind men who grope against an elephant and draw conclusions from what they happen to touch: the tail like a rope, the leathery ear, the leg as thick and rough as a tree."54 Thus, for Shipler, the USSR was a kind of Cartesian sensation: it was defined largely in the mind of the beholder. Who could say whether or not Soviet change was possible? According to Shipler, the USSR was fundamentally unlike the United States; lying was second nature to Russian and Soviet political culture. "Nothing in Communist rule has diminished the insularity that thrived under the Tsars," or

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

153

"the compulsion to mask unpleasantness," the journalist wrote. "[DJissembling was much more than mere censorship from above; it was a profound aversion to the western habit of turning the darkest defects of society into the sunlight for ruthless scrutiny." Americans' "delight in self-criticism" incited within Russians a "visceral revulsion." Shipler concluded that, ultimately, the appearance of pluralism in Soviet society was a mirage. Despite the spectacle of "Muscovites clamoring for places at a performance of the London Symphony," or "craving [for] travel to the West," and despite Soviet citizens' love of western literature and all things American, the Soviets were antipathetic to the ideals of freedom and democracy. Far from wanting to become westernized, they were frightened by what they saw of American life and political culture, said Shipler. The Soviet people's fascination with the West reflected their instinctive curiosity to look through a cultural window—"even if [they did not] like wha[t they saw] on the other side". Life in the United States seemed "chaotic" to the Russian people, Shipler added. Politically, Americans seemed "disorderly, directionless, frighteningly disharmonious." Economically, the United States was diverse and decentralized but also "insecure, uncertain, [and] dangerously unpredictable." Socially, the United States was "riven by street crime and racial conflict. It [made] a terrifying spectacle." Thus, few Russians favored "a free press, free elections, open debate, and individual liberties."55 In 1984, Harvard University historian Richard Pipes argued that the Soviet Union was radically different from the United States and the West because of its strong ties to Russian political and religious culture. "Russia adopted Christianity not from Rome," as the West did, "but from Byzantium," Pipes wrote. Alienated from both the Roman Church and Islam, Russians "viewed themselves as culturally unique and not as members of a larger international community." As a result, Russians felt "isolated and under permanent siege."56 These traits carried over into the Soviet period, Pipes believed; until recently, Russians knew little about "the rights of private ownership," a notion that was fundamental in the West. Moreover, Russia's "feudal tradition" left it devoid of the rule of law "as a force superior to human will." Admittedly, "socialism originated in the West"—but Soviet-style totalitarianism appeared only in the USSR, the scholar insisted; thus, the harshness of Soviet politics derived not from socialism but from Russian political culture. Pipes depicted the USSR as a large and powerful "political conglomerate with [an] insatiable appetite for territorial acquisitions" that "nothing short of [world domination] will ever appease." The Harvard University historian rejected the primacy of ideology as a cause of Soviet expansionism. Moscow's rulers were "cynic[s] who [viewed people as] driven exclusively by selfinterest" and dismissed any other motive "as humbug."57 Relating Soviet Third World adventurism to Russia's repressive past, Pipes argued that expansion was used to legitimize the regime; in turn, Moscow's heavy hand gave leaders the freedom to do whatever they wanted in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, without having to worry about domestic constraints.

154

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

According to Pipes, one of the defining characteristics of the Russian past was its "propensity for imperialism. [EJxcept for brief intervals when domestic difficulties forced it to turn inward, [Russia] has been expanding since the fourteenth century with extraordinary vigor." Thus, Soviet foreign policy was not prompted by defensive considerations or legitimate national interest concerns. "[F]ar from being the victim of recurrent aggression, Russia has, [over the span of several centuries, instigated] aggressive wars, and if anyone has reason for paranoia it would be its neighbors."58 Indeed, Pipes argued, Moscow had "the unique ability to impose tight control over [its] own domain while destabilizing the enemy's." In retrospect, this claim stretched credulity: throughout the Cold War, the USSR struggled to keep the lid on its East European empire, and virtually all of Moscow's efforts to destabilize western governments were ineffective. Pipes acknowledged that the USSR faced many significant economic and political crises during the 1970s and 1980s that pointed to a need for systemic change. These included the Soviet Union's "declining economic growth," the burgeoning of a "second" economy, corruption, "political dissent, and the demographic decline of Slavs." Even more alarming was the diminished Soviet living standard. Whereas an American family with an average income had to spend 23 percent of its household budget for food purchases, the average Soviet family spent 54.5 percent of its income on food. This figure represented "a higher proportion" than that spent in Greece and Portugal and exceeded what it had cost a Russian family to feed itself in 1900. The scholar concluded that "the sheer difficulty of obtaining food," which was "the most basic indicator of living standard, [made] mockery of [Soviet] comparisons" with the West"; economically, the USSR had "never been self-sufficient" and now was "less so than ever." Nevertheless, Pipes wrote, declining "economic growth does not auger catastrophe"; the Soviet Union was not about to collapse because of its domestic troubles."59 Alarmed by Moscow's "grand strategy" of dividing the West and destabilizing the Third World through military intimidation and subversion, Pipes wanted Washington to apply firm pressure on the Soviet regime so as to prod it toward reform, or perhaps, dissolution. To be sure, such intervention went well beyond George F. Kennan's old "containment" doctrine: the USSR would "become less aggressive only as a result of failures and worries about its ability to govern effectively," Pipes noted. "[S]hort of the most painful kind of crisis," nothing would change. Thus, Pipes called on U.S. leaders to aggravate Moscow's economic situation by denying it badly needed goods and credits. By "assisting] those economic and political forces [that were already] at work undermining the system," Washington could help neutralize the Soviet threat. But the scholar worried that the Soviet Union's political and military goals were all too likely to be achieved, due to American weakness. Absent U.S. power, the USSR would so dominate the world militarily "that opposition to its wishes [by] any other 'socialist republic' would be inconceivable."60 Pipes believed that detente had weakened America by tilting the East-West

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

155

military balance in Moscow's favor. U.S.-Soviet relations during the 1970s were based on a mere "patchwork of commonsensical opinions" that had never been examined critically, he argued. The key assumption "behind detente held that if [the West] lavished economic benefits on the Soviet Union, [Moscow] would develop [a] powerful interest" in easing Cold War tensions. But this was nonsense: despite Moscow's chronic need of western economic assistance, the United States should not—as long as the USSR remained its chief military rival—provide any help to Moscow, because such aid would only strengthen the Red Army. Like Ulam, Pipes was convinced that "the line separating the [Soviet] military and civilian economies [was] so indistinct as to be meaningless." Indeed, the Kremlin leaders saw "the entire national economy as potentially destined for military ends"—it was "a war economy operating on a moderate level of mobilization." Thus, Pipes dismissed as illusory the old chestnut of two separate Soviet economies—a military production pipeline manufacturing high quality, technologically advanced equipment, and a civilian sector turning out inferior products. "The civilian and defense sectors [were so] intertwined," he argued, that even the Kremlin did not know "how much it allocate[d] to the one and how much to the other."61 Pipes thought that Moscow felt it had "to hold on" to its East European "colonies." But the cost of doing so was rising rapidly—from $18 billion per year in 1971 to $41 billion in 1980. The Harvard University historian acknowledged that the USSR faced a serious nationalities problem, but he did not view it as destabilizing in the short term. Still, ethnonationalistic tensions could hamper the Soviet Union's "long-term prospects," he warned ominously. Pluralist Literature Much like the political cultural-historicists, and unlike realist scholars, pluralist Sovietologists managed to avoid getting caught up in the tension between the pessimism of official Washington and the optimism of events in Moscow. Rejecting the neoconservative ideology that had captivated so many American Soviet experts during the late 1970s and early 1980s, pluralists concentrated on the bright prospects of the Brezhnev succession and the sure signs of Soviet change. Whereas many hard realist and political cultural-historicist Sovietologists had depicted the Kremlin leaders as ruthless and saw detente as a vehicle for the exercise of Soviet perfidy, pluralist Soviet experts insisted that reform was possible in the USSR and, ironically, that it was not Moscow but American neoconservatives who did not want harmonious Soviet-American relations. Many pluralist scholars agreed with Robert H. Donaldson's assessment that the new post-Brezhnev leaders "differed] from their elders in several significant respects." Their "formative experiences [were] rooted in de-Stalinization" and the Khrushchev reforms. Well educated and materially secure, these new men were "confident in [Soviet] power and accomplishments], [uncomfortable with idle sloganeering, and embarrassed" by the current "inertia and drift."62 In short, the pluralists concluded, Brezhnev's successors would be "impatient [for]

156

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

change." During the period from 1982 through 1985, Princeton University Sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen wrote and edited several works in which he underscored the idea that political and economic reform was not new or foreign to the USSR. In An End to Silence (1982), Cohen traced the growing influence of Soviet samizdat literature—particularly Roy Medvedev's underground journal, Political Diary, which ran from 1964 through 1971—on the CPSU elite and on intellectuals. The scholar cited a "fractious" April 25, 1969 discussion between Marxist and Slavophile Soviet literary critics—"all of them in good official standing" politically—which demonstrated the presence of "fundamental conflicts behind the official facade" of party unity and pointed to the rich pluralism that existed among the Soviet elite. Thus, while "outwardly official Soviet life, especially the [CPSU], censored press, and Marxist-Leninist ideology," seemed "monolithic," it was actually "quite different—a world of conflicting political groups, programs, and ideologies."63 Cohen cited the existence of samizdat, open dissent, and other "public assertion of political liberties" as an early and "significant" sign of change "in a country where for decades citizens, including the outspoken intelligentsia, were silenced by terror." Admittedly, "dissident activities involve[d] only a tiny minority of the populace," which was "overwhelmingly conformist" and did not pose a "political threat," the Princeton University Sovietologist noted. But samizdat was singularly important because it was "in these 'publications' that an uncensored debate" about the USSR's "political past, present, and future [was] finally taking place, and where the nation's diverse traditions, social currents, and political spectrum [had] emerged in open conflict."64 Samizdat literature did not exist apart from Soviet officialdom or the ruling CPSU, Cohen emphasized; Medvedev's influential journal was edited by and intended for party members and intellectuals, and its "purpose was to promote democratic socialist reform inside the party." Cohen considered the question of whether "meaningful reform" could take place in the "tenaciously authoritarian, habitually repressive" political environment of the USSR, where "the Stalinist past still hovers over the Soviet present." Following the death of Brezhnev and the promotion of Yuri Andropov, two erroneous opinions emerged among American Soviet experts. "Either no change was possible because the Soviet dictatorship never changes," Cohen recalled, or "everything depended on Andropov because all power [was] concentrated" in his office. But "in fact, fundamental changes, for better and for worse, have occurred throughout Soviet history."65 Thus, under Khrushchev, "mass terror ended, political prisoners were released, consumer and welfare provisions [received] higher official priority, intellectual life was made freer," and the USSR "moved from Cold War toward detente," Cohen insisted. Khrushchev's initiatives "improved virtually every aspect of Soviet life." In essential agreement with Carl A. Linden, Cohen saw Khrushchev as a bold reformer who contradicted Soviet and western assumptions that the USSR could not change. While many of the general secretary's "reforms were re-

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

157

versed by his successors," Soviet "officials] and citizen[s] still benefited] from his lasting achievement: the considerable de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union." The Princeton University Sovietologist noted that Khrushchev's economic reforms had "challenged" both "Soviet conservatives who insisted] that the system should not or dare not change" and "western cold warriors" who argued that it could not change.66 Although U.S. observers had often insisted that "no [reformist] leader [could] rise to the top of the Soviet system" and that MarxismLeninism was "too rigid and sterile to inspire [innovation], Khrushchev's career" proved otherwise, Cohen concluded. Following Khrushchev's ouster, "many liberal-minded Soviet citizens" became disheartened—particularly after a new round of counter-reforms and repressions was launched by Khrushchev's successors. These citizens saw the USSR as "corrupt" and doubted whether significant change could come from within the CPSU or Soviet ideology, Cohen noted. Yet the reformist dream endured because the limited Khrushchev innovations demonstrated "that enlightened forces [did] exist" in the CPSU; that Moscow would, "in the right circumstances, respond positively to the country's social and political problems; and that Communist ideology [could] inspire a more humane socialism."67 Thus, "the defeat of reform" under Brezhnev was "a bitter disappointment," but it was "only a stage in an ongoing struggle for change inside the Soviet system." Although it was far from certain that Khrushchev's reforms would have been maintained even under the most favorable of domestic and international circumstances, Cohen guessed that Washington's fiery anti-Soviet rhetoric contributed to their reversal by unwittingly bolstering the argument of the "metal eaters"— Soviet military-industrial leaders opposed to the general secretary's military reductions—that the United States was a dangerous imperialist enemy and that Khrushchev's consumerist policies were weakening their country. For Cohen, "the Stalin question" was inextricably linked to the issue of Soviet reform, because inherent in the old dictator's legacy was a "stubborn resistance to change" that remained "the central feature of official political life" throughout the Cold War. Thus, Soviet reformers condemned Stalin's legacy "in virtually every area of policy," Cohen recalled. Not unrelatedly, many American Sovietologists underestimated the possibility of Soviet change during the 1970s and 1980s because they were aware of past failed reform efforts, such as the Brezhnev-Kosygin economic initiatives of October 1965, and were frightened by the popular resurgence of neo-Stalinist sentiment in the USSR. Cohen was not particularly alarmed by neo-Stalinism, which he viewed as a conservative backlash against cultural diversity, consumer shortages, public drunkenness, and other modern social and political problems. After all, Stalinism was a "product of specific historical circumstances and a special kind of autocratic personality" that "have passed from the scene."68 Cohen disputed the notion that, in Flora Lewis's words, "[T]he Soviet system has had one great success in building military power and has failed in everything else." Despite Moscow's economic and social problems, the Soviet system had not "failed to deliver on its basic domestic promises over the years," the

158

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Sovietologist noted. Indeed, Soviet stability hinged on a kind of "social contract" between the state and the people—and Moscow had kept its end of the bargain. Between 1950 and 1980, per capita consumption had tripled, and "ordinary citizens live[d] better than ever before."69 The fact that these accomplishments came at a high price, and that Soviet living standards were still inferior to American ones, was "beside the point": Soviet citizens knew that these "provisions did not exist fifty years ago," and "they regard[ed] them as major achievements of the system, as Communist promises at least partially fulfilled." Cohen acknowledged that past achievements would not solve present problems or satisfy future generations, but to assume that the USSR was about to collapse or become unstable was "to underestimate the system's reformist potential and popular support." Cohen rejected the political cultural-historicist idea that the United States could or should force Moscow to pursue reform "through relentless cold war, an uncontrolled arms race," and the application of economic or political pressure. "The United States does not have the wisdom, the power, or the right to intervene in internal Soviet politics," he noted, and any "attempts to do so will cause more harm than good." Cohen enjoined his American readers to stop deceiving themselves about Soviet "crises" and instead "ask why a system with so many problems is so stable."70 The Sovietologist believed that there had always existed a latent "reformist impulse" in the USSR—even at the height of Stalin's authoritarian tenure. Accordingly, he cited the "early strivings" of Stalin's lieutenants "toward a 'Moscow Spring'" as "official antecedents" of Khrushchev's reforms in the 1950s and 1960s—as the general secretary himself "tacitly acknowledged by [launching] an investigation of Kirov's assassination and by rehabilitating Voznesensky." Moreover, by "forcibly abolishing]" the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1929, Stalin "inadvertently created a historical model, [a] lost alternative, for future Communist reformers," Cohen argued. Since then, NEP has "exercised a powerful appeal to anti-Stalinist reformers" throughout the Communist world. When Stalin died in 1953, this reformist potential became a full-fledged movement, and a decade of Soviet innovation was "unleashed. Virtually [all] of Soviet life was improved": mass terror ended; "millions of prison camp survivors and exiles" were exonerated; "educated society began participating] more fully in political, intellectual, and cultural life"; various "economic, welfare, and legal reforms were carried out"; and "major revisions were made in censorship practices, in the official ideology and in foreign policy." Indeed, the "Khrushchev leadership [was] only part of a much broader [Soviet] reformist movement." Significantly, this Soviet reform movement continued under Brezhnev. Cohen noted that many of Khrushchev's initiatives in "consumerism, agriculture, legal proceduralism, detente, [and the] repudiation of Stalin[ism were] incorporated into the new conservatism."71 Reform-minded officials "at middle and lower levels" of the bureaucracy continued to influence policy, and their appeals for economic reforms and decentralization, the relaxation of censorship,

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

159

and other liberalizations "appear[ed] in the Soviet press throughout the 1970s." In the 1980s, these "reformist calls became bolder and more persuasive"—even as social, political, and economic problems mounted. What eventually emerged was a broad "coalition for change" composed of both reformers and conservatives within the ruling elite. According to University of Illinois at Chicago Sovietologist Rasma Karklins, "the nationality factor" was virtually ignored in western Soviet studies during the Cold War years, because of both the "neglect accorded to all domestic sources of Soviet foreign policy making," and "a widespread insensitivity to the role of ethnicity" in Soviet politics. Despite the "prevailing tendency of westerners to speak of 'Russia' when referring to the Soviet Union," the USSR was "both a multinational and a federal state," Karklins noted, "and these characteristics ha[d] major consequences" for Soviet domestic and foreign politics.72 Another reason for western apathy toward Soviet ethnonationalism had to do with the successful efforts of Soviet propagandists who "consistently convey[ed] the image of complete harmony among the peoples of the USSR in order to hold [the Soviet Union] up as a shining model" before the world. This "complete harmony" line was unwittingly reinforced by the popularity of the totalitarianism model, which endured among many western Sovietologists even in the face of strong evidence that communism was not monolithic, and that interest groups, conflict, and pluralism existed in the USSR. In effect, western scholars took Moscow's denials of a Soviet nationalities problem at face value and were surprised to learn how fragmented the Soviet Union really was. Karklins noted that "the cautious and defensive impulse of the USSR" regarding its borderlands reflected not only the presence of "non-Russian peoples with autonomous aspirations" in these areas but also "irredentist claims" by China, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. While all of the Soviet nationalities "constitute^] a latent source of tension," the Islamic Central Asian republics were a special problem for Moscow. "Soviet efforts to pose as a friend of Islam and as a champion of anti-imperialism" were undermined by the Red Army's "occupation of Afghanistan, which [was] denounced by virtually all Muslim and Third World countries." Moreover, it was difficult to reconcile Islam with Soviet ideology and practice, since many beliefs that were "strongly held" in Muslim regions—including "ideas about the benefits of selfdetermination" and warnings against "non-indigenous modernizing influences"—would threaten "Soviet rule if transmitted to the USSR." Indeed, the "radical and fundamentalist teachings" that swept through "Iran and other Islamic countries would have an explosive effect if they were to spread to the USSR," Karklins said.73 Multiethnicity had a perverse effect on Soviet military readiness during the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Many of the units sent to Afghanistan had a strong Muslim component" and had to be "pulled out and replaced by Russian units a few months later." In addition, there were reports of "ethnic tension between Muslim soldiers and European officers, that desertions had occurred, and that the Afghans had begun to exert religious and political influence" on the Islamic

160

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

troops. Analogous concerns "about a potential lack of loyalty on the part of Soviet Central Asians" deployed along the USSR border with China had retarded Soviet adventurism in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Similar constraints would dampen Soviet militarism along other non-Russian borders, Karklins noted. In 1983, George Washington University Sovietologist Carl A. Linden characterized Soviet politics as a kind of "ideocratic despotism"—a phrase that conveyed the primacy of ideology and its resemblance to theocratic "dogma and power." The USSR was no less despotic in the early 1980s than it was in Stalin's time, Linden insisted. "[T]he repressive practice of the party-state continued" for more than sixty years, "despite [a] succession of leaders from Lenin to Andropov, and despite [policy] shifts and major changes [in] Soviet society." Indeed, throughout Soviet history, "the party-state ruled its subjects without their consent and denied them any voice [in judging] its rule."74 Although he was sharply critical of the Soviet party-state, Linden distinguished his views from those of Richard Pipes and other political culturalhistoricist scholars by noting that it was Marxism-Leninism itself, and not Russian tradition, that gave the USSR its distinctive repressive and despotic character. "The capacity of the party-state to implant itself in various parts of the world shows that the [popular] view that despotism [arose] out of Russian political tradition and not western Marxism is inadequate on its face," the Sovietologist argued. "Rather, something like a reinforcement of the potentials for [repression], both in Marxian ideology and in the diverse political cultures where it has taken root" was at work. In other words, Russian culture was not totalitarian or unchanging; these traits came with Marxism, a western ideological construct. Although the USSR "energetically] projected] an image of internal unity to the outside world," the Soviet party-state was riven by the same factional politics and "cleavages" that were found in other variants of ideocratic rule, Linden noted. In effect, the party-state functioned as a kind of "pressure cooker": it tried to "suppresfs]" and destroy "class-based forces in society," by "compressing] the diverse social and national elements within it striving to break free."75 Factional and oppositional currents had always existed in Soviet politics, Linden added; every leadership turnover in Soviet history was the result of struggle and rivalry within the CPSU. Although "Lenin had dominated the party, he was constantly embroiled in conflicts." His anti-factional decree of 1921 (ironically!) "opened the way for Stalin's buildup of his faction's power." Khrushchev "rose to power" and ruled amid "factional struggle." Brezhnev tried to avoid Khrushchev's mistakes, but he too, and Andropov after him, faced opposition in their rise to power and during their rule. Linden rejected the idea of a Soviet social contract and its tacit assumption that if the rulers and the ruled both kept their end of the bargain, the Soviet Union would remain stable and not change. Indeed, "the absence of a genuine reciprocal relation between the system and its subjects" was responsible for the current "difficulties troubling the Soviet imperium and its East European orbit," he noted; "the defect in the ruler-ruled relationship" was fairly obvious. Linden concluded that "the massive Soviet military forces and domestic police [we]re

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

161

imposing in aspect and prompted] controversy as to whether the [USSR was] as strong as it lookfed], or whether its [commanding appearance] concealed] a systemic vulnerability."76 Through his consumerist orientation and efforts to change the Soviet system, Khrushchev tried to bridge the gap separating the regime and the populace. Linden saw the general secretary as a reformer and a kind of political hero figure, for despite his inconsistent policies, he tried to alleviate the harshest and most despotic aspects of Soviet life, and he shifted "the party's focus from ideocratic to mundane economic managerial functions." Moreover, Khrushchev "combined [his] attack on Stalinism with a revival of the Utopian goals of Marxism, invoking [a] vision of a coercionless Communist society as a basis for relaxing] the internal regime." But Brezhnev rebuffed Khrushchev's efforts and "made the retrenchment and consolidation of the party-state his first task." Disagreeing sharply with Cohen and Jerry F. Hough, Linden did not see Brezhnev as a reformer but as a Stalinist dictator who reimposed many of the coercive and repressive aspects of the Soviet system that Khrushchev had removed.77 Further, Brezhnev expanded the Red Army and tightened secret police controls. Thus, in the end, Khrushchev's reforms "rested on sound intuition," but Brezhnev's "immobilism" postponed problems or aggravated them. Concerning the Soviet future, Linden thought that the system and its rulers would soon face an existential crisis, possibly triggered by the various nationalist currents that were simmering uneasily during the early-to-mid 1980s. "In the not distant future," he speculated, the leaders would have to change their "manner of rule" or risk "an upheaval." Yet the inherent inability of Soviet ideology to give up control imposed severe limits on how much a Leninist Soviet Union would actually change. Leninism provided no "practical wisdom" about how to limit, loosen, or redistribute power; its authoritarianism and antidemocratic temper, rooted in Lenin's distrust of the people, militated against wholesale reforms. Still, Linden hoped that some change would occur. In his classic study of Soviet-American relations during the 1970s and early 1980s, Raymond L. Garthoff argued that pluralism and strong policy differences continued to energize USSR politics as well as the discussions of Soviet officials, writers, and scholars. Garthoff disagreed with Richard Pipes, who viewed Soviet newspaper articles and other journalistic works as monolithic and consistent expressions of Kremlin intentions. Contrary to western opinion, "veiled reflections of real policy differences [did] appear in the Soviet media," he insisted. "[M]oreover, there [were] significant differences in the weight given to various Soviet authors and publications. Some reflected] institutional interests," while "others reflected] political constituencies." In addition, "differences in viewpoint and schools of thought exist[ed] in the Soviet academic institutions and press." Western analysts had to "familiarize themselves with these considerations" and weigh "the standing of the author, [the] intended audience, and [the] purposes of any Soviet statement" they read. They could not unthinkingly take every Soviet writing at face value and accept—or reject—its argument merely because it originated in Moscow.78

162

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Regarding the superpower rivalry, Garthoff acknowledged that "MarxistLeninist expectations of the ultimate victory of socialism made it difficult for Soviet leaders to cast doubt on that victory by admitting the catastrophic consequences of a world nuclear war." Still, Moscow wanted "to avert war through peaceful coexistence," the Sovietologist argued; it recognized that "in the nuclear age, war would mean an incalculable disaster" for the USSR and a "setback for world socialism." Indeed, the Soviet leaders believed that it was the West that had "a proclivity to resort to military force to extend [its] strategic, political, and economic interests." Thus, "while aiming to end war," the Soviets "insisted loudly that peaceful coexistence [did] not mean an end to 'class struggle,'" Garthoff noted; rather, "peaceful coexistence and detente [would] aid socialist revolutionary class struggle."79 Garthoff emphasized that this was no new element in Moscow's strategy: the pursuit of peaceful coexistence and the prevention of war had "been [a part of] official Soviet doctrine since the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961." Upon assuming power in 1964, Brezhnev stated that "peaceful coexistence [would] enable the success of the liberation struggle and the achievement of the revolutionary tasks of people." In the 1970s and 1980s, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko all argued unequivocally that, quoting Brezhnev, "there [was] no need for war between states" for "the revolutionary aims of Communism in the world" to come about. In particular, nuclear war was "a danger to all mankind" and "must not be permitted." Indeed, Garthoff concluded, "many Soviet commentaries have reiterated this position," and it should have been taken seriously by the West. CONCLUSION: GETTING THE SOVIET UNION (MOSTLY) WRONG In the waning days of Konstantin Chemenko's year in office and on the eve of Gorbachev's rise to power, the predominant American scholarly expectation was that the Soviet Union would "muddle down." Reading the Sovietological literature of the 1970s and 1980s, we are struck by the extent to which the need for major Soviet change was recognized by realist, political cultural-historicist, and pluralist scholars alike. Yet most U.S. Soviet experts did not expect reform to be introduced in the USSR anytime soon, and many did not seem to want any kind of Soviet change to occur. Few American Sovietologists thought that a genuine reformer would come to power in the Soviet Union, or, if one did, that his policy proposals would accomplish anything significant, but nearly every Soviet expert who wrote during the 1982through-1985 years speculated in some way about the need for, and the difficulty of achieving, Soviet political and economic reform. Virtually all of the Sovietological writings discussed in these pages refer to at least some of the eighteen indices of Soviet change that we highlighted in Chapter 1. These trends, and a good amount of other data suggestive of reform, were evident to American Soviet experts throughout the early 1980s—yet many of these scholars drew no hard conclusions from them. Indeed, most of the real-

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

163

ist, political cultural-historicist, and pluralist literature of this time frame was more cautious, qualified, and pessimistic about Soviet change than the writings of Kennan, Brzezinski, and Hough, examined in Chapter 2. How well did the Sovietological writings of this period respond to the evidence of Soviet change? Nearly all scholars, representing every Sovietological category, emphasized geopolitical events as well as the uncertainties of the Brezhnev succession in their writings, and most viewed Moscow's slowed GNP and production growth, and the worsening Soviet living standards and consumption rates, with alarm. In addition, many realist Sovietologists of this period focused on Soviet modernization, demographic shifts, and the problem of antiquated technology, while a number of political cultural-historicist scholars found ethnonationalism, worker apathy, Soviet health problems, and declining mortality statistics especially compelling. In turn, pluralists saw citizen participation in political life, reformative Soviet and Russian traditions, responsible Soviet crisis management and arms control behavior, polycentrism, and the political reawakening of Eastern Europe as sure signs that innovative change was possible. If the U.S. Sovietological literature of the 1982-1985 years failed to properly interpret the Chapter 1 evidence of Soviet change, this lapse was perhaps understandable in light of the prevailing anti-Sovietism of the Reagan administration and the American Cold War consensus. Still, there was a certain worldweariness about many of these writings; their authors understood almost reflexively that after five decades, the Cold War had become institutionalized, and East-West hostilities were easier to aggravate than terminate. The terms reform and innovation were not in these scholars' vocabulary. In Marshall I. Goldman's colorful metaphor, U.S. Soviet experts—no less than the Soviet leaders!—found themselves riding a tiger they could not dismount. Regarding the question of Soviet reform, a number of American Sovietologists minimized the likelihood of political and economic transformation occurring in the USSR during the 1982 through 1985 period, and many Soviet experts rejected even the possibility of such change. Thus, realist scholar Robert F. Byrnes introduced his 1983 collection of essays with a sweeping assertion. Not one of the essay contributors (Seweryn Bialer, Robert W. Campbell, Coit D. Blacker, Gail W. Lapidus, Maurice Friedberg, Andrzej Korbonski, Adam B. Ulam, and Byrnes himself), he noted, expected that the USSR would either become democratized or that it would collapse anytime soon. Moreover, they saw "very little likelihood" that the Soviet Union would "become a congenial, peaceful member of the international community."80 Indeed, these scholars expected the USSR to "remain [a] destabilizing element" internationally. Many Sovietologists were quick to dismiss Gorbachev's prospects as soon as he became general secretary. Angela Stent of Georgetown University warned that it was "very dangerous" to assume that the new leader would "be any more 'liberal or flexible' on foreign relations than his predecessors."81 Similarly, Peter Reddaway rejected the possibility that Gorbachev would institute significant changes. "You don't get into the Politburo by being a liberal," he said dryly.82

164

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

And Goldman complained that the general secretary's call for "an intensification of social production and the economy" was merely "a catch phrase meaning 'more discipline.'"83 The economist's forecast was dim: if Gorbachev "masters the system—rather than its mastering him—this may auger bold moves in domestic and foreign policy. Don't bet on it." But other scholars viewed Soviet change as eminently possible. Pluralist Stephen F. Cohen challenged the idea that detente was a temporary or new phenomenon in U.S.-Soviet relations. He recounted a fifty-year history of American efforts to achieve meaningful and peaceful relations with Moscow, from President Roosevelt's initial establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviets in 1933, to Eisenhower's talks with the Soviet Union in 1953 (ending U.S.Soviet confrontation in Austria and Korea), to Kennedy's call for renewed Washington-Moscow diplomacy in 1963, to the historic agreements forged by Nixon and Brezhnev in the early 1970s. Indeed, said Cohen, Americans "habitually found in the Soviet Union" what they wanted to see. Stalin's dictatorial "regime of the 1930s had many American admirers, while Brezhnev's far less repressive one had virtually none." In the immediate postwar years, "we exaggerated Soviet economic strength; now we underestimated it." Anticommunists and "Sovietophobes" argued "against all evidence, that no improvements have occurred" in the USSR, or they turned the improvements that had "occurred into new indictments. Thus, Soviet leaders [we]re not commended for allowing 260,000 Jews to emigrate since 1971, only condemned for not permitting more to leave."84 Cohen concluded that the U.S. tendency to demonize the Soviet Union and militarize the Cold War stemmed from a myopic understanding of diplomacy and detente. Similarly, Robert V. Daniels argued that the convoluted reasoning and hyperbolic statements that had characterized U.S.-Soviet relations during the early Cold War years turned many Soviet experts—policy makers and scholars alike—against the notion of Soviet reform. Malenkov's and Khrushchev's reforms—innovative as they were compared to the rigidity of Stalinism—were greeted with disinterest in Washington, the Sovietologist said. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles saw the new Soviet initiatives as a trick; indeed, most policy makers in the U.S. government remained committed to the idea of Moscow's intractable hostility toward the West. Daniels added that Washington's "containment" policy was actually working—the Soviets were softening their policies just as Kennan had predicted. Yet the Eisenhower administration could not tone down its harsh anti-Soviet rhetoric and suspicions.85 So effectively were these attitudes of mistrust cemented in place by the Cold War consensus of the 1950s that even three decades later, the Reagan administration could not take Gorbachev or his reforms seriously. The more the world changed, the more U.S. thinking about the Soviet Union remained the same. In their effort to contain Moscow, American Soviet experts succeeded in containing themselves.

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

165

The Co-optation of Sovietology Why did so many American Soviet experts fail to anticipate the possibility of reform taking place in the USSR? A number of prominent scholars, whose work we have examined at length in these pages, have argued pointedly that Cold War Sovietology was perversely influenced, or co-opted, by totalitarianism model thinking and the Cold War consensus. And it stands to reason that if Sovietologists themselves thought they were co-opted, some of them probably were. This explanation accords with Thomas S. Kuhn's account of why scholarly communities are often reticent to accept new and anomalous data. As Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus recalled, the Gorbachev reforms of the mid1980s "challenged the prevailing academic paradigms and conventional wisdom regarding the Soviet system. The initial Western reaction to the Gorbachev program was one of profound skepticism," the two scholars noted.86 "The widely held belief among U.S. Soviet experts was that "basic [Soviet] change was impossible and could not be carried out by people who had themselves grown up in and benefited from the system." Eventually, with the delegitimation of Communism in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a "scientific revolution" occurred in western Sovietology, as Soviet experts saw many of the familiar realities they had taken for granted—notably, the Cold War and the USSR—changing or evaporating. Stephen F. Cohen adds that Sovietology was politicized from its inception as a result of its dependence on government funding and the formation of an unhealthy "scholarly consensus" around the totalitarianism model. Wedded to this model, many Sovietologists "eliminated everything diverse and problematic from [their] subject," and Soviet studies became, in quick order, a kind of Kuhnian normal science that found it difficult to assimilate new information about the Soviet Union. "What belatedly infused new ideas into Sovietology was less its own intellectual dynamic than political changes in [Moscow] that the profession had not anticipated and could hardly explain" or ignore, Cohen said. The discipline of Sovietology came into being "during the worst years" of the East-West conflict, Cohen added, at a time when U.S.-Soviet relations "intruded into academ[ia both] politically and intellectually." The Cold War put a premium on "usable scholarship" that served Washington's policy interests and diminished "more detached academic pursuits." If most early Sovietologists were honorable and well-intentioned scholars, "many came to [their discipline through] wartime experience and [their] interest in 'national security,'" and not out "of an intellectual passion" for Soviet studies. These were joined by exCommunists who had more political zeal than expertise. Foundations subsidized general Russian studies, but the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency asked for—and only funded—"policy-related research." Scholars "established many open and reasonable relationships with government" during this time, "but also some that were covert and troublesome.

166

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

As a result, academic Soviet studies became, a highly politicized profession imbued with topical political concerns, a crusading spirit, and a know-the-enemy raison d'etre," Cohen concluded. It taught "its basic 'lessons' in a single voice, which fostered consensus and orthodoxy." This practice "narrowed the range of [acceptable] interpretations," and "minimized intellectual space to be criticalminded and wrong."87 Similarly, Alexander Motyl revealed that during much of the Cold War, the influx of government money into academic political science departments and Russian studies institutes went hand in hand with the government's attempt "to set Sovietology's research agenda" along policy-analysis lines.88 But this was a Faustian bargain for American universities, because "notwithstanding its importance for democratic government, policy analysis inclines Sovietologists to eschew the very stuff of theory—big questions with no simple answers." Analogously, Frederic J. Fleron and Eric P. Hoffmann argued that far too many U.S. scholars were focusing on short-term policy-oriented research during the Cold War years. Such analyses were "neither historically grounded nor farsighted"; they "place[d] heavy emphasis on current political personalities, toplevel power relationships, and international and domestic crises" and skimped "on the thinking and behavior of counter-elites and citizens; on underlying socioeconomic and scientific-technological trends; and on policy options, policy implementation, and policy outcomes at the national, regional, and local levels."89 In addition, such research was "more focused on means than ends, more speculative than analytical, more partial to simplistic than complex explanations," more eager for quick fixes than durable solutions, more accepting of official than independent views, and more cognizant of immediate than eventual political costs and consequences." According to scholar Raymond C. Taras, Cold War scholarship simply followed geopolitics and followed the money. Since the government was paying universities and think tanks for research pertaining to the Soviet threat, little attention was focused on the Baltic states or on the individual Soviet republics.90 Even as late as 1992, "western universities ha[d] trained few students in the languages spoken in the breakaway republics, making prospects for incisive empirical research not promising." The existence of a pervasive co-optative relationship between academic Sovietology and the government is also suggested by the career mobility many scholars enjoyed between these two environments. According to Jerry F. Hough, there existed, throughout the Cold War period, a virtual revolving door between American universities, think tanks, and government foreign policy and national security-related agencies and departments—and a number of Soviet experts moved repeatedly and often from one of these professional environments to another.91 Not only did Sovietologists move freely from academia to government and back again; this study argues, more perversely, that there was an insidious homogeneity of scholarly opinion within these settings. While there were significant distinctions between realist, political cultural-historicist, and pluralist points

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

167

of view, the scholarly differences between professors, researchers, and policy makers of the same Sovietological school were relatively slight. Thus, political cultural-historicists tended to think alike, whether they taught at a university or sat at a policy desk at the State Department—and the same was true of realists and pluralists. What this suggests is that Sovietological co-optation by government was endemic—both in the early Cold War years and in the 1970s and 1980s—if for no other reason than that all Sovietologists, regardless of the professional setting in which they worked, needed good data, and the government both supplied much of this data (for example, in unclassified CIA and Department of Defense studies) and controlled scholars' ability to acquire it on their own (through the tacit threat of denying research grants and passport renewals to researchers who stirred up trouble). If it is true that many scholars became policy makers, and in turn, that a significant number of government officials were also scholars, then we should expect that these professional communities courted and cooperated with one another as much they competed against each other. And it should come as no great surprise that academic Sovietologists were co-opted by policy-making interests, or that, as Cohen argued, this cozy relationship between government and the academy was as deleterious to good scholarship as it was commonplace.

NOTES 1. Coit D. Blacker, "Military Forces," in Robert F. Byrnes, ed., After Brezhnev: Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 162-164, 181. 2. Seweryn Bialer, "The Political System," in Robert F. Byrnes, ed., After Brezhnev, pp. 15,26-27. 3. Ibid., pp. 27, 32, 64-65. 4. Adam B. Ulam, Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970— 1982 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 62, 82, 95. 5. Ibid., pp. 132, 140,208,234. 6. Ibid., pp. 234, 309. 7. Adam B. Ulam, "Russian Nationalism," in Seweryn Bialer, ed., The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981), p. 14. 8. Adam B. Ulam, Dangerous Relations, pp. 21-23. 9. Ibid., pp. 312-313. 10. Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 13-14, 131, 152. 11. Ibid., pp. 25, 105, 115-116. 12. Ibid., pp. 83, 93-95. 13. Ibid., pp. 215-216. 14. Alvin Z. Rubinstein, Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II: Imperial and Global (Boston: Little, Brown., 1985), pp. viii-ix. 15. Ibid., pp. 83, 89. 16. Ibid., pp. 233, 244, 300, 305. 17. Ibid., pp. 306-307.

168

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

18. Marshall I. Goldman, USSR in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System (New York: W. W. Norton, Publishers, 1983), pp. 6-8. 19. Ibid., pp. 2, 33. 20. Ibid., pp. 54, 170, 182. 21. Marshall I. Goldman, "Gorbachev and Economic Reform," Foreign Affairs 64, no. 1 (fall 1985), pp. 57, 71. 22. Ibid., pp. 69-70, 72-73. 23. Marshall I. Goldman, USSR in Crisis, p. 119. 24. Ibid., pp. 43-44, 122-123, 174. 25. Ibid., pp. 92-93. 26. Ibid., pp. 92-93, 95-96, 111 27. Ibid., pp. 13, 18,88-89 28. Gertrude E. Schroeder, "Prospects for Economic Reform in the Soviet Union," in Helmut Sonnenfeldt, ed., Soviet Politics in the 1980s (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 85-88. 29. Ibid., pp. 92-93. 30. Roman Kolkowicz, "The Political Role of the Soviet Military," in Joseph L. Nogee, ed., Soviet Politics: Russia After Brezhnev (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985), pp. 66-67, 69. See also Nogee's introduction, p. xi. 31. Roman Kolkowicz, "The Military and Soviet Foreign Policy," in Roger E. Kanet, Soviet Foreign Policy in the 1980s (Praeger Publishers, 1982), pp. 18-19. 32. Robert V. Daniels, Russia: The Roots of Confrontation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 280-281, 358. 33. Ibid., pp. 360, 362, 364-365. 34. Ibid., pp. 289, 296. 35. Ibid., p. 339. 36. Ibid., pp. 357-358, 362-364, 368-369. 37. Robert F. Byrnes, "Critical Choices in the 1980s," in Robert F. Byrnes, ed., After Brezhnev, p. 427. 38. Thane Gustafson, "The Andropov Accession," in Helmut Sonnenfeldt, ed., Soviet Politics, pp. 11, 15. 39. William G. Hyland, "Kto Kogo in the Kremlin," cited in Soviet Succession: Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 69, 73-74. 40. William G. Hyland, "The Gorbachev Succession," in Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: Politics and People (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution, 1991), pp. 11-15, 18. 41. Gail W. Lapidus, The Nationality Problem and the Soviet Future (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, December 15, 1983), pp. 3, 5— 10. 42. Ibid., pp. 28-29. 43. Gail W. Lapidus, "Social Trends," in Robert F. Byrnes, ed., After Brezhnev, pp. 186-192, 196. 44. Ibid., pp. 242, 246. 45. Gail W. Lapidus, "Soviet Politics in the 1980s: Strains, Dissatisfactions, and Diversity," in Helmut Sonnenfeldt, ed., Soviet Politics, pp. 24, 35. 46. Ed A. Hewett, "Gorbachev's Economic Strategy: A Preliminary Assessment," in

The Three Post-Brezhnev Successions

169

Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: The Economy (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1991), pp. 16, 22. 47. Paul B. Henze, "The Specter and Implications of Internal Nationalist Dissent: Historical and Functional Comparisons," in S. Enders Wimbush, ed., Soviet Nationalities in Strategic Perspective (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), pp. 23, 33. 48. Walter Laqueur, "U.S.-Soviet Relations: The Darkest Hour," in Walter Laqueur, Soviet Realities: Culture and Politics from Stalin to Gorbachev (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990), pp. 145, 147-148, 150. 49. Walter Laqueur, "What We Know About the Soviet Union," Commentary, February 1983, quoted in Walter Laqueur, The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost (New York: Collier, 1989), p. 239, n. 38. 50. Walter Laqueur, "Is There Now, or Has There Ever Been, Such a Thing as Totalitarianism?" in Walter Laqueur, Soviet Realities, pp. 124—125. 51. Michael Mandelbaum, "The Fall of the House of Lenin," World Policy Journal 10, no. 3 (fall 1993), p. 98. 52. Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Times Books, 1983), pp. 508-509, 558. 53. Ibid., pp. 530, 547. See also p. 555: "From afar, the temptation has always been great to overread the danger signals of the Soviet economy, the corruption and the ideological malaise, as indicators that Russia is afflicted with some fatal disease" and is at "the brink of collapse." Later, in the same argument, Smith accused Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig, Jr., of such "overreading." 54. David K. Shipler, Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (New York: Penguin Press, 1984), pp. 4-6. 55. Ibid., pp. 348-349, 358. 56. Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, Publishers, 1984), pp. 18-19, 21. 57. Ibid., pp. 44-45. 58. Ibid., pp. 37-38, 53. 59. Ibid., pp. 112, 127. 60. Ibid., pp. 13-14,50. 61. Ibid., pp. 118, 184, 187,221,266. 62. Robert H. Donaldson, "Political Leadership and Succession: The Passing of the Brezhnev Generation," in Joseph L. Nogee, ed., Soviet Politics, pp. 12—13. 63. Stephen F. Cohen, "The Struggle for Soviet Ideology: Marxists vs. Slavophiles," in Stephen F. Cohen, ed., An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union from Roy Medvedev's Underground Magazine Political Diary (New York: W. W. Norton, Publishers, 1982), p. 216. 64. Stephen F. Cohen, "Editor's Preface: Roy Medvedev and Political Diary," in Stephen F. Cohen, ed., An End, pp. 7-9. 65. Stephen F. Cohen, "Brezhnev and the Reign of Conservatism," in Stephen F. Cohen, Sovieticus: American Perceptions and Soviet Realities (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), pp. 53-54. 66. Stephen F. Cohen, "Khrushchev and Reform from Above," in Stephen F. Cohen, Sovieticus, pp. 49-50. 67. Stephen F. Cohen, "Toward a Moscow Spring?" in Stephen F. Cohen, ed., An End, pp. 297-298. 68. Stephen F. Cohen, "The Stalin Question Since Stalin," in Stephen F. Cohen, An

170

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

End, pp. 27,40-41. 69. Stephen F. Cohen, "The Soviet System: Crisis or Stability?" in Stephen F. Cohen, Sovieticus, pp. 24-25, 27. 70. Stephen F. Cohen, "The Failure of the Hard Line," in Stephen F. Cohen, Sovieticus, pp.28, 143. 71. Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 134-135, 138-139, 141-142, 149. 72. Rasma Karklins, "The Nationality Factor in Soviet Foreign Policy," in Roger E. Kanet, Soviet Foreign Policy, p. 58. 73. Ibid., pp. 60, 70-72. 74. Carl A. Linden, The Soviet Party-State: The Politics of Ideocratic Despotism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983), pp. ix-x. 75. Ibid., pp. 58, 66. 76. Ibid., pp. 137-138. 77. Ibid., pp. xi-xii, 49. 78. Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution, 1985), p. 51. 79. Ibid., pp. 41, 777-779. 80. Robert F. Byrnes, preface to After Brezhnev, Robert F. Byrnes, ed., p. xvii. 81. Angela Stent quoted in Norman Kempster, "Gorbachev May Press Drive to Split U.S., Allies," Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1985, p. 1, in Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 212. 82. Peter Reddaway quoted in R.W. Apple, Jr., "In West, No Rapid Changes Are Seen," New York Times, March 12, 1985, p. A17, in Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury, p. 211. 83. Marshall I. Goldman, "Will Gorbachev Be Brezhnev II?" New York Times, Op-Ed page, March 12, 1985, in Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury, p. 212. 84. Stephen F. Cohen, "Sovietophobia: Our Other Soviet Problem," in Stephen F. Cohen, Sovieticus, pp. 21, 132. 85. Robert V. Daniels, Russia, pp. 248-249. 86. Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, "The Setting: An Introduction," in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, The Soviet System in Crisis: A Reader of Western and Soviet Views (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), p. 7. 87. Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking, pp. 4, 7-12, 19. 88. Alexander Motyl, "The Dilemmas of Sovietology and the Labyrinth of Theory," in Frederic J. Fleron, Jr. and Erik P. Hoffmann, eds., Post-Communist Studies & Political Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), p. 82. 89. Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., and Erik P. Hoffmann, "Post-Communist Studies and Political Science: Peaceful Coexistence, Detente, and Entente" in Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., and Erik P. Hoffmann, Post-Communist Studies, p. 372. 90. Raymond C Taras, "Introduction: Sovietology and Its Discontents," in Raymond C. Taras, ed., Handbook of Political Science Research on the USSR and Eastern Europe: Trends from the 1950s to the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1992), p. 4. 91. Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 531.

6 Surprised by Gorbachev: American Sovietological Literature and the Possibility of Innovative Soviet Change after 1986 From 1986 on, virtually all American Sovietological scholarship was dominated, in one way or another, by the developing Gorbachev revolution and the prospect of Soviet change. The 1986-1988 period was, by all rights, a late time in Cold War history for U.S. Soviet experts finally to be making up their minds about the possibility of Soviet reform. It was late not only for the obvious reason that the USSR collapsed in 1991, but more important, because the evidence for Soviet change had been around for decades and scholars should have paid attention to it sooner. Sovietologists could not have known in 1985 that the USSR would dissolve precisely six years later, but they should have understood in the 1970s and early 1980s that there was a historic urgency in Moscow and that fundamental change was possible. Yet many American scholars did not know what to make of the USSR, or of Gorbachev, even on the eve of the Soviet leader's 1989 renunciation of the Brezhnev doctrine (an important political milestone that signaled to the Eastern European countries that they could safely depart the Soviet fold and go their own way). Thus, the principal concerns of U.S. Sovietologists during this late period—and of the writings discussed in this chapter—were the interrelated questions of what kind of leader Gorbachev would turn out to be and whether he could bring lasting change to the USSR, and how much change and how soon. SOVIETOLOGICAL LITERATURE FROM 1986 THROUGH 1988 Two findings were particularly surprising about the scholarship of the 1986 through 1988 years—first, that so many U.S. Soviet experts were caught offguard by Gorbachev's new thinking and policies; and second, that some scholars seemed oblivious to the new leader's initiatives, perhaps because they still had no idea, even after watching Gorbachev for years, that this general secretary

172

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

was fundamentally different from the harsh Stalinist image they expected all Soviet leaders to emulate. American scholars should not have been surprised that Gorbachev would turn out to be an innovator. A careful reading of Russian and Soviet history would have revealed several earlier instances of social, economic, and political reform, and an examination of the evidence noted in Chapter 1 would have suggested that the Soviet Union was again ripe for transformation. But even if U.S. Sovietologists failed to notice the Chapter 1 evidence, they should have realized that Gorbachev's ideas and leadership style did not conform to the totalitarian or Stalinist ideal put forth by the Soviet communist party (CPSU) and by American political cultural-historicist scholars, and they should have noted, in the remarkable admissions of the Nineteenth Party Conference of 1988, that irreversible changes—significant improvements and innovations—were occurring. While some years would have to pass before the outcome of Gorbachev's initiatives became evident, there should have been no doubt by the end of 1985 regarding the new Soviet leader's commitment to change. Yet the scholarly pessimism and refusal to consider evidence continued. Realist Literature During the 1986 through 1988 period, many realist Sovietologists maintained a cautious optimism about the possibility of Soviet change, avoiding both the deep pessimism of political cultural-historicist scholars and the near euphoria of pluralists. In essential agreement with Henry Kissinger, these scholars argued that the Cold War had imposed a certain structure and predictability on world politics; in Sidney Blumenthal's words, "[T]he end of the Cold War meant chaos" to them, and they saw the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, forged by President Reagan and Gorbachev, as "a major rupture" in the Nixonian-Kissingerian global system. Many realists agreed with the former secretary of state "that those who were discarding Cold War assumptions were incapable of understanding the U.S.-Soviet relationship. They were selfdeluded and would inevitably come to grief." A smaller but still sizable group of scholars agreed with Kissinger that it was "'not realistic' to think that Gorbachev was moving in a radically new direction," since the Soviet leader "'has never wavered' from Communist doctrine." Indeed, Kissinger argued, Gorbachev and his program were "not new at all. The Soviets abolish their claim to world revolution every decade."1 Several "hard" and "soft" realist writings from the 1986-1988 period will now be considered. Hard Realist Views. In general, hard realist approaches did not anticipate substantial change occurring in the foreseeable Soviet future. For example, Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote extensively of the "systemic crisis" of the Soviet Union. "Politically, this crisis manifested itself in the leadership "paralysis" of the early to mid-1980s, he noted. Socially, it was evident in increased rates of "alcoholism, absenteeism, corruption, and

Surprised by Gorbachev

173

thievery." Culturally, it was reflected in "the futility and emptiness of life" depicted in Soviet literature.2 Militarily, technologically, and even economically, the USSR was competitive with the United States primarily "because of [its] nuclear weapons"; otherwise, the United States was "far superior" in every category. To make matters worse, the Soviet Bloc was polarized, with "the population and Communist elites of Eastern Europ[e]" and the Central Asian republics "fighting for greater independence" from Moscow. Many of these crises had intensified, and showed "no sign" of abating, Bialer argued. Nevertheless, the Columbia University Sovietologist did not expect the Soviet Union to change. Bialer did not view the USSR as "politically unstable" or about to "disintegrate"—Moscow was plagued by a "crisis of effectiveness," not one "of survival." In contrast to the tempered optimism of his earlier writings, the scholar now expected "the forces of inertia and continuity [to] remain dominant" in the years ahead, and he characterized the Soviet Union in a harsh, dictatorial light. "It is the tragedy of today's Russia," Bialer wrote remarkably, "that one [cannot] find any meaningful anti-Stalinist forces either in the establishment [or in] society." Indeed, "the core of the [Soviet leadership] is Stalinist" in its "defense of the system, and the command economy." The ruling establishment would only institute "drastic" innovations "when the political price of change is lower than that of muddling through"—for example, if there was "powerful social unrest."3 Change also could be triggered if "economic stagnation threatened" to weaken the Soviet armed forces "in comparison with the armies of the West"—and by "the growing technological gap" between the Soviet Union and the Pacific Rim countries. But Bialer saw these scenarios as unlikely. Although he was a realist, Bialer undergirded his faith in the USSR's political stability with a cultural continuity argument. "Despite its revolutionary origins," he noted, "the Soviet Union [had often] utilize[d] and promote[d] the symbols of traditional Russian authority: nationalism, international ambitions, and messianic [notions] of mission." Moreover, "the regime benefited] from the lack of any democratic tradition in its Tsarist past. Authoritarianism [was] its only model of rule." The scholar saw two other sources of Soviet stability— "the political acquiescence of the population," and "the memory of the great terror."4 Despite his allusions to Russian political culture, Bialer did not see the Soviet Union as monolithic, and he rejected the political cultural-historicism of fellow Polish-born scholars Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Pipes. While the USSR had indeed pursued uninterrupted military growth and expansion, the Columbia University Sovietologist saw the Soviets as opportunists, not grand strategists; although the elites "expect[ed] the final victory of Communism, the goal of worldwide communization [was] not the operating principle of Soviet foreign policy" even in Stalin's time. Bialer thought that it was wrong to "demonize" the Soviet leaders, or to "den[y] any validity to their fear of war, their legitimate security concerns," or their desire to coexist peacefully with the West. Moreover, he did not believe that western economic embargoes or U.S. military

174

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

spending would bankrupt the Kremlin.5 The scholar acknowledged the presence of group conflict and pluralism in the Soviet system. Under Brezhnev, "the elite became engaged as never before in real politics," he argued. "The cult of the top leader" and the centralized party and state "could not hide the interplay of interests and individuals within the elite." Thus, Soviet military and political leaders engaged in substantive debates on the butter-versus-bullets question, Bialer noted, and there was a growing awareness among the Soviet middle-class and working populations of the adverse effect of military spending on their standard of living. Bialer believed that U.S. Soviet experts had "consistently overestimate[d]" the Soviet military threat. Still, Moscow posed a significant danger to the West; during the 1970s when U.S. defense spending was "flat, Soviet expenditures grew by 4 percent a year until 1976." The Columbia University Sovietologist discussed the fundamental Soviet contradiction of an imposing military colossus operating side by side with a crippled civilian economy. Indeed, the weaker the Soviet economy became, the stronger the Red Army seemed to grow.6 Bialer employed a familiar explanation for this paradox: the Soviet economy ran simultaneously on two-tracks, he noted—it produced inferior goods and services for consumers and high quality equipment and weaponry for the military. But the scholar qualified this explanation severely by admitting that Moscow's "ability to run two parallel economies and to isolate military production" from the general economy had "declined" in recent years. Even worse, "the civilian sector [could] drag the military sector down with it" if changes were not implemented. Bialer expected only minor improvements from Gorbachev. While the Sovietologist was impressed by the new leader's policies, he saw "no difference between Gorbachev and his predecessors regarding the centrality of Soviet military power"; moreover, he worried that the new Soviet leader could revive the Cold War in order to strengthen the regime's legitimacy and appeal to Russian patriotism.7 In all likelihood, Gorbachev would "reestablish his country's international image" as a strong and decisive superpower that rivaled the United States, and he would try to "damage the image" of the U.S. globally, and "drive a wedge within the Atlantic alliance." In the end, systemic reforms would probably not occur, Bialer concluded, because the USSR would never give up Eastern Europe. In classical realist terms, Bialer and Sovietologist Michael Mandelbaum argued in a 1988 collaboration that throughout the Cold War, U.S.-Soviet relations had been constrained by the nature of the international system and the exigencies of geopolitics; indeed, "as the two most powerful states, the United States and the Soviet Union would have had difficulty maintaining cordial relations no matter what their domestic systems." But when ideological differences were factored in, each country began to view "the other's influence [and] very existence as illegitimate; each objected, ultimately, not only to what the other did but also to what it was." For these reasons, the superpower "conflict [would] not end in the next decade," Bialer and Mandelbaum noted. The Soviet Union

Surprised by Gorbachev

175

would remain the United States' "preeminent rival far into the twenty-first century." Nor would the two sides "do away with nuclear weapons."8 In 1986, Harvard Sovietologist Timothy J. Colton concisely analyzed the sources of the USSR's domestic and international decline and explored alternate scenarios of the Soviet future. Soviet and western analyses differed on the causes of Moscow's problems, the scholar said, but they agreed on one essential element—the weakened Soviet economy. Of all the USSR's difficulties, the secular decline in gross national product (GNP) growth and personal consumption was the most likely source of serious trouble in the long term. "Per capita consumption [growth] slipped to 2.2 percent a year" in the late 1970s (from "5.1 percent ten years before) with food, housing, recreation, education, and health services faring the worst." In high technology, Moscow's economy "manifested a bias against innovation," Colton added, with various enterprises manufacturing "outmoded" products, or consumer goods that no one wanted to buy.9 Soviet demographic trends pointed to further decline, with male and female life expectancy falling sharply, due to such "factors as alcohol abuse, [personal] stress, worsened hygiene, and overloaded hospitals." Moreover, "the [combination] of lower birth rates and the aging of the population" had slowed the growth rate in the Soviet labor force. To add insult to injury, Colton pointed to several "new questions about [Soviet] ethnic identity" and the rise of nationalism—but the Harvard scholar minimized the possibility that ethnonationalism would cause the USSR to disintegrate. Moscow would have no trouble keeping the lid on its fomenting kettle of nationalities, he noted, since demographic trends would leave the Russian population dominant "long into the twenty-first century"—indeed, the Russians would maintain their "territorial and political coherence and centrality" while the "ethnic minorities remain[ed] on the periphery," quite "receptive to Soviet rule." Despite its economic and demographic problems, the Soviet Union had several unique strengths and resources, Colton noted, including high rates of modernization, urbanization, and educational achievement. But perversely, these attainments served to inflate popular expectations, which the regime had a hard time meeting. Thus, increases in educational attainment "stimulated [citizens] to [criticize] Soviet shortcomings and to covet rewarding careers." Innovations in communications technology and "enhanced contact with the outside world" drew attention to "the regime's failings" and to the attractions of the West. Nevertheless, Colton believed that the USSR's social inertness, its citizens' patriotic pride, the entrenched power of the elite, and the broad network of controls the rulers commanded would see the Soviet Union through, as they had so many times before.10 Despite Gorbachev's reformist proclivities, Colton foresaw no significant changes in the immediate Soviet future; the USSR's historical experience, its lack of a cohesive elite, its Leninist fixation and reluctance to give up the primacy of the CPSU, and its bloody tradition were antithetical 10 radical reform. On the other hand, the Harvard Sovietologist anticipated a "moderate reform," or "controlled change somewhere between radical and minimal reform," which

176

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

would not alter Soviet society or "revolutionize its political institutions and ideology." Such change would be a "significant reform within the Soviet system, but not a fundamental reform of it." But Colton warned of dire consequences— a "crisis of legitimacy" could ensue in the 1990s—should resurgent conservative forces obstruct change, or if Gorbachev's reform program proved ineffectual.11 Colton saw Gorbachev's rise to power as a hopeful sign. While the new leader had no plans "to democratize the Soviet Union" or inaugurate systemic reforms, he clearly rejected "the plodding style" of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. But Colton deemed the possibility "of a 'Moscow Spring' [or] of a sudden efflorescence of personal rights" as remote. The USSR would not give up its republics and Eastern European allies. "Granting that Gorbachev wants the Soviet dictatorship to become more benevolent and open-minded, he intends it to remain a dictatorship nonetheless," Colton insisted.12 Colton's view of the Soviet Union as stable and likely to endure had significant foreign policy implications. While the USSR could not afford additional "costly foreign commitments or [an accelerated] arms race," it could easily maintain "its existing commitments," the Harvard Sovietologist noted. If the Soviet bear had fallen on hard times, it still had sharp "teeth and claws." It was not "crippled, and, if cornered, it [could] be dangerous." Thus, the West could not force the Soviet Union to change. The West's most effective weapon "for influencing" Soviet domestic politics was "not integrated circuits, Iowa corn, or gas turbines," Colton wrote, "but the slow-acting magnet of western culture."13 Generational change was certain to alter both the Soviet civilian elite and the Red Army leadership. The younger military officers were probably more embarrassed by Soviet economic and technological deficiencies—and more hopeful for reform—than the older leaders they replaced, Colton noted. The Sovietologist rejected the arguments of Bialer, Richard Pipes, and others, that depicted an ever expanding Soviet military budget and a two-track economy that produced high quality equipment for defense but turned out shoddy goods for consumers. Indeed, the annual growth rate of Soviet defense spending had been cut in half in the late 1970s, "from 4 or 5 percent [during] the previous decade to [about] 2 percent," Colton reminded his readers. Not unrelatedly, the Red Army was constrained by shortages of fuel and other resources; agricultural failures forced "military units to grow their own food"; meanwhile, officers and enlisted men were angry about inadequate quantities of consumer goods, waiting in queues, "and petty corruption" within the defense bureaucracy. All this occurred amid keener competition between military leaders and consumers "over economic resources." The generals wanted "more than they [were] getting" at the same time that civilian consumers—believing that their economic sacrifices were already extraordinary—wanted the Red Army's funding reduced.14 In 1987, Columbia University Sovietologist Alexander J. Motyl addressed the questions of why the USSR survived for so many years, and relatedly, why American scholars failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change. Motyl linked both Soviet longevity and the intellectual rigidity of scholars to the idea that "persisting things tend to be accepted and taken for granted"—that is, to an

Surprised by Gorbachev

177

innately human resistance to change and acquiescence to authority. "Not only do [most] people, be they Russians, non-Russian [Soviets], or Americans, tend to submit to existing, time-honored, and legitimate authority, but they are also likely to do its bidding, however much it runs counter to their professed beliefs."15 Since the non-Russian Soviet republics yielded to Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s, it was easy to assume that they would continue doing so in the future. Analogously, it was easy for American scholars to assume that the USSR would remain a static and repressive system for decades to come. According to Motyl, the Soviet dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s did not spark a rebellion against Moscow largely because it was not a real movement; rather, it was a "loose conglomeration" of dissatisfied "individuals, organizations and groups." Equally, the "overpowering presence" of the KGB precluded dissident rebellion. Regarding the question of whether "outside pressure" could "generate a Ukrainian or a non-Russian rebellion," Motyl deemed such intervention "ineffective in any but the short run"—even if social conditions were ripe for a rebellion—"as long as the coercive capacity" of the USSR could "prevent internal opponents from translating it into active opposition." Relatedly, Motyl ruled out the possibility of a hot war of liberation, launched by the West against Moscow. Economic warfare was more feasible—but even trade cutoffs and technology embargoes would not bring the USSR to heel.16 Indeed, the most serious threats to Soviet stability were internal, not external. Noting the USSR's large Muslim population, Motyl raised "the possibility that the Islamic revival in the Middle East [could] spread to Central Asia and thereby undermine the claims of Communist ideology." Instability also could occur in Eastern Europe, where many countries were "undergoing economic decline and social unrest. To keep [these states] materially satisfied," the USSR would have to "either subsidize their economies, which it [could] ill afford to do for long," or allow them to form ties with the West, thereby "increasing] their exposure to nefarious influences, or more fully incorporate them into the Soviet economic and political sphere, thus risking even greater popular resentment." Thus, "Eastern Europe [was] a no-win proposition" for Moscow. In the end, Motyl feared that "another Polish outburst, although not necessarily on the scale of Solidarity, [was] inevitable." Concerning the Soviet future, Motyl guessed that Gorbachev's "volunteerist predilections" would not "overcome ingrained economic inertia," despite the Soviet leader's commitment to change, "unless he resort[ed] to coercion on a massive scale." Even if Gorbachev successfully triggered a "radical" economic reform—"a very big if—there could still be a drop in "productivity, living standards, and economic growth."17 Moscow's economy almost surely would "face stagnation [or] continued decline, for the foreseeable future." Despite the Soviet Union's many crises, Motyl insisted that the system was "nowhere near a critical condition," or on the "verge of [nonexistence]. However severe its problems, the USSR [would] remain a formidable world actor" for a long time to come. The Columbia University Sovietologist added that "big problems are endemic to modern states, which respond mostly by tinkering with

178

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

one problem, throwing money at another, ignoring a third, resolving a fourth. And for better or worse, they do get by." Thus, states "can flourish for many decades without reform." Indeed, "most states at most times do not embark on major, radical, and long-lasting reforms willingly," Motyl concluded. "The business of states is business as usual."18 But Motyl was not conceding the possibility of Soviet reform. Indeed, "Communist states," like capitalist ones, "are capable of change," he noted. The USSR had "undergone more change in the last seventy years than any country in the developed world." Thus, "Stalin's 'revolution from above' radically altered Soviet society." So did "Khrushchev's partial dismantling of the totalitarian state." Admittedly, the Brezhnev era had become stagnant, but "only after [the] bold measures" of the 1960s.19 Motyl concluded that while "Gorbachev may eventually fall flat on his face, his debut" suggested that deterioration was "not historically inevitable." Motyl saw curious similarities in the American Sovietological critique of the USSR, with its focus on the "crisis" of the Soviet state, and the Soviet scholarly view of the United States, with its corresponding concern about the "crisis" of capitalism. "No serious analyst of the American political scene would deny that these are real problems," he argued. Yet few would conclude "that the United States is congenitally incapable of reforming itself." American scholars "should apply similar standards" to their study of the USSR. "After all, if we believe that Communism simply cannot work—while the 'American way of life' naturally can and does [work]—it is no surprise" that we conclude that the Soviet system "does not work." Thus, if western scholars believed that the Soviet system was unviable, they had to explain how it was unviable, Motyl insisted, and why "our conclusions regarding the Soviet Union cannot be extended to [western] political systems" such as the United States. In 1987, former national security council official William G. Hyland argued that "in almost every respect," the USSR "had deteriorated]" since Stalin's death; in the 1950s, Moscow "had a special political and ideological appeal in the world," but today, "it posed a military threat but not much more." Still, Hyland cautioned Americans against euphoric feelings or celebrations over the Soviet difficulties; such optimism would be severely misguided. Expectations of "prolonged peace between two hostile rivals" went against the grain of history. The "small common ground" in East-West relations was "unstable." Indeed, even "the nuclear equilibrium" was "uncertain [and] dangerous."20 Hyland disagreed with George F. Kennan's view that the bitterest geopolitical rivalries occur between geographically contiguous states and that, historically, the United States and Russia had enjoyed peaceful relations. Instead, the scholar found no evidence to indicate that the U.S.-Soviet conflict would disappear. Hyland believed that Gorbachev could do little to change the Soviet system, which in any event, could not be altered "radically, drastically, or quickly." Yet those were precisely the kind of wholesale changes that were needed. Gorbachev's "only hope" of cracking through "the stagnation of the Brezhnev era [was] to strike hard at the [Soviet] system"—yet such a move would incite

Surprised by Gorbachev

179

widespread opposition. The Soviet leader's "predicament" suggested to westerners "that his reforms [were] cosmetic," and that before long, he would fall back into the status quo policies and leadership behavior of his predecessors. Hyland doubted that this would happen; Gorbachev would likely "persist with his reforms" but face internal opposition within "two to four years." His chances of "prevailing" were about even: if Gorbachev emerged victorious from this conflict, he could "change the Soviet Union profoundly"—but if he failed, "another time of troubles [would] follow that could be dangerous for the United States." Hyland rejected Paul Kennedy's thesis of a long-term secular decline of Soviet power and prestige. After two centuries of progress, "it [was] unlikely that Russian power had begun to decline because of a decade of adversity," he argued; not long ago, western scholars "were making equally confident predictions of a new era of Soviet expansion." And even if the USSR was on the verge "of decline," it would take "many decades, perhaps fifty years, before [it was] fully evident." In short, "Gorbachev was not elected to [oversee] the dismantling of the Soviet empire. If pressed, [domestically or internationally,] the Soviet Union [would] fight back" with everything it had.21 For this reason, the Reagan administration's attempt to bankrupt the Soviet Union through a renewed arms race was "an enormous gamble for which there [was] no supporting evidence" in the course of U.S.-Soviet relations. If "Gorbachev want[ed] a 'breather' in world affairs," Hyland concluded, it was only "to gain time to rebuild" the USSR's economic and military might. Hyland discounted Richard Pipes's and other neoconservatives' claim that Moscow was preparing to "fight and win" a nuclear war. Such arguments were based on "the esoteric writings" of a few Soviet military officials. A number of these military-doctrinal articles were unearthed from "obscure journals," and others were classified and unavailable to western scholars. From these questionable sources, American scholars cobbled together "an alarming story" that "dissolved" into a gossamery web of "ambiguities under rigorous analysis."22 Hyland recalled how quickly Soviet military doctrine became "a bogeyman" in the quixotic Team B reassessment of the CIA's Soviet estimate in 1976. Penned by Pipes, that report concluded that Washington had "seriously underrated" Moscow's "determination" to win a nuclear war. Ironically, real changes were occurring in Soviet military doctrine even as the Team B reassessment was underway: "From 1977 on, Brezhnev denounce[d] nuclear war as 'suicidal,'" Hyland noted, and there was a significant reduction in Soviet military expenditures. And in his first year in office, "Gorbachev abandoned] the old Soviet position and [endorsed] Ronald Reagan's claim that a nuclear war 'cannot be won and must never be fought.'" Hyland characterized Washington's view of the Soviet Union as fundamentally schizophrenic. According to U.S. policy, "the Soviets were bent on relentless expansion and had to be checked at every turn," but Washington also "maintained that the [USSR] was weak and had entered a historical decline." Some policy makers "tried to square the circle by arguing that the Soviets were

180

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

still expansionist" and militarily powerful; but "now they were motivated by desperation" and were "doubly dangerous." This explained "the priority Reagan [placed on a] military buildup" over diplomacy. This was no time for negotiating, administration officials noted, "and it might not be for years."23 But this was a specious argument, Hyland concluded, for "if the [U.S.] was too weak to negotiate, it was too weak to confront" Moscow militarily. In 1987, Michael Mandelbaum and Strobe Talbott argued that "it [was] almost solely by virtue of its military power that the Soviet Union qualifie[d] as a superpower at all, and its nuclear weaponry [was] the ultimate manifestation of that power." In effect, the USSR resembled Aristotle's depiction of ancient Sparta—it was a militarized society that was powerful but one-dimensional. The two scholars were pessimistic about the Soviet future and about the question of whether fundamental change would occur in Moscow. "A genuine transformation in Soviet-American relations [would] depend not on grandiose visions" of a nuclear-free world "or even on concrete arms control compromises," they noted, but "on internal changes in the Soviet Union." Mandelbaum and Talbott deemed the prospect that Gorbachev would "change the emphasis of the Soviet system from coercion and centralized control to individual initiative and responsibility" as "remote at best": the USSR would "resist pressure for change, whether it comes from without or within, from the top or the bottom."24 Thus, Soviet-American relations were likely to remain as they were. "American and Soviet leaders of the next century" would probably "be wrestling with the same great issue—how to manage their rivalry so as to avoid nuclear catastrophe"— that Reagan and Gorbachev had contended over in the late 1980s. Soft Realist Views. Significantly fewer scholars embraced soft realist arguments than hard realist positions during the 1986 through 1988 years. The overwhelming majority of soft realist Soviet experts saw Soviet reform as likely or possible. In 1986, Washington Post managing editor and former Moscow correspondent Robert G. Kaiser identified several new realities that were evident in light of Gorbachev's innovative leadership. Most significantly, the "Soviet pretense"—the "official confidence in the superiority of the Soviet system and in the certain victory of socialism over capitalism"—was collapsing; Gorbachev had repudiated the traditional Soviet "rhetorical style" of "minimizing] bad news while repeating again and again how great is Soviet power, how glorious its victories, how brilliant its future."25 Kaiser believed that Gorbachev would change the USSR, but he raised the disturbing prospect that the changes could be perverse. In downplaying the "happy-ever-after" scenarios put forth by his predecessors, Gorbachev held "out hope for a marvelous tomorrow, but only if his demands for sweeping changes" were met. If innovative change did not occur, or if it did not occur quickly, the Soviet leader's new candor would "dispirit" Soviet citizens and "reinforcfe their] cynicism." Those who listened carefully to Gorbachev should have been "troubled" by his speeches, Kaiser suggested, "because of [his] pessimism about the past and because of the scale of the changes he demand[ed]."

Surprised by Gorbachev

181

Kaiser found it significant that Moscow's perception of the "correlation of forces"—thought to be aligned to the USSR's advantage in the 1960s and early 1970s—had turned overwhelmingly against the Soviets in the 1980s. Particularly disappointing was the unfulfilled promise of detente. The abandonment of "economic autarky" did "not work out well. Western technology did not bring the benefits [that] Brezhnev and Kosygin hoped for"; meanwhile, the USSR and East European states were "amass[ing] large debts to the capitalists." Kaiser added that the USSR was "not competitive with the advanced western economies, and showfed] no sign" of catching up "in this century, or beyond"; indeed, the only real "accomplishment" of the Soviet economy was "the creation of awesome military might." Still, Moscow's fundamental threat to the West was ideological, not strategic: western fears of a Soviet military threat were based more on misperceptions than on facts. Kaiser realized that his depiction of the USSR as "hostile, ambitious, yet incapable of fulfilling either its own hopes or our own darkest fears" would be greeted with deep skepticism in the West: since the McCarthyite 1950s, he noted, Americans had "made a heavy psychological investment" in viewing "the Cold War as the ultimate showdown between two irreconcilable giants." Like other realist scholars, Kaiser depicted Moscow's leaders in contradictory terms, as both cautious and opportunistic, "conservative, but also hostile to a world order dominated by the United States and the international capitalist economy," seeking international stability yet wanting to expand Soviet influence. The scholar expected Moscow to "muddl[e] downward," but its survival and military dominance were "not in question"—the USSR would "neither collapse nor be transformed in the foreseeable future." Gorbachev was a new kind of Soviet leader, yet "there [was] no reason to expect [him] to become reasonable." The Soviet Union would "continue to pla[y] an active role in the world as a superpower," yet it was not "the threat we once feared, a modern version of the Third Reich bent on world conquest."26 Two years later, Kaiser was considerably more upbeat about the Gorbachev initiatives. He described events in the USSR as "enthralling—nothing so interesting or exciting as Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms has happened in Russia in modern times." For the first time, "Russians [were] telling the truth about their past and their present, encouraging private enterprise, urging a diminished role for the Communist Party, and generally committing mayhem against MarxismLeninism." In short, Kaiser concluded, "we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire."27 Kaiser outlined the magnitude of the USSR's economic, political, and social crises by citing data that had come out of the 1988 party conference. Soviet health care standards were similar to those of a Third World country. In addition, there were massive deficiencies that the West had known about for years— in agriculture and consumer goods, in machinery and equipment, in computer and telecommunications technology, and in consumer electronics. In addition, Kaiser noted Soviet citizens' "cynicism" and "demoralization," their "sheep-like qualities," and their "reflexive instinct to stay out of trouble by staying low to

182

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

the ground [and] never speaking up or taking initiative." For these reasons, the Washington Post journalist did not expect Gorbachev to succeed, but he admitted that "already in three and a half years," the Soviet leader "has brought changes to his country that can never be fully undone. The pre-Gorbachev 'era of stagnation' will not be restored." Moreover, much as the Soviet leaders yearned for "the days when [the USSR was] the only genuine rival to the United States for international preeminence," those days were "at best a long way off and unlikely to return.28 Kaiser suggested obliquely that American Sovietologists had failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change because the process of reform was unpredictable—any forecast of the Soviet future would be tenuous at best. Indeed, violence and political instability were not out of the question; Moscow was caught between a rock of East European restiveness and a hard place of its own unwillingness to let go of power and empire, and it was unimaginable "how Gorbachev or any future leader could gracefully yield" to its allies or republics "their independence." Robert Legvold agreed with Kaiser. In view of Gorbachev's innovative initiatives, wrote the Columbia University Sovietologist in 1987, almost no one in western "academic circles doubt[ed] that [the Soviet leader was] committed to far-reaching changes."29 Indeed, "a revolution [was] underway in Soviet foreign policy" that was "greater than any in the postwar period." Cold War rivalries were becoming irrelevant; the West now had a "historic opportunity," and neither "timidity" nor old thinking would bring about an appropriate outcome. Legvold emphasized this point. Despite the self-congratulatory claims in Washington that "the Cold War [was] over and [that] the West ha[d] won," the United States was "in danger of ending" the East-West conflict "on Soviet terms." This would happen the Sovietologist warned, "if Moscow established itself in the eyes of the world" as having "greater vision and more compelling foreign policy values" than the United States; if the USSR was "more willing to run risks for a safer and less militarized international order"; or if the Soviets were "more ready to [forsake] the contests of the past." Legvold recalled that Washington's main response to Gorbachev's initiatives was "the urging that we 'test'" the new leader by "prob[ing] to see how far he [was] willing to alter Soviet policy." But this was "increasingly irrelevant advice as Gorbachev [met] more and more tests we ha[d] not yet collected ourselves to pose," the Sovietologist concluded.30 Indeed, it was the West that was being tested: did "we have the imagination, creativity, and courage to respond to the very revolution in Soviet foreign policy for which we have waited half a century?" In 1986, economist Ed A. Hewett, of the Brookings Institution, noted optimistically that Gorbachev "clearly believes that a sustained improvement in [Moscow's] economic performance will only come [about] through systemic reform."31 But by December 1987, Hewett was hedging his bets on the Gorbachev initiatives. On the one hand, "the general view" in Washington since "the June 1987 Plenum of the Central Committee [was] that a radical, far-reaching reform" was possible, he wrote. "And most American Sovietologists [were]

Surprised by Gorbachev

183

willing to be convinced that this reform will be implemented. On the other hand, [the] publication of decrees is only the beginning of a long reform" process.32 As late as 1988, Hewett considered a middle course of change as the most likely outcome of the Gorbachev initiatives. He ruled out as unlikely both a "success scenario," where "everything work[ed] as planned" and qualitative goals were met, and a "failure scenario," which was essentially a "muddling through" outcome.33 Like Hewett, University of Virginia economist Gertrude E. Schroeder adopted a cautious posture regarding Soviet change. Concerned about the increase in ethnonationalistic disputes, the scholar noted in 1986 that Moscow's "goal of Russification and assimilation" was "an impossible dream." In Central Asia, ethnic and "religious identities remain strong. Baltic nationalism is alive and well, even though those republics are relatively affluent." Moreover, "rising standards of living and increased educational attainments do not automatically" dispose non-Russians to identify with the USSR. "Soviet nationalities policies have not produced a melting pot," Schroeder concluded: "[T]he next decade or two" would be "a time of troubles" for the Soviet Union and "its diverse peoples." Economic progress would "slow to a crawl" due to reduced labor force growth, "decreasing returns, raw materials shortages," and low productivity.34 Schroeder's outlook for the Soviet future was bleak. "In the period of economic stringency that lies ahead, the competition for scarce investment resources will be severe," she noted; Moscow "will be hard pressed to provide enough funds to [its] republics." This shortfall would be "particularly pressing in Central Asia and Transcaucasia, since the state must provide jobs for their rapidly growing labor force." But despite frequent and disruptive "nationalistic manifestations," Schroeder believed that the Soviet Union, "with its manifest willingness to [use] force, [would] keep [dissent and] divisive [ethnic] displays within tolerable bounds"—at least "in the absence of a major internal revolution or [global] conflict." Schroeder likened Gorbachev's proposals to previous Soviet reforms that had failed—notably, Kosygin's 1965 initiatives, the July 1979 decree, and many smaller measures. Accordingly, she expected the new leader's program to produce little or no improvement in economic performance. Gorbachev's actions were "neither radical nor a reform," the University of Virginia scholar complained; only his rhetoric defined his program as far-reaching.35 Thus, "if Mikhail Gorbachev aspires to rank with Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin as [a] great reforme[r] of the Soviet economic system, he will have to come up with a different blueprint" from the one he had put forth thus far. Meanwhile, "the [Soviet] treadmill continues." Schroeder changed her mind about Gorbachev a year later, after reviewing the economic reforms approved by the Supreme Soviet in June 1987. She now characterized the Soviet leader as "a man in a hurry," whose "program impose[d] a staggering set of tasks on the central bureaucracies and producing units, to be accomplished in the next three years." Still, while Gorbachev's initiatives were "impressive" and "comprehensive," they did not "provide for more

184

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

efficient allocation of investment"; they did "not create a market environment, as Lenin did in 1921 with his New Economic Policy"; and they did not "allow workers to determine the[ir] firm's activity, as in Yugoslavia."36 Indeed, "Gorbachev's reform[s left] the pillars of the traditional economic system in place— state ownership" and oversight, price controls, and "enterprise incentives" driven by "output targets and administrative superiors rather than following signals from markets." Concerning the future of Gorbachev's innovations, Schroeder counseled her readers to wait and see. "In the long run, the present reforms [will] not go far enough [in] narrowing the technological gap with the West," she wrote; radical changes were needed. "Markets must be created [by eliminating] central planning, freeing enterprises from subordination to government bureaucracies, and allowing prices to reflect supply and demand." But it was an open question "whether any Soviet leader [would] opt for such truly 'radical' reforms." "From the Baltic[s] to Soviet Central Asia," burgeoning ethnonationalism was "one of the [Soviet Union's] most serious problems," wrote University of California Sovietologist Gail W. Lapidus in 1986—and it would remain the biggest challenge Moscow would face "in the years ahead." While Soviet leaders tried to manage this problem "through rapid modernization, coercion, and political co-optation," Lapidus noted "a fundamental tension" between the "pluralist aspect of Soviet nationality policy," which saw nations and nationalities as individual social units, and the USSR's "centralizing and Russifying impulse."37 Although indigenous nationality groups played an important role in governing their own republics, the party, military, and economic leaders at the center of the Soviet system were all Russian or Slavic. In the allocation of resources, the poorer republics reminded the center of its commitment to "social and economic equalization" and requested additional resources for modernization and development; meanwhile the more developed republics complained that they had contributed disproportionately more to national wealth but received less in return than the smaller republics. For the foreseeable future, the Soviet nationalities problem would be difficult but "manageable," Lapidus concluded: first, because it was difficult for "nationalist political movements" to emerge in the USSR; second, because of Moscow's "powerful coercive mechanisms"—it could "proffer carrots as well as sticks" to the republics; and third, because "the very complexity and fragmentation of the Soviet multinational population enablefd Moscow] to exploit [nationalistic] tensions [as a way of] maintaining] control."38 Indeed, said Lapidus, "while various social forces [and] national groups could become politicized" and threaten Soviet stability, it was "unlikely" that this would happen. Although Moscow's problems were acute, they would not lead to social disintegration or political collapse.39 In 1988, University of Vermont Sovietologist Robert V. Daniels examined the potential for change in Gorbachev's USSR. Characterizing Stalinism as "a synthesis of powerful historical influences" that were "both Russian and universal," the scholar found many elements of the past—including "totalitarian gov-

Surprised by Gorbachev

185

ernment, command economics, political control of [all] social activities], and the manipulation of cultural values and historical truth"—in today's Soviet Union. If "the 'excesses' of the 'cult of personality'" were gone, many Stalinist "features remain[ed] in force," Daniels noted, and they impeded Gorbachev's "pursuit of reform and modernization."40 Despite academic controversy over the continued usefulness of the totalitarianism model, and despite the tendency of western scholars to restrict the model to the Stalin period, Daniels defended this traditional view of Soviet politics: "[I]f totalitarianism has any generic meaning at all," he noted, "it still applies to the [USSR] today despite the [Soviet system's] functional divisions and interest groups." The University of Vermont Sovietologist saw an inextricable link between Soviet totalitarianism and Russian culture. Relating Stalin's "purges [to] the comeback of Old Russian political folkways and the termination of Russia's westernizing 'aberration,'" Daniels concluded that totalitarianism and Stalinism were outgrowths of Russia's "distinctive political tradition." This suggested to the scholar that Communist ideology was not the only, or the main, Soviet feature that needed changing. Russia was totalitarian "for reasons that [we]re far deeper" than its Marxist-Leninist rhetoric. Thus, "a switch in [ideological] languages would only [create] a different protective cover for the profound hostilities [in Russia's] political nature."41 What had to change was not merely the USSR's ideological language but also its Tsarist cultural and political tradition. If reform had been "unthinkable" during Stalin's "despotism by personal terror," Daniels noted that "the impetus to reform" reappeared immediately upon the dictator's death and was evident in Khrushchev's "affirmation of collective leadership, curbs on terror, and economic concessions to consumers and farmers." The scholar saw Khrushchev as a reformer who, "from his ascendancy in 1955, endeavored to revive the early revolutionary spirit and to repudiate [Stalinist] despotism." Khrushchev's failure stemmed from his caution and inconsistency "in recognizing the intelligentsia as the key force for change." Despite his commitment to reform, the general secretary could not change the power structure, Daniels concluded. Once Khrushchev "faltered, and the Stalinist bureaucracy took over, reform was doomed for another generation." 42 What then, of the prospects for Soviet change in the late 1980s? On balance, Daniels was more doubtful than optimistic, for while "the constellation of social forces in [Gorbachev's] USSR" was "more capable" of effecting lasting change "than it was in the 1950s," there was also "a certain irony" in the fact that the impetus "for reform ha[d] come from the state and the limits of reform [were] set by the state, implicitly confirming the ultimate power of the political authorities [who were] responsible for terror [and] stagnation." Thus, the University of Vermont Sovietologist was skeptical about the leadership's desire or ability to "'democratiz[e] the system.' The challenge of dismantling Stalinist institutions [was] far beyond what any [leader] seemed prepared to contemplate. Even a gradual approach depend[ed] on the convictions and skill" of Gorbachev in "overcoming bureaucratic] inertia."43 Still, Daniels saw "underlying circumstances that ha[d] not yet had their full effect on Soviet reality." These included

186

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

the requirements of modernization; "the tension between the regime and its revolutionary origins; [and] the impatience of [the] new leadership." Indeed, "China over the last decade ha[d] illustrated how quickly a great [Communist] nation may change under the pressure of such circumstances." Political Cultural-Historicist Literature A casual observer might have expected that with the passage of time—with mounting evidence of sharp policy differences within the Soviet elite and pluralism in the society at large; with the institutionalization of Gorbachev's new thinking; and with the new Soviet leader's proposals for far-reaching political and economic change in 1987 and 1988—the influence of the totalitarianism model would have waned in American Sovietology. Indeed, we might have expected to see political cultural-historicist scholars distancing themselves from the totalitarianism concept in the second half of the 1980s and moving toward a centrist or realist position. But such a shift did not occur. Instead, as the 1980s wore on, many political cultural-historicists hardened their views. In Kuhnian terms, there was no mass movement of scholars away from the still influential (if no longer quite dominant) totalitarianism paradigm, but rather, a number of political cultural-historicist Sovietologists began to write strident essays and books, defending the traditional Cold War paradigm and criticizing other scholars who, in their view, embraced novel but wrong positions. Curiously, in light of the abiding influence of neoconservatism and the totalitarianism model, relatively little substantive Sovietological work was produced by political cultural-historicist scholars during this time. To be sure, a number of neoconservatives wrote on the Cold War and on U.S.-Soviet relations during the 1986-1988 period, but few political cultural-historicist Sovietologists actually published anything on Soviet political, social, and economic conditions, or on the question of Soviet change. What accounts for the odd silence on the part of political cultural-historicist Sovietologists during the 1986-1988 years? Why were these Soviet experts struck dumb during this golden period of neoconservative influence? Were they so surprised by Gorbachev's rapid rise to power, or by his dynamism and commitment to change, that they were rendered speechless? Certainly, some scholars may have been caught off-guard, yet it is unlikely that an entire school of Sovietology was taken by surprise! To some extent, the strange quiescence of political cultural-historicist scholars may be explained by the fact that many realist Sovietologists, including Seweryn Bialer, Timothy J. Colton, and Michael Mandelbaum, had adopted both the pessimism and the arguments of the neoconservative movement in their own writings during the mid to late 1980s. In effect, political cultural-historicist Sovietologists were co-opted by the sudden popularity of their views. Since other Soviet experts were now discussing their political ideas, there was less need for them to do so. In addition, many scholars were reticent to write anything about Soviet poli-

Surprised by Gorbachev

187

tics immediately after Gorbachev took office—particularly after having been twice "burned" by the swift promotions and equally sudden deaths, in rapid succession, of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. Accordingly, these Sovietologists bided their time during Gorbachev's early years in office; they watched the new leader and assessed his political (and physical!) vitality, but they did little writing.44 This explanation accords well with the spate of new political cultural-historicist writings that appeared after 1988, by Richard Pipes, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Martin Malia, Walter Laqueur, Robert Conquest, and other scholars. In 1986, Hoover Institution Sovietologist Robert Conquest "examinefd] the atrocities [that were] inflicted on the Russian peasantry" by the Stalinist regime. The scholar focused on three phenomena that occurred between 1929 and 1933: dekulakization—"the killing or deportation" to Siberia "of millions of peasants"; collectivization—"the abolition of private property" and the establishment of "collective farms under party control"; and the terror-famine inflicted on Ukrainian peasants. These crimes were "abetted by many westerners who wished to deceive or be deceived," Conquest noted. "Even when the facts" were known, a number of influential western scholars and journalists tried to "excuse them" away. "The scandal" was not merely that these American and British Soviet experts had justified Stalin's crimes "but that they refused to hear about them" and "were not prepared to face the evidence." Every effort was made by Stalin to impose "the Big Lie"—"to persuade the West that no famine had taken place." Indeed, Conquest argued pointedly, the Big Lie could "hardly be said to be extinct even today."45 The Stalin atrocities did not result simply from "an urge to power [or] an insistence on suppressing all autonomous forces in the country," Conquest argued; rather, they were facilitated by communist ideology—"a set of doctrines about the social and economic results achievable by terror and falsehood." This ideology fostered "an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children," and the present Soviet rulers who subscribed to it were murderers and criminals who would not hesitate, even today, "to kill tens of millions of foreigners, or [lose] millions of their own subjects in a war." As such, the present leaders were "heirs and accomplices" of Stalin's crimes. Many were directly involved in these killings, or "justified" the actions of those who were. These atrocities could not "be shrugged off as part of the dead past, too remote to be of any current significance," yet there was "little sign [that] the regime [was] coming to grips with its past, [or] permitting" full disclosure of its crimes.46 Conquest's conclusion was stark and pessimistic: neither Marxism-Leninism nor the leaders' murderous character had changed significantly over the past half century. "So long as th[e] events [of the 1930s could not] be seriously investigated or discussed, they [were] in no sense part of the past" but were part of the normal political experience of today's USSR. In 1987, scholar Robbin F. Laird suggested that Gorbachev's new thinking was prompted more by the Soviet Union's need for temporary "breathing space"—after which the Soviet Union would resume its military buildup and

188

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

expansionist policies—than by sincere reformist leanings. Thus, Moscow's "preoccupation with domestic modernization [would] not eliminate the competitive instincts of the Soviet foreign policy elite," Laird warned. "An economically successful Soviet Union [would] be more competitive and troublesome" to the West than the present regime. Still, Laird acknowledged that "new thinking [had] spread to the Soviet military" and that the USSR now "recognizefd] the legitimacy of western concerns," both "about [its] offensive war-fighting tactics and strategy" and about "the threat [of] Warsaw Pact armored divisions to the West."47 Nevertheless, for Moscow to adopt "a more defensive orientation [would] require a major transformation of Soviet foreign policy." Therefore, "vigilance is required," Laird asserted, "to ensure that modernization [does] not simply [give] the Soviets a more advantageous position for later domination of the West." In a tacit admission that Gorbachev seemed to be a real reformer and that his initiatives were genuinely innovative, Sovietologist Peter Reddaway argued, shortly before the June 1987 Plenum, that the Soviet leader would, in Peter A. Hauslohner's words, "have to curb his radicalism or else up the ante and 'risk being removed from office a la Khrushchev.' Should Gorbachev 'persist in his radicalism, [but] fail to improv[e] the [Soviet] standard of living,'" the scholar warned, it would be difficult for him to survive. While his program could "lead to 'unprecedented changes,' the [USSR] seemed no more 'susceptible of transformation today than it was thirty years ago.'"48 Later that year, Reddaway was even more explicit in his pessimism about the Soviet leader's prospects: "if Gorbachev is trying to circle the square by democratizing] the Soviet system, as he shows every sign of doing, then he is unlikely to remain in power" much longer. "Sooner or later, the nomenklatura [would] remove him," and the cause of reform would "suffer in the inevitable conservative reaction."49 Pluralist Literature A significant pluralist Sovietological literature was published in the 19861988 period. Viewing strong evidence of fundamental Soviet reform, most pluralist scholars agreed with Princeton University Sovietologist Robert C. Tucker that "history [was] on the move again in Soviet Russia." The evidence of reform was "abundant" to these Soviet experts and included increased "public openness or "glasnost,"' "steps toward economic reform," "a lively ferment in the arts," "the freeing of prominent dissidents," and various "moves on the international chessboard."50 These pluralist scholars saw "a struggle taking place [in Gorbachev's USSR] over reforming] the customary ways of thinking and acting handed down from the past." Expecting pro-reform elements to win this struggle, these Sovietologists believed that innovative change was both possible and likely. Other pluralist Soviet experts were even more confident about the Soviet reform process. Quibbling with Tucker's assertion that "history was on the move again" in the Soviet Union, these scholars insisted that history had never stopped moving in the USSR, any more than it had in the West. Further,

Surprised by Gorbachev

189

if a struggle was ensuing in Moscow over innovative change, it was a skirmish in a war that had already been won. Soviet reform was a sure thing, these scholars insisted, and it was ongoing. In 1986, Stanford University Sovietologist Alexander Dallin noted that there had never been a Soviet "master plan" for world revolution. Rather, there were many plans and many changes "in Soviet perceptions and priorities." Thus, while Marx had emphasized "the inevitable unfolding of history," Lenin shifted Marx's focus, and ushered in "a celebration of will and organization." After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist ideal "of imminent world revolution" gave way to the reality of "gradual transformation"—which made it possible for a powerful Stalinist state to emerge. "Instead of [sponsoring] Marxian grassroots revolutions," Moscow imposed revolution "from above."51 In turn, if Khrushchev thought that the Third World would reflexively side with the USSR "as a matter of its own interest," he was wrong. It didn't. Thus, the history of USSR-Third World relations was a story of "clients and allies who got away"; the only Soviet constant was change. Despite these realities, American scholars and policy makers had mistakenly interpreted Soviet behavior during the Korean War, and in other crises including the Afghanistan incursion of 1979-1980, as part of a broad Soviet "blueprint" for revolution. Dallin related this error to Robert Jervis's observation that states tend to exaggerate their enemies' capabilities, power, and purpose, and to diminish their own. In addition, this mistaken view was facilitated, in part, by the U.S. ethos of exceptionalism and legalistic-moralistic thinking. But whatever the reason for such suspicions, Dallin concluded, the time had come for Americans to rid themselves of old stereotypes about blueprints and nefarious designs for world revolution. Dallin acknowledged the enduring popularity of Zbigniew Brzezinski's totalitarianism model and Richard Pipes's political cultural-historicist arguments. But while the cultural continuity argument was not without merit, it was reductionists, he warned, because everyone is influenced, if not controlled, by her past. But it was far from certain "which past" was most relevant for understanding the modern Soviet Union, which "was living simultaneously in every century from the thirteenth to the twenty-first."52 Russian history featured a liberal tradition as well as an authoritarian one, Dallin explained. The Sovietologist saw both "a Slavophile tradition that cherished the distinctiveness of Russia" and a westernizing one that favored modernization. "For every Dostoyevsky there was a Turgenev." To be sure, one could trace "an anti-western, authoritarian animus [that ran] like a red thread from Patriarch Nikon through Berdiaev to Solzhenitsyn," but there was also an "opposite thread link[ing] ancient Novgorod and its popular assembly; liberals like Pavel Miliukov; the [1918] Constituent Assembly; and Andrei Sakharov." Indeed, by World War I, Russia had become, or was becoming, an economically "developed country" that featured "political parties, partisan newspapers, and [a] vigorous public life." Most of the traits cited by political cultural-historicist scholars were not

190

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

"unique" to the USSR; Soviet citizens' feelings of attraction and revulsion toward the "'advanced' West" were not unlike the "ambivalence" of most Third World countries "toward the 'First World,'" Dallin noted. Moscow's "hostility to 'bourgeois' values" resembled that "found among the aristocracy and in slums the world over." On the other hand, "India and Japan, like Russia, failed to experience the Renaissance, but without turning to Bolshevism." Indeed, Dallin saw numerous Soviet features—like federalism, "the emancipation of women," the eradication of the "propertied classes," the worldwide Communist network, and "the renunciation of Tsarist treaties and foreign debts"—that had few "prerevolutionary Russian precedents." Marxism itself originated in the West. Thus, scholars should not overemphasize "the determinism of historical continuity" or draw "mindless" conclusions from Russian history. It was both wrong and intellectually irresponsible to assume that Russia could not change, or that Soviet citizens were enslaved to "a past they [could not] escape." Dallin concluded that conditions in the USSR could get better or worse, and Americans could affect U.S.-Soviet relations for years to come by their views and actions.53 According to Dallin, the historical continuity argument, which linked twentieth-century Soviet politics and cultural life to the Russian past, went hand in hand with a tendency to deny the possibility of Soviet change. "The stress on distinctive and unchanging characteristics of Russian history" was quickly embraced by scholars who saw the USSR in a harsh light, the Sovietologist noted in 1988. "Some of the most vociferous affirmations of historical determinism" derived "from persons espousing the most militant anti-Soviet positions."54 Proponents of this argument included Richard Pipes, William Odom, and other Reagan administration policy makers and scholars. Dallin decried "the effort [of political cultural-historicist scholars] to make Russian history a tool for partisan argument." Indeed, "with a similar deterministic bias," eighteenth-century Parisian scholars might have argued, "prior to the capture of the Bastille, that French political culture was authoritarian and permitted no democratic or republican" evolution. Similarly, "political scientists writing [before] 1945, often den[ied] the possibility of significant change" in Germany and Japan, "given the dominant and presumably persistent political cultures in these two countries." Indeed, most such arguments were defective because it is impossible "to test whether event E1 and later event E2 are continuous manifestations of the same phenomenon or are autonomous events"—particularly when their occurrence is centuries apart. Thus, it is difficult to say "whether the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an extension of the Russian drive into that country a century earlier," or if "the [mistreatment of Pasternak and Sakharov was essentially the same as that accorded Chaadaev and Tolstoy." Dallin concluded by citing Gordon A. Craig's warning that "too great a desire to prove continuity" may lead scholars "to ignore nuances and confuse chance similarities with identity in essence." Few American scholars "would refer to the War of the Roses, the Huguenots, and the Treaty of Campoformio to explain contemporary Italia[n], British, or French" attitudes, he noted. Simi-

Surprised by Gorbachev

191

larly, it was unnecessary to mine through the Russian historical record in order to comprehend modern Soviet political culture. Like Dallin, Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael MccGwire criticized the political cultural-historicist argument that the Soviet Union had a blueprint for world revolution and the related idea that the USSR was planning to fight and win a nuclear war. According to MccGwire, a fundamental shift had occurred in Soviet military doctrine from 1966 to 1968, as Moscow abandoned its "prevailing assumption that a world war would inevitably escalate to an intercontinental nuclear exchange" and embraced a "new assumption" that such attacks could be avoided. The USSR's perception of the United States had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to be hostile, MccGwire emphasized; the Soviet Union had changed—and it did so in the mid-1960s!55 This shift meant that Moscow did not intend to start or fight a nuclear war—or any kind of war— against the West; "since 1968, a basic tenet of Soviet defense policy" was the idea that arms control was "in the best interests" of the USSR. MccGwire contrasted the starkly different American and Soviet attitudes toward war. Washington believed that hostilities could be "prevented by the threat of dire punishment." But Moscow "emphasize[d] the need to avert war by political means"; it did not "share the [United States'] confidence in being able to manage events," and it saw "the danger of war as related to the level of EastWest tension." Moreover, the Soviets viewed "arms racing [as] a source of tension and inherently dangerous, as well as [economically] costly." What Moscow feared most during the 1980s was "not some deliberate decision to start a war, but the unpredictable 'Sarajevo factor,' the uncontrollable chain of events, the slippery slope into the abyss of world war." But "the United States [saw] the possibility of war through the lens of Munich" and argued that hostilities "would only [occur] as the result of some Soviet initiative that the West failed to deter." Thus, Washington rejected "Soviet [complaints] that the confrontational [policies and assumptions of the West were] making war more likely."56 Viewing such protests as "propagandistic" and not reflective of "genuine Soviet beliefs," U.S. officials insisted that Moscow "could not help but recognize" that Washington's policies had "enhanced" deterrence and made war "less likely." MccGwire saw "three interlocking themes" in Washington's Soviet policy during the 1980s—first, the idea that Marxism-Leninism "was a political aberration and an evil that was not only destined to fail but should be made to fail"; second, the notion that the U.S. should "force an arms race on Russia" in order to "break its economy"; and "third, the concept of a 'crusade for freedom' directed at all" citizens of the Soviet bloc. MccGwire concluded that Washington saw the USSR as "essentially uncivilized." Scholars and policy makers located "the focus of all evil" as much on Russia as on Marxism-Leninism. MccGwire chronicled the confusion, infighting, and reluctance of Washington officials to engage in any significant arms control negotiations with Moscow. "The U.S. approach" to the intermediate nuclear forces (INF) negotiations and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) suggested "that the Reagan administration was not interested in arms control agreements unless they re-

192

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

quired the Soviet Union to make major, unlikely concessions," the scholar noted. The United States seemed to be "disingenuously engaging in arms control simply as a cover for build[ing] up its nuclear arsenal."57 This was the same tactic that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had employed three decades earlier. Moscow, on the other hand, was sincerely interested in furthering the arms control process, despite the American stalling tactics. At both the INF and the START talks, the Soviets offered substantial "concessions of a kind that had been dismissed as unthinkable by the president's advisors." MccGwire concluded from this that "if the immediate objective is sufficiently important," Moscow would "enter negotiations, even when faced by U.S. disinterest" and the likelihood that the talks would fail. According to MccGwire, Washington's fondness for worst-case scenarios tended to distract U.S. policy makers and scholars from seeing the very real possibility of Soviet change that existed in the 1970s and 1980s. "The western focus on its own vulnerabilities" blinded American Soviet experts to significant and "tangible evidence" that Moscow wanted to "reduc[e] nuclear armaments and [was] prepared to make major concessions to reach agreement."58 In 1986, Catholic University Sovietologist Joan Barth Urban recalled that throughout the Cold War, there was a common belief among western Soviet experts in a "world Communist movement"—in the idea that all Communist parties, including western nonruling parties, were "unthinking agents of Soviet diktat." Moreover, it was "conventional wisdom" that the leaders of these groups "were invariably Stalinists at heart until 1956, if not later." But Urban rejected this view; she saw "telling evidence that the movement was never monolithic, even during the heyday of Stalinist centralization." Indeed, "the Comintern was rife with informal coalitions that spanned national party boundaries," she argued; and "transnational coalition building bec[a]me a commonplace feature of the world Communist movement [after] the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet conflict."59 World Communism was capable of great change and variation—and by inference, so was the USSR. Urban's examination of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and of other Western European Communist parties, led her to classify Soviet-style leaderships into four categories of political attitude and behavior, based on their predilection to use force or persuasion—radical sectarians, for whom coercion was absolutely necessary (for example, Stalin's one-man rule); moderate sectarians, who used "intransigence [and] tactical agility" as tools of manipulation (e.g., the Brezhnev oligarchy); moderate innovators, who used cooperation and persuasion, not manipulation, "to convert the center left to their views" (exemplified by the Khrushchev leadership); and radical innovators, who saw "persuasion as integral to the struggle for socialism" (notably, the Czech reformers of 1968 and Gorbachev). Implicit in Urban's schema was the idea that Soviet receptivity to change depended to a significant extent on leadership attitudes and behaviors. The Sovietologist's fourfold classification suggested that Soviet reform was not only possible but that, as Stephen F. Cohen had noted, such transformation was occurring continually.

Surprised by Gorbachev

193

Once Stalin died, PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti voiced several innovative ideas about the structure of the Communist world, Urban noted. Principally, he suggested "that Communist parties were just one among several forces in the global march toward socialism," a view that anticipated "the PCI's later support for socialist pluralism." He also affirmed national "autonomy as the basic organizational norm of the world Communist movement." By the mid-1970s, the Italian Communists were issuing many such critiques of Soviet socialism, said Urban, and these voices "reached a crescendo in the 1980s when Enrico Berlinguer challenged the CPSU's revolutionary credentials across the board." Moscow tried to "projec[t] a facade of pan-European Communist unity" in order to maintain "domestic legitimacy and international prestige," but PCI outrage over the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan and "martial law in Poland in December 1981 led to a polemical firestorm."60 From that point on, the Catholic University Sovietologist noted, the PCI "sought disengagement from, not autonomy within," the Soviet-led Communist movement. With the aging of the Brezhnev leadership, Italian Communist leaders came to believe that Moscow's economic difficulties and internal decline had significantly eroded both the global prestige of the Soviet Union and its ideological primacy over the world Communist movement. "The stability of the Brezhnev regime had long rested on the twin props of peace and prosperity," Urban wrote. "Detente with the West" and steady growth in domestic consumption "contributed to the system's legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens."61 But by the early 1980s, "both these props [were] undermined. Consumer welfare [improvements] ceased, [and] Soviet-American tensions [climbed toward historic] Cold War levels." Like other scholars of the 1986-1988 period, Urban was cautious regarding Gorbachev's likely course in Eastern Europe. "Precious little was known" about the younger leaders, she warned. While "there was much speculation" about Gorbachev's "reformist proclivities," it was unlikely—even if the new general secretary proved to be "a moderate innovator" like Khrushchev—that Moscow would loosen its grip on Eastern Europe; while the USSR "could not manage its client states neither could it let them go. It was Khrushchev, after all, who ordered tanks [in]to Budapest."62 In 1987, historian Moshe Lewin, of the University of Pennsylvania, outlined the vast shifts that had occurred in Soviet society during the Cold War years. Soviet citizens were "urbanized, educated, professionally differentiated and politically and culturally diversified," the scholar noted: "[T]he facade of monolithic uniformity [was] no longer taken seriously. Complex urban networks [now] shape[d] individuals [and] filtered] official views." But the Soviet political system had not caught up with these changes, Lewin warned; party conservatives were "trying [in vain] to control the uncontrollable or disregard] the spontaneous," but "either recourse was unproductive and [would] put the system under crippling pressure." Thus, Gorbachev faced the unenviable task of having to renovate all spheres of the system at once. Collectively, these trends suggested to Lewin that a kind of "civil society"—"capable of extracurricular action

194

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

and opinion independent of the state"—was emerging within the USSR. The leadership now had to "respon[d] to contradictory [domestic social] pressures as well as to the demands of international events." These developments "mark[ed] the start of a new age from which there [could be] no turning back."63 Lewin believed that popular opinion had long been "a force to be reckoned with in the USSR"; its power was evident even during the Khrushchev years, when the Soviet leader's educational initiatives were opposed by significant groups of citizens and had "to be abandoned." The University of Pennsylvania scholar concluded that no state, not even the USSR, could remain impervious to social influences. Popular pressures would eventually force the Soviet Union to change. Lewin attributed the USSR's enduring stability to a kind of social "understanding"—if not quite a social contract—between the state and its citizens. The populace took great pride in the Soviet Union's superpower status. The USSR "had educated its population" and "excelled" at "managing both] routine tasks and emergencies." Thus, Soviet society was both a spontaneous, creative force and a source of political stability, Lewin concluded.64 Lewin traced the contours of Soviet reform from Khrushchev through Gorbachev. Under Khrushchev, the domestic political process was "normalized," the scholar noted, and the lives of Soviet citizens were improved. Concentration camp inmates were sent home, and the secret police was put on a leash. In addition, new laws were "enacted, and the [legal] profession [began to] resemblfe] a lobby" that was "pressing]" for additional citizens' rights. Other reforms were implemented during the next fifteen years. Western observers did not overlook the important political changes that were occurring under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, said Lewin; most U.S. Soviet experts acknowledged that there was, at least to some extent, a "diffusion" of power from the political leadership at the top of the state and party hierarchy, to the citizens below. Nevertheless, many scholars saw Jerry F. Hough's discussion of institutional pluralism as "far-fetched," and a number of Sovietologists agreed with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington that the Soviet system was hobbled by "oligarchical petrification." Yet such critiques shared an inherent weakness, the University of Pennsylvania Sovietologist noted: observations about Soviet leadership behavior "could not yield insights" regarding the direction the USSR was moving in. This was because "the most dynamic events" were occurring among Soviet citizens—who resided "outside the Kremlin" and were invisible to most western scholars. Lewin rejected the argument that the enormity of Gorbachev's opposition indicated that "the party, the bureaucracy, [and] the economic system—were immobile" and unchanging. If that was the case, he asked, what explained Gorbachev's amazing rise to power? "How did Khrushchev," a Stalin protege, turn out to be a reformer? Lewin's only explanation of "how and why [such] powerful reformist thrusts" originated within "supposedly immutable Soviet institutions" was an "acknowledgement] that over the decades many transformations have occurred and accumulated within the system."65 Lewin noted the mixed reaction of western scholars to Gorbachev's mod-

Surprised by Gorbachev

195

ernizations and achievements. Numerous experts "oversimplified] and misinterpreted] the precipitous" changes that were occurring in the Soviet political system, the Sovietologist recalled.66 Thus, both the Khrushchev reforms and the Brezhnev-Kosygin program "were dismissed as ineffectual reformist hankerings" that would not alter the USSR. But Lewin disagreed. Despite their ultimate failure, these initiatives heralded "an era of reform." The USSR was "on the verge of important changes." Lewin's criticism of the totalitarianism model—and of the scholars coopted by it—was scathing. Throughout the Cold War, he argued, the model was embraced by the West "for propagandist and ideological use [in the] strategic competition." The model's focus (and odium) easily shifted from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, "influential Sovietologists" with ideological axes to grind depicted "totalitarianism [as] an explanatory, theoretical tool for understanding" the USSR. The model worked "well in its ideological function," the University of Pennsylvania scholar recalled, but "it was useless" as a serious analytical tool. It said little about the Soviet Union's origin and goals, "what kind of changes it was undergoing, and how to study it critically and seriously." Indeed, the totalitarianism model "was itself 'totalitarian' in its empty selfsufficiency"; it acknowledged no possibility of change or "historical process." Lewin concluded that western scholarship about the USSR and the possibility of Soviet change was significantly impaired by this "cognitive schema" that prevented Soviet experts "from seeing the world realistically]." Even after the totalitarianism model was abandoned by many scholars, "the focus [of western Sovietologists] remained the study of the state and the staterun economy," Lewin complained. This extreme concern with five-year plans and Stalinism placed so much emphasis on the state that Soviet experts saw "the state as the main, [or] sole, actor in the system." As a result, they failed to examine the diverse and rapidly changing pattern of Soviet society; if they expected any reform, they anticipated "small variations within [an] unalterable framework": systemic change was "unthinkable," Lewin argued.67 Thus, western Sovietologists envisioned and analyzed "a political system without a social one, a state floating over everything else, over history itself." The need for economic and political reform was a strong and recurrent theme in the USSR during the Brezhnev and early Gorbachev years, Donald R. Kelley wrote in 1987. Brezhnev himself sought to raise his country's living standard and guide "the Soviet Union through the second industrial revolution." Indeed, economic modernization, "managerial reforms," the frustration of consumer demands, and the "reconceptualiz[ation of the CPSU's] role in society" were all high on Brezhnev's agenda.68 Kelley's analysis suggests that had Brezhnev (or, for that matter, Andropov or Chernenko) lived longer and been more energetic, systemic reforms might have started in the late 1970s or early 1980s, rather than in 1986-1987. His argument also implies that U.S. scholars should have been talking seriously about the need for, and the possibility of, Soviet change during the 1970s and early 1980s—because the Kremlin leadership itself was engaged in such discussions.

196

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Kelley worried that the economic and political stagnation that plagued Brezhnev's final years in power "might obscure the reformist aspects" of his rule. He acknowledged, for example, that the Soviet leader's highly publicized economic reforms and efforts "to introduce new technology and restructure management" did not work out as intended. Moreover, "the last half decade of [the general secretary's tenure] was marked by [serious] policy failures that lent credence to the notion that [Moscow] had lost control of events." Nevertheless, the Soviet leader's efforts in the early 1970s were significant, Kelley noted. "Despite [his] obvious tone of caution," Brezhnev revitalized "the individual enterprise level"; he created "multi-factory associations," which "combinefd inefficient factories with stronger counterparts that could foster modernization"; and he ameliorated the disruptive effects of change within the elite by "promising] party and state officials that their tenure and prerogatives would not be capriciously challenged for the sake of breakneck reform." Thus, Brezhnev avoided "the sort of 'hare-brained' reorganizations" that got Khrushchev in trouble.69 In the end, changing the USSR proved to be politically difficult, said Kelley. "Like his predecessor," Brezhnev recognized that "extensive" social, economic, and political "reforms were needed, but also like Khrushchev, his [program ran] headlong into [bureaucratic] opposition." Indeed, the very concessions that the general secretary had to make in order to win power "militated against reform;" the "respect for cadres policy [of] 1964 meant that [Brezhnev] could neither dismis[s] uncooperative officials, nor [reorganize] the conservative bureaucracies."70 Thus, the general secretary "was left with [two] decidedly [unproductive strategies." He could "tou[t] the reformist implications of developed socialism and the technological revolution," or he could beg "suspicious" bureaucrats to cooperate with his program "in the interests of economic efficiency and a better standard of living." Neither of these bromides would prove to be effective. The Andropov regime was too cautious, politically encumbered, and shortlived to launch effective changes, Kelley wrote. "While it spoke with candor" about Moscow's economic problems and the need for reform, "its actions were circumscribed" by the CPSU hierarchy and "the cumbersome bureaucracy that tenaciously resisted change." Thus, Andropov's initiatives amounted to little more than a governmental admonition that Soviet citizens should work harder and with greater efficiency. Still, the leader's achievements were noteworthy; "however brief his tenure in office, Andropov "launched a[n important] debate" about economic and social change, Kelley argued, and this discussion continued throughout the 1980s.71 When Andropov died, Konstantin Chernenko tried to follow in his predecessor's footsteps, although "the vigor [of his] efforts" fluctuated with his declining health. But some emphases, including Andropov's "commitment to economic [reform were] quickly reiterated by the new regime." From the start, Gorbachev insisted that the Soviet economy and the development of high technology would be his top priority. Despite the opposition of

Surprised by Gorbachev

197

the Soviet bureaucracy, the new leader's first year in office "reinvigorat[ed] the reform debate among economists" and facilitated "freer discussion" of political, cultural, and economic problems.72 But "Gorbachev face[d the same] intractable [bureaucratic] obstacles" that his predecessors had to deal with, Kelley noted. These included "the persistence of narrow 'departmental interests'"; "the unwillingness of cadres to alter their role"; and the failure of previous economic reforms. Thus, Kelley guessed that Gorbachev would "proceed cautiously rather than risk conflic[t]." He would lead by consensus, and be more concerned "with the consolidation and maintenance of power [than] with the implementation of bold reforms." Still, Kelley was optimistic. "Given the malaise and stagnation" that attended Brezhnev's final years in office, "even the slightest breath of fresh air" would elicit "enormous goodwill and hop[e] from all levels of Soviet society," he noted. Even a minor improvement—the aspiration to "buil[d] a modern and competitive industrial society," a modicum of political candor and openness, or a belief that generational change was transforming the leadership—any of these indicators would "be welcomed by the elite and the common people." Like Moshe Lewin, S. Frederick Starr believed that the USSR was in the process of developing a new political order that would bring it into the mainstream of western civil society. In 1988, Starr took issue with Gorbachev's "claim that the manifest stagnation in the [CPSU] and bureaucracy [had] pervaded Soviet society as well." In reality, the USSR had come alive—not stagnated—during and after the Brezhnev years. "While the official economy lagged, an entrepreneurial 'second economy' burgeoned. Unprecedented numbers" of Soviet youth became active "participants in the global youth culture, forcing the government to accept what it could not alter." Similarly, "individual citizens in countless fields plunged into innovative work." Although western scholars had noted the problem of alcoholism in Soviet society and had examined the differentiated impact of demographic trends on labor and society in the European Soviet republics and in Central Asia, most Soviet experts "dismissed the broader changes" occurring in the USSR as irrelevant to explaining Soviet political attitudes and behavior, Starr noted.73 Not only was Soviet society "ripe for change," as Gorbachev told a group of Moscow writers in June 1986; "Soviet society was already changing]." What was truly ripe for change, Starr emphasized, was "the government [political and economic] apparatus" which needed to catch up with "the emerging values of the populace, especially its best-educated and technically most competent elements." Thus, "Gorbachev [was] not creating change so much as uncorking it." Starr itemized the elements of this change: "rapid urbanization"; the vastness and potential of the Soviet economy; educational advances (which taught Soviet citizens how to read, and not insignificantly, how to "rea[d] between the lines"); the "frenzy of city life" and the related "diminution" of the regime's ability to regiment and spy on its citizens (Starr cited news reports of criminality and draft-dodging as suggestive of "the difficulty of operating a police state when the inhabitants are determined and resourceful in pursuing their own interests");

198

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

"the revolution in personal communications"; and the development of popular opinion (which demonstrated "the living diversity and pluralism" of the USSR). In this "emerging [Soviet civil] society, people who formerly [saw] themselves as subjects" had begun to assume "the mentality of citizens," Starr said. Not insignificantly, all of these trends were evident under Brezhnev; Starr singled out Soviet scholars such as the dissident writers Yevgeny Gnedin and Fyodor Burlatsky for "draw[ing] attention" during the late Brezhnev era "to the signs of a national shift toward a civil society." But despite these salutary changes, Starr issued four caveats regarding the future of the Soviet reform process. First, Gorbachev wanted to maintain the primacy of the CPSU; second, the Soviet leader "share[d] the traditional Marxian opposition to private property"; third, Gorbachev sought "not to introduce liberal reforms but to revive the Soviet economy"; finally, none of the reforms that had occurred was irreversible. Still, the cost of undoing these changes was rising daily, because "citizens in a civil society are less malleable and less subject to manipulation by the state than subjects [of] an authoritarian regime. And as [the citizenry] becomes less malleable, society and the state grow more interdependent," with each "limit[ing] and influencing] the other." Despite the changes taking place in the USSR, Starr did not anticipate the complete elimination of the Soviet state. "[J]ust as certain continuities persisted from Tsarism to Communism," some Leninist and Stalinist features would likely "carry over into future U.S.-Soviet dealings," he argued. Thus, the USSR would "continue to assert itself globally," and "Soviet leaders [would] continue to view their country as a superpower."74 In a 1988 article, Princeton scholar Richard H. Ullman noted that the "sheer quantity" of Gorbachev's arms control proposals from 1985 to 1988 persuaded "some western analysts" that the Soviet leader was '"not serious' because they overloaded] the system." But Ullman rejected this conclusion: "[T]he sense left by [Gorbachev] seem[ed] to be, 'if you don't like that one, try this one.'" The new leader evidenced "strongly held goals and a Sadat-like impatience with the rigidities of Soviet policy making and the international system." In short, "Gorbachev's Soviet Union, unlike that of his predecessors, [was] in significant ways an 'ordinary state.'" In Soviet-Eastern Bloc relations, Gorbachev's "statements evince[d] a far-reaching tolerance for diversity in the socialist world," Ullman added. u[S]o long as domestic change in Eastern Europe [was] peaceful," the new leader would likely "accept substantial deviations from the East Bloc's norms." But as bold as Ullman's 1988 assessment was, he did not anticipate the Eastern European revolution that would occur a year later. Rebutting the neoconservative argument that Moscow merely wanted breathing space—a temporary reprieve from the Cold War—and that the Gorbachev initiatives were a sort of Trojan horse, intended to lull the West while the Soviet Union became more prosperous and dangerous, Ullman argued that it was "highly improbable that Gorbachev's program" would improve the Soviet economy and military but leave the USSR's politics and society unscathed. "In a polity as complex" as the USSR's, all of these spheres were interrelated. Eco-

Surprised by Gorbachev

199

nomic change was "scarcely possible" without concomitant social and political reforms.75 In 1986, Sovietologist Rasma Karklins, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, sought to examine Soviet ethnonationalism using a "perspective from below," which looked at the lifestyles of individual citizens. "Empirically, the [most important lapse] in [western] Soviet nationality studies [was] in popular perceptions and goals," the scholar argued. Karklin's approach departed from Soviet studies tradition that tended to study "the official policies [and pronouncements] of [Moscow] and republic authorities."76 Instead, the scholar examined popular ethnic attitudes and behavior within the Soviet nationalities. Her theme was deceptively simple: ethnicity mattered, not just as "a political identity to be manipulated from above" but also in citizens' lives. "Nationality [influenced] friendships and marriages," workplace relationships, and popular perceptions. Noting the tendency in Soviet nationality studies to focus on the non-Russian minorities, Karklins examined "the two-sidedness of ethnic relations." By virtue "of their number and dispersion, Russians [were] the major partner in ethnic relations unionwide," she noted. In addition to "constituting] the primary nationality of their [own] titular republic," they "ma[de] special claims as the dominant state nation" in all other Soviet republics.77 Moscow's nationality policy relied "on the physical presence" of a sizable Russian subpopulation within each non-Russian republic, in order to forestall "escalati[ng] ethnic claims," Karklins wrote. But to the extent that this Russian minority challenged the native population's cultural, economic, and political primacy, they were "resented and verbally attacked." Typically, the indigenous peoples saw the Russians as "foreign colonizers"; the Russians, in turn, saw themselves as Kulturtrage, or as cultural and "economic benefactors" and "liberators" of the local populations.78 Examining ethnic identity, Karklins found that whereas most Ukrainians and Belorussians identified themselves as Russian, Kazakhs and Central Asians held on to their "distinctive language, religion, [and cultural] identity." Not surprisingly, "exogamy [wa]s rare, and if it occurred], the non-local spouse and children [were] 'nativized.'" Karklins concluded that it was "more attractive and valuable to [belong to] a primary [Soviet] nationality"—and indeed, it was best to be Russian. Lowest in status were secondary groupings, such as Soviet Jews and Germans, who were dominant in none of the Soviet republics. Concerning language integration and knowledge, Karklins saw "deficiencies" throughout the Soviet Union. Most Russians in "the non-Russian republics [did] not know the local languages." In Central Asia, less than 10 percent had achieved fluency, and few Central Asians could speak Russian well.79 Indeed, the non-Russian republics felt pressured by central policies that promoted Russian as the official Soviet language, Karklins wrote. In university admissions policies and in the distribution of social benefits, native citizens of the primary population group received most of the benefits, Karklins noted; but contention over ethnic preference policies often led "the

200

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

indigenous nationality [to] attack the Russian presence per se." Many Russians "resented" these policies because they were "to their disadvantage" and seemed to violate the ideal of the unionwide equality of all Soviet peoples. The indigenous populations were also unhappy, because they saw their gains as "insufficient." Thus Moscow "arouse[d] resentments in both [the Russian minorities and the larger local populations] no matter what policy" it adopted.80 Indeed, Karklins saw "a clear 'we-they' differentiation" in every non-Russian republic, "between the titular nationalities and Russians." While there were many grievances, the most important had to do with "the Russian presence" and the indigenous populations' forced "union with Russia." Karklins discussed the widespread practice, in the Soviet armed forces, of segregating troops ethnically. She noted a "de facto pattern" whereby Central Asian and non-Russian units were given noncombat roles, while Russian and Slavic soldiers were assigned to combat units and other "sensitive" and "technologically sophisticated task[s]." Although Russian was "the language of command and socialization," there was little or no Russian language training for non-Russian troops. Military leaders assumed that non-Russian conscripts would learn "enough Russian [on their own] to function effectively." Thus, the armed forces were ethnically "fragmented" and hampered by racial tension, insults, and violence, the Sovietologist noted. Although the Red Army was "formally the most integrated institution" in the Soviet Union, "functional integration" was limited, and "attitudinal integration" was even more uncertain.81 Karklins noted the elusive ability of Islamic Soviet populations to "accommodat[e] the 'powers that be.'" Unlike Soviet Germans, who felt "a strong tension" between their "Christian faith and Communism," the Central Asians were able to join the CPSU and practice the Muslim religion simultaneously. Yet this Islamic "communal particularism" was a kind of Trojan horse for Moscow, because the avowed loyalty of these groups to Communism was, in stark contradiction to official Soviet policy, "socialist in form and national in content." In short, Moscow's goal of developing the "new Soviet man" was in grave trouble, Karklins noted; to the extent that "the Soviet way of life and customs [were] accepted" by the various Soviet nationalities, it was "in a superficial and formalistic manner. Contacts with other ethnic groups rarely extend[ed] into family and community life."82 Finally, Karklins questioned the long-standing Soviet "practice of registering" citizens' ethnic identities on their personal papers and passports. What was "the rationale," she asked, "of this policy which [so blatantly contradicted] official Soviet pronouncements about the gradual emergence" of the new Soviet man? Indeed, this practice "reinforcefd] the persistence of ethnic identification" and subverted the goal of the unification of all Soviet peoples. As such, it was "a policy at crosspurposes."83 Several important lessons derive from Karklin's study, including, first, the idea that "it matters what nationalities think and want"—"even in an authoritarian" country like the Soviet Union; and second, the realization that Soviet "melting pot" theory—the notion that the nationalities would willingly give up

Surprised by Gorbachev

201

their cultural identities for the common good, and that a unique new Soviet man would emerge—was socially untenable. In addition, there was an ominous implication for the future of the USSR itself. While the West should not doubt Moscow's resolve to solve its problems, current trends in Central Asia pointed to "a qualitatively new situation," Karklins warned. Native demands "for [economic benefits] and social mobility will [only] increase," and instability could result.84 LIKE DEER CAUGHT IN THE HEADLIGHTS: SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS Scholar A. W. DePorte once observed that throughout the Cold War era, "western analysts have tended to seek the essence of Soviet policy rather than closely studyfing] the details" of Moscow's behavior. Not surprisingly, Soviet experts "have often claimed to find" that essence "while in fact their work tendentiously interpreted Soviet foreign policy according to the international—and domestic—temperature of the moment."85 Little wonder, DePorte concluded, that "the mainstream" of American scholarship "saw Soviet policy as deeply purposeful, devious, and expansionist." Throughout the 1986-1988 period, American Sovietology was influenced along the prevailing neoconservative temper of the Reagan administration and toward a modified totalitarianism model depiction of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, many realist and political cultural-historicist scholars embraced a virulent anti-Soviet line, believing that, in political observer Eric Alterman's pithy words, "America's long twilight struggle" against Communism "took precedence over all competing national priorities and goals." As late as 1988, Soviet experts argued that "the central problem of American political life remained the need to educate and fortify the public to resist Communism." Their mind-set was "a mixture of pre-Vietnam centrism coupled with the hard-line revisionism of the Reagan [Right] counter-establishment" and a deep-seated pessimism regarding the likely outcome of the East-West competition.86 So thick was the cloud of neoconservative gloom that enveloped both U.S.Soviet relations and American Sovietology during this time that Georgetown University Soviet scholar Harley D. Balzer remarked, with Kuhnian irony, that from 1985 on, "the few scholars who did forecast Gorbachev's revolution were treated as [being] outside the mainstream by most Sovietologists." Balzer added that "the most frequently heard] argument in the West in 1986-1987 centered on whether Gorbachev was 'for real.'" Many Soviet experts insisted, curiously, that the Soviet Union would not change because it could not change, "and that if it [did] change it [would] no longer be the Soviet Union."87 In effect, said Balzer, "by making the Soviet regime sui generis and outside history," scholars "definefd] it as something that could never be anything else." Indeed, American hard realist and political cultural-historicist Sovietologists reacted to Gorbachev's initiatives in three distinct ways. At first, scholars insisted that Soviet new thinking was "all a trick," and that Gorbachev was not for

202

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

real. Then in 1987 and 1988, when this reaction was "no longer sustainable," some Soviet experts said that the Soviet leader was "just resting," and that soon his true, darker nature would reveal itself. "When this justification collapsed," in the late Gorbachev period, these Sovietologists "returned with a new accusation," charging that the Soviet leader could not control his own revolution and that "he was about to be overthrown." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer summarized these three sequential reactions succinctly when he asserted in late 1987, "[W]e don't know if Gorbachev is sincere. If he is, we don't know whether he will succeed. If he does, we don't know if he will last." In short, no matter what Gorbachev said or did, the first (and often the final) response of U.S. Soviet experts was that nothing had changed, and that, in Alterman's apt wording, Americans had to "stand tall, remain firm, keep our powder dry, avoid 'euphoria,' and most importantly, do nothing."88 Boris Z. Rumer of Harvard University's Russian Research Center has suggested obliquely that some American scholars did not speak out forcefully about Soviet reform because they were afraid of being ridiculed by their peers and colleagues, many of whom expected the Soviet future to resemble the present. Rumer recalled attending a 1987 conference at the University of London, where he engaged one of Moscow's top experts on Islamic Central Asia regarding the occurrence of ethnic unrest in Alma-Ata. The Harvard scholar asked if the Soviet leaders had not been "inflexible" in their nationality policies, in underestimating the ethnic grievances of Central Asians, "and [in] fail[ing] to draw the right conclusions from the unrest." But the Soviet official scoffed at Rumer's argument and asked whether the Harvard Sovietologist seriously thought that Gorbachev would "put a nationalist outburst in Alma Ata higher on the agenda than other more important problems. 'We have [other] sore points right now,'" he said. '"So far as the discontent of Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and the others is concerned, we'll quickly put things in order.'" The Moscow official seemed so self-assured that Rumer decided there and then that his questions were naive: "Really, I thought to myself, all these nationality problems are overdramatized by the West. For 70 years Moscow has regulated [its] multinational empire and will not permit it to [explode]. Events in Alma Ata [are] minor disturbances, whose significance should not be exaggerated."89 Of course, subsequent events justified Rumer's pessimism and showed his Soviet interlocutor to be wildly optimistic about Moscow's capacity to control ethnonationalistic unrest. By the final months of 1988, the Gorbachev revolution had swept through the Soviet Union and transformed Europe, yet ironically, it had little impact in the United States. Official Washington continued to view "the American purpose" in terms of resisting "Soviet Communist domination," as Alterman noted; indeed, "when Michael Dukakis debated George Bush for the presidency of the United States, both spoke as if Mikhail Gorbachev did not exist." Remarkably, this official U.S. distrust of Moscow continued well past the election, to the eve of the 1991 war against Iraq, when Gorbachev's attempt to broker a diplomatic solution to the conflict led some U.S. policy makers to suspect that the Soviet leader was trying to revive his country's arms trade and initiate "Cold War II,"

Surprised by Gorbachev

203

and that the USSR was reverting to its true mendacious form. The prevailing pessimism of American Sovietology influenced how scholars responded to the evidence of reform cited in Chapter 1. Eight indicators of Soviet change—modernization, lowered living standards and consumption rates, slowed gross national product and production growth, the military burden, antiquated technology, generational change, increased citizen participation in policy making, and Gorbachev's new thinking—were cited by realist and pluralist scholars but were virtually ignored by political cultural-historicists during this time. By contrast, agricultural inefficiency and the spread of polycentrism—two prominent issues in the Sovietological literature of the 1970s—were all but forgotten in the 1986-1988 period. Many scholars in every Sovietological category believed during those years that social, economic, and political reform was at least possible, but few realist and political cultural-historicist Soviet experts expected such transformation to actually occur. No Sovietologist thought that the USSR would collapse, although political cultural-historicists talked with some frequency of the illegitimacy of Communism and the inviability of the Soviet system, and warned that "instability" could ensue. Almost all scholars thought that the Cold War would endure—realists were most certain of this geopolitical dogma, followed by political cultural-historicist scholars. Pluralists tended to be a bit more skeptical about the permanence of the Cold War, but most agreed that it would continue for the foreseeable future. Finally, it is noteworthy that few scholars in any Sovietological category changed their positions after the delegitimation of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet collapse. Like deer standing on a road, caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, many Soviet experts were mesmerized: they did not understand what was coming, and they did not realize that they needed to move. Rather, they remained frozen in place intellectually, believing that the evidence of 1989 and 1991 had vindicated their arguments while showing the theories of other scholars to be inadequate. To a significant extent, these tendencies were evident throughout our study. Even a cursory examination of the scholarly writings of the 1974-1988 period reveals that the majority of Soviet experts, representing all Sovietological persuasions, did not adjust their views regarding the Soviet Union significantly over time—despite three leadership turnovers in Moscow and the accumulation of new evidence that the USSR could change and was changing. We have seen repeatedly how new writings adopted the same tired arguments that were featured in older scholarly works. Second, third, and fourth editions of textbooks often took the same fundamental position as first editions. Of those scholars who did weigh the evidence of Soviet change, most hard realist and political cultural-historicist Sovietologists were persuaded that the Soviet future would be plagued by deep socioeconomic problems, political rigidity, malaise, and instability. Pluralist and soft realist scholars, on the other hand, often interpreted the same indicators and trends as suggestive of social transformation and broadbased innovation. What do the writings of U.S. Soviet experts tell us about how American So-

204

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

vietology saw and studied the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s? The answer to this question is complex. We might well assume that Sovietologists, by virtue of their training and research skills, should have had the most enlightened attitudes about the Soviet Union, should have been the first to appreciate the evidence of Soviet change presented in Chapter 1, and should have recognized that such change was eminently possible. Yet the scholarly literature we have examined renders this assumption problematic. George Kennan, arguably the foremost Soviet expert of the Cold War generation, developed his earliest and most lasting views of the Soviet Union, as Michael Hunt has noted, "in those hotbeds of antibolshevism, Berlin and the Baltic port of Riga, during the late 1920s and early 1930s," where he came into contact with deeply apathetic Soviet citizens, embittered emigres, and the poisoned rhetoric of U.S. and Soviet officials.90 It would have been difficult for Kennan's early beliefs about the USSR not to have been influenced by these experiences. Similarly, a number of eminent Sovietologists, including Richard Pipes, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Seweryn Bialer were deeply affected by their emigre backgrounds and/or their families' misfortunes at the hands of Communist regimes and, consequently, pursued their scholarly and governmental careers with a conscious interest in opposing Soviet Communism and helping their native countrymen. Still other Soviet experts got caught up in fighting the Cold War and put ideology, or career interests, ahead of scholarly dispassion. Realists, political cultural-historicists, and some pluralists minimized the likelihood of radical Soviet reform, although many scholars saw nonsystemic change as possible. In general, the writings of political cultural-historicist scholars tended to be more anti-Soviet in tone than the work of realist Soviet experts—for example, in glossing over the reformative implications of Khrushchev's "secret speech" and de-Stalinization campaign at the Twentieth Party Congress. But remarkably, none of these scholars—not even pluralists— anticipated the Soviet changes that would occur in the near future. Thus, it may well be that the better trained and more specialized U.S. Soviet experts became, and the more professionally connected they were to academia, government service, and/or the Sovietological discipline, the more pessimistic they became concerning the possibility of Soviet change.

NOTES 1. Henry A. Kissinger, quoted in Sidney Blumenthal, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), pp. 250-251. 2. Seweryn Bialer, "The Soviet Union in a Changing World," in Kinya Niiseki, ed., The Soviet Union in Transition (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 6, 12-14. 3. Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal Decline (New York: Vintage Press, 1986), pp. 1, 14, 16-18. 4. Ibid., pp. 20, 36-38. 5. Ibid., pp. 348, 352-353. 6. Ibid., pp. 43, 279-287.

Surprised by Gorbachev

205

7. Ibid., pp. 336, 339, 343. 8. Seweryn Bialer and Michael Mandelbaum, The Global Rivals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers, 1988), pp. 5, 38-39. 9. Timothy J. Colton, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1986), pp. 34-35, 40, 42-43, 63-64. 10. Ibid., pp. 47-48, 58-60. 11. Ibid., pp. 3, 57-59, 61, 131, 133, 173,219. 12. Ibid., pp. 120-122. 13. Ibid., pp. 221,224. 14. Timothy J. Colton, "Civil-Military Relations in the Mid-1980s," in Alexander Dallin and Condoleezza Rice, eds., The Gorbachev Era (Stanford, Calif: Stanford Alumni Association, 1986), pp. 112-113. 15. Alexander J. Motyl, Will the Non-Russians Rebel? State, Ethnicity, and Stability in the USSR (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 70. 16. Ibid., pp. 126, 138, 140, 143. 17. Ibid., pp. 162-163. 18. Alexander J. Motyl, Reassessing Soviet Crisis: Big Problems, Muddling Through, Business as Usual (New York: Columbia University Press, September 1988), pp. 5-6. 19. Ibid., pp. 9-10. 20. William G. Hyland, Mortal Rivals: Superpower Relations from Nixon to Reagan (New York: Random House, Publishers, 1987), p. 247. 21. Ibid., pp. 253-255, 22. Ibid., pp. 83-85. 23. Ibid., p. 233. 24. Michael Mandelbaum and Strobe Talbott, Reagan and Gorbachev (New York: Vintage Press, 1987), pp. 104, 187, 190. 25. Robert G. Kaiser, 'The Soviet Pretense," Foreign Affairs 65, no. 2, (winter 1986-1987), pp. 236-237. 26. Ibid., pp. 238-241,249-251. 27. Robert G. Kaiser, "The U.S.S.R. in Decline," Foreign Affairs 67, no. 2, (winter 1988-1989), p. 97. 28. Ibid., pp. 105-106, 109, 112-113. 29. Robert Legvold, quoted in Russell Watson, "A Mellower Moscow," Newsweek September 21, 1987, p. 43, cited in Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics (New York: HarperCollins, Publishers, 1992), p. 217. 30. Robert Legvold, "The Revolution in Soviet Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs 67, no. 2, (winter 1988-1989), pp. 83-93, excerpted in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, The Soviet System in Crisis: A Reader of Western and Soviet Views (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), p. 497. 31. Ed A. Hewett, "Gorbachev at Two Years: Perspectives on Economic Reforms," in Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: The Economy (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1991), p. 30. 32. Ed A. Hewett, quoted in Abel G. Aganbegyan, "Basic Directions of Perestroika," in Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones: The Economy, p. 110. 33. See Ed A. Hewett, Reforming the Soviet Economy: Equality Versus Efficiency (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1988).

206

What Happened to the Soviet Union?

34. Gertrude E. Schroeder, "Social and Economic Aspects of the Nationality Problem," in Robert Conquest, ed., The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), pp. 309-310. 35. Gertrude E. Schroeder, "Gorbachev: 'Radically' Implementing Brezhnev's Reforms," in Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones: The Economy, p. 46. 36. Gertrude E. Schroeder, "Anatomy of Gorbachev's Economic Reform," in Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones: The Economy, pp. 215, 217-218, 224. 37. Gail W. Lapidus, "The Soviet Nationality Question," in Alexander Dallin and Condoleezza Rice, eds., The Gorbachev Era, p. 73. 38. Ibid., pp. 76-77, 79, 82-83. 39. Gail W. Lapidus, "Soviet Society in Transition," in Alexander Dallin and Condoleezza Rice, eds., The Gorbachev Era, p. 32. 40. Robert V. Daniels, Is Russia Reformable? Change and Resistance from Stalin to Gorbachev (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 3, 5. 41. Ibid., pp. 11,47-48. 42. Ibid., pp. 61-63, 68. 43. Ibid., pp. 123-124, 132. 44. To put it baldly, no Sovietologist wanted to rush a book or article into print, only to discover that it was rendered obsolete scarcely a month after publication. Scholars did not have to worry about this problem during the lengthy Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev tenures. Yet it happened repeatedly to some hapless Soviet experts in the early 1980s who wrote on the "emergent Andropov and Chernenko eras." 45. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3-6, 308, 321. 46. Ibid., pp. 344, 346-347. 47. Robbin F. Laird, "The Gorbachev Challenge," in Robbin F. Laird, ed., Soviet Foreign Policy (New York: Academy of Political Science, 1987), pp. 8-9. 48. Peter Reddaway, "Gorbachev the Bold," New York Review of Books 34, no. 9 (May 28, 1987), pp. 21-25, cited in Peter Hauslohner, "Politics Before Gorbachev: Destabilization and the Roots of Reform," reprinted in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, The Soviet System, p. 37. 49. Peter Reddaway, cited in Archie Brown, "Political Change in the Soviet Union," reprinted in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, The Soviet System, pp. 127128, n. 2. 50. Robert C Tucker, "Gorbachev and the Fight for Soviet Reform," World Policy Journal, Spring 1987, p. 179, cited in Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury, p. 216. 51. Alexander Dallin, "A Soviet Master Plan? The Non-Existent 'Grand Design' in World Affairs," in Alexander Dallin and Condoleezza Rice, eds., The Gorbachev Era, pp. 167, 171, 173. 52. Alexander Dallin, "The Legacy of the Past," in Alexander Dallin and Condoleezza Rice, eds., The Gorbachev Era, pp. 2-A. 53. Ibid., pp. 5-6, 9. 54. Alexander Dallin, "The Uses and Abuses of Russian History" in Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., and Erik P. Hoffmann, eds., Post-Communist Studies & Political Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 131-135, 139. 55. Michael MccGwire, Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1987), p. 3. 56. Ibid., pp. 272, 362-363.

Surprised by Gorbachev

207

57. Ibid., pp. 265-266, 270, 289, 292. 58. Ibid., p. 370. 59. Joan Barth Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 10, 16, 18-19. 60. Ibid., pp. 21-22, 225. 61. Ibid., p. 262. 62. Ibid., pp. 352-353. 63. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 82, 147. 64. Ibid., pp. 74, 113. 65. Ibid., pp. 101-103, 129. 66. Ibid., pp. viii, x, 1. 67. Ibid., pp. 3—4. 68. Donald R. Kelley, Soviet Politics from Brezhnev to Gorbachev (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1987), p. 4. 69. Ibid., pp. 6-8, 13-14. 70. Ibid., pp. 15-16. 71. Ibid., pp. 76, 128. 72. Ibid., pp. 167, 188-189,231-233. 73. S. Frederick Starr, "Soviet Union: A Civil Society," Foreign Policy 70, no. 2 (spring 1988), pp. 26-28. 74. Ibid., pp. 30, 32, 35-37, 39. 75. Richard H. Ullman, "Ending the Cold War," Foreign Policy 72, no. 3 (fall 1988), p. 132, 135-136, 146. 76. Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1986), pp. 1-2. 77. Ibid., p. 8. 78. Ibid., pp. 49-53, 94. 79. Ibid., pp. 39-40, 43, 59, 72. 80. Ibid., pp. 65-66, 71-72. 81. Ibid., pp. 113, 116-117, 122. 82. Ibid., pp. 197-199. 83. Ibid., pp. 42, 216. 84. Ibid., pp. 94, 225. 85. A. W. DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 63. 86. Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury, pp. 204-205. 87. Harley D. Balzer, "Perestroika as Process: Lessons from the First Five Years," in Harley D. Balzer, ed.. Five Years That Shook the World: Gorbachev's Unfinished Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), p. 70. 88. Charles Krauthammer, "When To Call Off the Cold War," The New Republic, November 16, 1987, p. 18, in Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury, pp. 214-215. 89. Boris Z. Rumer, Soviet Central Asia: "A Tragic Experiment, " (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. xiii. 90. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 153.

This page intentionally left blank

Epilogue After the delegitimation of Communism and the demise of the Soviet Union came the post mortems. What happened to the Soviet Union? How and why were American Sovietologists caught by surprise? What accounts for the events of 1989 and 1991, and whose fault was it that American Sovietology hadn't done a better job of predicting their occurrence? More significantly, was there a fundamental flaw in the way U.S. Soviet experts perceived the USSR during the Cold War era? In Kuhnian terms, was the dominant U.S. Sovietological paradigm in error? A number of prestigious symposia, conferences, and research projects were convened in the early 1990s to answer these questions, and most of these studies resulted in the publication of new scholarly articles and books. Soon a minor cottage industry developed among American Soviet experts anxious to reassess the Gorbachev era and the nature of the Soviet Union, and to explain the failings of Communism and the Soviet collapse. Surprisingly—considering the scholars and resources involved—the results of this vast effort were uneven. While some good work was produced, much of it was anecdotal, impressionistic, and selfcongratulatory. This yielded an avalanche of mostly unsatisfactory answers to the first group of questions, of why the Sovietological crystal ball failed to predict the events of 1989 and 1991—including the oblique and somewhat disingenuous observation that it was not the job of Sovietologists to make predictions, and besides, the Soviet collapse was unforeseeable. Oddly, not much was said about the second set of questions, concerning the way Soviet experts studied the USSR during the Cold War period, except polemically, as a way of justifying one's own Sovietological forecasts and condemning those of others. If most of these Cold War assessments and reassessments were unsatisfactory, it may be because Soviet experts were asking—and answering—the wrong questions about the USSR. Throughout the years from 1974 to 1988, and even in the post-1988 period, many scholars avoided examining the issue of Soviet

210

Epilogue

change, while others broached the subject gingerly, considering only the question of whether the USSR would undergo systemic reform in the foreseeable future. Assuming the answer to be no, these Sovietologists then bypassed the harder and more complex question of whether, and under what circumstances, any kind of Soviet change was possible, and conveniently moved on to other topics. Soviet experts of the post-1988 period should not have focused only on the narrow question of why the Sovietological discipline failed to anticipate the breakdown of Communism and the Soviet collapse. In addition to these concerns, they should have asked why Cold War Sovietology seemed to expect the status quo in Moscow to continue forever. As Donald R. Kelley and Hoyt Purvis correctly noted in 1990, "[T]he United States had grown complacent about the Soviet Union. Many [scholars] did not believe" that real Soviet reform "was probable," and "some doubted that it was possible."1 A common error in many of the retrospective Sovietological analyses of the post-Cold War period was a tendency to define Soviet reform in terms of how it all turned out in 1991—that is, in terms of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Thus, some scholars trivialized the concept of Soviet change by arguing that the 1991 collapse was itself a form of political change and that the USSR's demise proved that the Soviet Union could have changed. More commonly, Sovietologists took the opposite approach of insisting that the USSR could not have been reformed and that the Soviet collapse of 1991 proves it! Not unrelatedly, many Sovietologists argued, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, that genuine, systemic innovation could not occur in the Soviet Union and that if it did occur, it would lead to anarchy or collapse. Thus, the best way for the USSR to "muddle through" its difficulties, these scholars implied, was for political leaders to avoid "rocking the boat," and indeed, to avoid change altogether. Few Soviet experts made the opposite but more plausible argument, that political, social, and economic innovation reinforces a state's resilience, and that indeed, it is the lack of change and the attempt to forestall reform that invites instability and collapse. Many of these intellectual and conceptual failings—including the Sovietological proclivity to ask the wrong questions about the events of 1989 and 1991, and the tendency to associate change with political instability—were evident in the realist writings of the post-1988 period. Thus, in 1989, Seweryn Bialer predicted that nothing would change anytime soon in Eastern Europe. The USSR had "moderated the harshness of its rule and increased the parameters of permissiveness," he conceded—"yet it showfed] no signs of dissolving its empire or relinquishing control over these countries."2 In a retrospective 1992 study entitled, What Went Wrong With Perestroika, Marshall I. Goldman likened the "schizophrenic capability" of the Soviet economy to the "dual economies of] Third World countries." He suggested that the USSR's economy featured a "backward sector" which "relie[d] on barter, laborintensive inputs, and primitive technology" and "an advanced sector that [wa]s integrated into the economy of the outside world" and had "sophisticated tech-

Epilogue

211

nologies, skilled labor, and access to convertible currencies."3 Posing a similar argument in his own 1992 book, Adam B. Ulam noted that "for all of its domestic weaknesses, the Soviet Union's credentials as one of the world's two most powerful states were unquestionable"; indeed, the USSR's "superpower [status] would for quite a while obscure its internal weaknesses and vulnerabilities."4 Goldman's and Ulam's analyses were reminiscent of the old two-track argument that many Cold War era Soviet experts and economists used to explain how the Soviet Union could pose a serious military threat against the West even though it could not provide its citizens with enough food to eat. In effect, their schema was dichotomous, or even trichotomous, and suggested a Russian nesting doll metaphor, with a secret advanced Soviet economy, hidden within a backward consumer economy, encased in a global superpower economy that was for show. In the early 1990s, some hard realists began to soften their positions regarding Soviet change. Thus, Michael Mandelbaum tried to deflate the hyperbolic claims and euphoric boasting of Soviet experts who had argued that the Soviet collapse proved that the West—or the United States—"won" the Cold War. The USSR "was not destroyed by those who defeated it," said Mandelbaum, "nor was the defeat anticipated, or welcomed, by the victors." Rather, the Cold War ended after a long and fierce competition in which one side "falter[ed] and the other attempted to prop it up—calculating that a familiar environment was preferable to an uncertain one" and "that a sudden collapse would be dangerous." But the rescue effort failed. Mandelbaum's point was clear: short of wanting the USSR defeated, Washington had a stake in its continued existence.5 Similarly, in stark contrast to the post facto claims of many Sovietologists in the early 1990s that they really did see the Soviet collapse coming, Washington Post journalist Robert G. Kaiser admitted that "nearly all westerners who studied the Soviet Union were unprepared for the most dramatic departures that Gorbachev was to cause, or to permit, in the next five years." Blaming western Soviet experts for being "mired in misconceptions" about Soviet reform, and for "lack[ing] imagination," the journalist recalled that American Sovietologists thought they had "good reasons" in the 1970s and 1980s for believing that the USSR could not change. U.S. scholars "knew" of the "inevitable] subjugation]" of individuals in the USSR to the state, Kaiser noted; they "knew" that "the authorities [would] stamp out" dissent and "censor nonconformist ideas;" and they "knew" that the Soviet Union's command economy, its "multinational empire" (and tight grip on Eastern Europe), and its social inertia were "immutable" facts.6 In short, western Soviet experts "knew" that the Soviet "system was cruel, stupid, and inefficient," but they believed that "it suited a nation of sheeplike followers." According to Kaiser, American Soviet experts had "failed to appreciate" how "reformist, humanistic, pragmatic ideas" that were "reborn in the thaw"—"ideas about the need to make the post-Stalin [USSR] a better society—had survived Brezhnev's 'de-Khrushchevization' and then survived eighteen years of Brezhnev." Moreover, they had not realized how broad based the support for Gorbachev's new thinking was; U.S. Sovietologists "knew that [a] small band

212

Epilogue

of dissident, liberal intellectuals held on to these ideas," he noted, but they "didn't understand" that the dream of Soviet reform "also lived on in the minds of many senior apparatchiks, academics, diplomats, scientists, and party leaders." Kaiser added that it wasn't until mid-1990 that he himself became a firm believer in Gorbachev. In 1992, Valerie Bunce argued that Gorbachev's reforms were not caused by "short-term and relatively idiosyncratic"—and hence, unforeseeable—factors but, rather, were "the culmination of pressures and possibilities long in development." Indeed, "the crisis [of] the 1980s was [itself] a product of the particular logic of the Stalinist system." Bunce agreed with Moshe Lewin that the growing "dissonance between a dictatorial party-state and an educated and urban society" that sought "major change" was a long-term trend, "and was fated eventually to restructure the Soviet system." Bunce's argument suggested that both Moscow's difficulties and Gorbachev's initiatives were foreseeable and should have been anticipated by the West. Even if the Soviet future could not have been known with certainty, the possibility of change was evident.7 A year later, Robert V. Daniels wrote that throughout the East-West conflict, and even after the Cold War was over, western Sovietology was preoccupied with the USSR's enduring Stalinist tradition and ideology. Yet "there were ample precedents" for the amelioration of Soviet-style totalitarianism, Daniels noted, and scholars should have been aware of this evidence. Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia demonstrated "well before the upheaval of 1989 that totalitarian regimes could evolve internally" into authoritarian or even democratic systems.8 Thus, as Daniels's reviewer, Abraham Brumberg, noted, the USSR was often judged by western scholars "not for what it was—a cruel, dictatorial bureaucratic system—but for what it pretended to be: 'socialist,' 'Marxist,' or 'Marxist-Leninist.'" Such misperceptions "poisoned public discourse in the West, both with regard to Communism and [in] our own social and economic institutions."9 For many years, American Sovietologists had eyed Gorbachev warily and insisted that for all of his western charm and polish, the new Soviet leader was no different than his predecessors. But Daniels turned this argument on its head by suggesting, in effect, that previous Soviet leaders were like Gorbachev. "It remains a paradox," he noted, "that in th[e] most conservative years of the Brezhnev regime, the most successful political climber" would shortly "repudiate" the Brezhnev period as an "era of stagnation." If the USSR was still totalitarian in the 1960s and 1970s, "the question naturally arises of how Gorbachev could so readily dismantle that system, or how leaders could come up through that system who were even willing to dismantle it."10 Daniels's answer was that the USSR and its leaders were never as monstrous or hostile as we thought they were: the West had misunderstood the Soviet system for decades. A number of political cultural-historicist writings were published after 1988, but many of these works were unjustifiably pessimistic and anti-Soviet in focus, while others seemed to be thinly disguised vehicles for railing against pluralist or "social science" Sovietology.11 Thus, in an essay published anonymously in

Epilogue

213

1990 under the pseudonym, Z, Martin Malia condemned "mainline western Sovietology" for its social science-based critique of the Soviet experience and for depicting the USSR as a modernizing, developing country.12 Not only did Malia admit that he had embraced the totalitarianism model in the 1970s and 1980s, but he insisted that the model possessed timeless validity and that it still provided "the best explanation" of Cold War era Soviet political behavior. Malia saw Gorbachev as "a product of the [Soviet] system"; accordingly, the general secretary was like all previous Soviet dictators—his overarching purpose was to win for Moscow a temporary Cold War respite.13 In a classic display of post hoc reasoning, Malia rejected the notion that the Soviet Union could have changed—on the grounds that it did not change. "[C]ould Gorbachev's reforms have succeeded? One might think that the [events] of 1989— 1991 [had] settled these questions once and for all with the conclusion that Communism was irreformable," he argued, "since it in fact failed to reform itself." Robert Conquest echoed Malia's criticisms of western Sovietology. In a 1991 essay, he recalled that "many [western scholars] had become accustomed" to the USSR, "treating it as a normal component of the world scene, or at least an acceptable arrangement for Russia and the other republics, while in fact it was a ghastly aberration." Indeed, George Orwell "had the imagination" to understand the true character of the Soviet system in a way that most western Sovietologists did not.14 But Conquest's complaint ignored the obvious rejoinder that readers' expectations of George Orwell, a novelist, were fundamentally different and less rigorous than those imposed on a serious political scientist. In truth, Conquest himself, like virtually all other western Soviet experts, had "become accustomed to the Soviet Union's existence" and assumed its stability before 1991.15 In 1989, Walter Laqueur faulted a number of pluralist Sovietologists for various scholarly transgressions. Moshe Lewin's modernization thesis recalled "similar arguments after Stalin's death by Isaac Deutscher," he noted. Jerry F. Hough's 1979 revision of the classic Merle Fainsod text, How Russia Is Ruled (1953), was both ill-advised and badly executed. As for the Duke University Sovietologist's insistence that "something akin to glasnost existed under Brezhnev," Laqueur retorted that if Hough's analysis was "correct, there would have been no need for Gorbachev to introduce glasnost.^6 Insisting that "social science" (i.e., pluralist) Sovietologists had taken over the mainstream of western Soviet studies, Laqueur excoriated these "revisionists" for failing to predict the Soviet collapse (although he acknowledged that prediction was difficult, that guessing the future was not the job of serious scholars, and that he himself had not anticipated the Soviet collapse) and for being excessively "optimistic" about the USSR's resiliency and chances of survival (although he admitted that he and other neoconservative scholars had been similarly optimistic). Ironically, Laqueur, who was himself a respected Sovietologist and as rigorous a scholar as any of his colleagues, evidenced a curious anti-intellectualism

214

Epilogue

in his incessant attacks on "revisionist" Sovietology's theories, its modeling and methodology building, and its objective scholarly inquiry. For example, in one singularly odd argument, he suggested that "ordinary Soviet citizens" with little education felt "in their bones in what direction their society was moving, whereas many western scholars, fortified [with] theoretical models, had no such misgivings." Indeed, Sovietologists would have been better off had they abandoned their theories and methodologies and "rea[d] Soviet novels, or watch[ed] Soviet plays or movies." Such sources were "far more likely to provide important insights concerning Soviet society," Laqueur added, because they "reflected Soviet realities, whereas revisionist scholarship steered clear of the real world." Similarly, in an endnote, Laqueur quoted Alfred G. Meyer's casual observation that "every important event in the Communist world within the last few years has come as a surprise" to scholars.17 Like their realist and political cultural-historicist colleagues, most pluralist Sovietologists had difficulty accounting for the events of the post-1988 period. Thus, Sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen could not say for sure, even as late as 1989, whether Gorbachev's initiatives would succeed or fail. "Despite what has already been accomplished," Cohen wrote, "the process of change still could be stopped and even reversed. To do so [now] would probably require considerable repression, but in a country with a long despotic tradition, that too is conceivable." The Princeton University scholar saw the battle between pro- and anti-reform forces as a "civil war" that threatened a variety of vested interests.18 Indeed, he noted, "[A]ll that can be said with any confidence is that the struggle will go on, and many of us will not live long enough to witness the eventual outcome." Despite this dour appraisal, Cohen believed that the USSR had always been far more pluralistic than western scholars thought and that a significant reformist tradition existed in Soviet history. The Gorbachev initiatives should not have taken U.S. scholars by surprise, he noted, but unfortunately, "the emergence of a Soviet leadership devoted to reform confounded most western commentators, who had long believed that the [Soviet Union] lacked any capacity for real change." Remarkably, "the Gorbachev reformation" continued to puzzle scholars well into the 1990s. Even after the Cold War was over, when it was obvious that the USSR had undergone significant transformation, many American Soviet experts remained doubtful about Gorbachev's motives and the possibility of Soviet change. They saw the Soviet leader's program as an "inexplicable accident," said Cohen, "an aberration without roots [or] any real prospect of success." The scholarly effort to define the USSR continued well past the 1991 Soviet demise. Thus, journalist-Sovietologist Strobe Talbott, soon to become a top official in the Clinton State Department, made an astonishing claim in his introduction to Georgi Arbatov's 1992 political memoirs. "In retrospect," he wrote, "it appears that the USSR was never really a viable country. Its 280 million people spoke too many languages, nurtured too many grievances, and strained too hard against the ties that bound them to Moscow." Nor was the USSR really

Epilogue

215

"an empire," the journalist-Sovietologist argued. So what was it? "The best word" to describe the Soviet Union, "was a system, a complex unity formed of many diverse parts subject to a common plan or purpose."19 It is easy to see in hindsight that Talbott's argument was prompted by his puzzlement over the Soviet collapse; nevertheless, his reappraisal of the USSR was problematic—in no small measure because the term, "system," is politically meaningless. If the Soviet Union was "never a viable country," or a real empire, then it was, in effect, sui generis—a one-of-a-kind political entity. If so, Talbott was simply importing the totalitarianism model into his account by the back door. PLUS CA CHANGE, PLUS C'EST LA MEME CHOSE "Prediction is difficult," baseball legend Yogi Berra once said. "Especially about the future." And in no endeavor was Berra's malapropism more true than in Sovietological forecasting. In this study, we have examined various reasons why American scholars of the 1970s and 1980s failed to anticipate the possibility of Soviet change. First, the writings of Thomas S. Kuhn suggest obliquely that the Sovietological community may have resisted new evidence because such data went against the grain of conventional scholarly opinion—it contradicted the dominant totalitarianism model, which had become a kind of "normal science." In addition, a number of Soviet experts whose writings are discussed in these pages have chronicled how the American liberal tradition and the Cold War consensus have influenced virtually every facet of American life, including U.S. intellectual and political culture. Third, such diverse Sovietologists as George F. Kennan, Walter Laqueur, Martin Malia, and Stephen F. Cohen have argued that their discipline was co-opted for many decades by the demands of governmental policymaking interests, as well as by the ethos of anticommunism and various federal and state "loyalty oath" requirements. What are we to make of these claims? We cannot deny that the academy— consisting of large research universities and think tanks, but also of smaller institutions—was deeply involved in defense and security-related partnerships with the U.S. government during the Cold War years. Indeed, various intelligence, diplomatic, and defense agencies, departments, and organizations—a loose but interrelated network of policy making communities—consulted frequently with academic Sovietologists. Nor can we deny that there was, throughout the 1974 to 1988 period, a curious congruence in tone and content between American realist, political culturalhistoricist, and pluralist Sovietological literature and the views of Washington (e.g., national security council, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and congressional) policy makers. Indeed, the mainstream of academic Sovietological opinion followed American policy declaration; many of the scholarly writings we have examined in Chapters 2 through 6 seemed to reflect, if not actually parrot, the official government line. Thus, even a superficial reading of the Sovietological literature of the 1974 through 1988 period reveals the extraordinary

216

Epilogue

willingness of scholars to support the orthodox American viewpoint during the Cold War, and to justify current Washington policy by linking the U.S. struggle against the Axis powers and the campaign against the Soviet Union as one continuous conflict against expansionist totalitarianism. We also know that these university-government partnerships were lucrative for academia and tended to advance scholarly careers and departmental reputations. Indeed, if we "follow the money," we quickly discover that the flow of funding in these relationships was strictly one-way—from the government agencies that ordered and subsidized the academic research, to the universities and scholars that did the work. This would seem to suggest that it was the professors who were co-opted by the policy makers and not the other way around. Scholars may have been co-opted toward a pro-Washington line for any number of reasons—including the possibility of acquiring lucrative research grants or winning the ear of an influential senator or presidential candidate. Since Washington's overriding objective during the Cold War years was to marshal its resources toward containment, professors (many of whom received federal subsidies for their work and went in and out of government service repeatedly) and students (many of whom were preparing for government careers) framed the debate accordingly and refused to contradict the official Washington line. This tendency of academic opinion to mirror the Cold War consensus continued well into the Gorbachev era. Neoconservative ideas gained such dominance in the American academic community during the 1970s and 1980s that alternative viewpoints—including the possibility that the Soviet Union could change—were not even considered. Several neoconservative themes about U.S.-Soviet relations—including the belief that the Soviets cheated at detente, the notion that the Moscow leaders were untrustworthy, and the idea that the USSR and the United States had achieved a rough strategic parity but that the Soviets were about to go ahead—were so widely accepted by realists, political cultural-historicists, and even some pluralists that it was hard for independent scholars who did not subscribe to these verities to deny them. They literally could not be heard above the din.

NOTES 1. Donald R. Kelley and Hoyt Purvis, eds., Old Myths and New Realities in United States-Soviet Relations (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990), pp. 2-3. 2. Seweryn Bialer, "Lessons from the History of Soviet-American Relations," Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Washington, D.C, 1989, pp. 8, 14. 3. Marshall I. Goldman, What Went Wrong With Perestroika (New York: W. W. Norton, Publishers, 1992), p. 48. 4. Adam B. Ulam, The Communists: The Story of Power and Lost Illusions 19481991 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), pp. 247, 287. 5. Michael Mandelbaum, 'The Fall of the House of Lenin" (book review), World

Epilogue

217

Policy Journal 10, no. 3 (fall 1993), p. 105. 6. Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, Publishers, 1992), pp. 12-13, 87-88. 7. Valerie Bunce, "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," in Raymond C. Taras, ed., Handbook of Political Science Research on the USSR and Eastern Europe: Trends from the 1950s to the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1992), p. 190. 8. Robert V. Daniels, The End of the Communist Revolution (London: Routledge Press, 1993), pp. 2-3,78. 9. Abraham Brumberg, "Decline and Fall and Afterwards," Washington Post Book World, August 22, 1993, p. 11. 10. Robert V. Daniels, The End, p. 58. 11. Remarkably, even as late as 1990, such books continued to be published. Thus, R. Judson Mitchell's Getting to the Top in the USSR: Cyclical Patterns in the Leadership Succession Process (Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 1990) suggested that Gorbachev, with his "nonrevolution" from above, had in fact, consolidated power according to the historic pattern and that the basic elements of the traditional Soviet system had remained intact. The USSR had not and would not change, Mitchell maintained. Even stranger was Arnold Beichman's The Long Pretense: Soviet Treaty Diplomacy from Lenin to Gorbachev (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 1990), which depicted the Soviet Union as bent on world domination and ready to commit any crime necessary to achieve that goal. Beichman cited a long list of western leaders who were taken in by Moscow's deception and by their own gullibility—among them Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, Richard M. Nixon, Henry A. Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. Beichman was pessimistic about Gorbachev's new thinking because, he said, no fundamental democratizing change and no abandonment of Marxism-Leninism had occurred in the USSR. It was possible, of course, to find any number of such books in the post-1988 period, published out of storefront or basement print shops. These two books, however, came from reputable publishing houses with strong scholarly reputations; moreover, they were reviewed in the prestigious Council of Foreign Relations journal, Foreign Affairs and thereby gained a certain cachet of "mainstream" respectability. 12. Martin Malia (Z, pseud.), "To the Stalin Mausoleum," in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, The Soviet System in Crisis, pp. 660-662. 13. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 409, 413, 492. 14. Robert Conquest, "The Fall of Lenin," in Ferdinand Mount, ed., Communism: A Times Literary Supplement Companion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 302. 15. Indeed, as Francis Fukuyama argued in 1992, "Virtually everyone professionally engaged in the study of politics and foreign policy believed in the permanence of communism; its worldwide collapse in the late 1980s was almost totally unanticipated." (See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man [New York: Avon Books, 1992], pp. 7-8). 16. Walter Laqueur, The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost (New York: Collier Press, 1989), pp. 240 (n. 39), 241. 17. Walter Laqueur, The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 106-114, 189, 209 (n. 2), 210 (n. 13). 18. Stephen F. Cohen, "Introduction: Gorbachev and the Soviet Reformation," in

218

Epilogue

Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 13, 17, 30. 19. Strobe Talbott, introduction to Georgi Arbatov, The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Times Books, 1992), p. ix.

For Further Reading Alterman, Eric. Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Ambrose, Stephen E. Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971). Balzer, Harley D., ed. Five Years That Shook the World: Gorbachev's Unfinished Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991). Barghoorn, Frederick C. Detente and the Democratic Movement in the USSR (New York: Free Press, 1976). . Politics in the USSR (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966). Berkowitz, Daniel M., Joseph S. Berliner, Paul R. Gregory, Susan J. Linz, and James R. Millar. "An Evaluation of the CIA's Analysis of Soviet Economic Performance, 1970-90" in Susan J. Linz, ed. Comparative Economic Studies, 35, no. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 33-57. Bialer, Seweryn. The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal Decline (New York: Vintage, 1986). . Stalin's Successors: Leadership Stability and Change in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Bialer, Seweryn, ed. The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981). Bialer, Seweryn and Michael Mandelbaum. The Global Rivals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). Billington, James H. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage, 1966). . Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope (New York: Free Press, 1992). Blumenthal, Sidney. Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991). Brands, H. W. The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Brown, Archie. The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Game Plan: How to Conduct the U.S.-Soviet Contest (New York: Atlantic Monthly Books, 1986).

220

For Further Reading

. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989). . The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). Brzezinski, Zbigniew, ed. Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). Brzezinski, Zbigniew and Samuel P. Huntington. Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking Press, 1965). Byrnes, Robert F., ed. After Brezhnev: Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1983). Caldwell, Lawrence T. and William Diebold, Jr. Soviet-American Relations in the 1980s: Superpower Politics and East-West Trade (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). Campbell, Robert W. The Soviet-Type Economies: Performance and Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Central Intelligence Agency. Handbooks of Economic Statistics, 1975-1990 (Washington, D.C: Central Intelligence Agency, 1975-1990). Chomsky, Noam, et al. The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: Free Press, 1997). Cocks, Paul, Robert V. Daniels, and Nancy Whittier Heer, eds. The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). Cohen, Stephen F. Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). . Sovieticus: American Perceptions and Soviet Realities (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985). Cohen, Stephen F., ed. An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union from Roy Medvedev's Underground Magazine Political Diary (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). Colton, Timothy J. The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1986). Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). . The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Conquest, Robert, ed. The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 1986). Cook, Linda J. The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed: Welfare Policy and Workers' Politics from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Dallek, Robert. The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Dallin, Alexander. "Bias and Blunder in American Studies on the USSR," Slavic Review 32, no. 3 (September 1973). Dallin, Alexander and Gail W. Lapidus. The Soviet System in Crisis: A Reader of Western and Soviet Views (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991). Dallin, Alexander and Condoleezza Rice, eds. The Gorbachev Era (Stanford, Calif: Stanford Alumni Association, 1986). Daniels, Robert V. The End of the Communist Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1993). . Is Russia Reformable? Change and Resistance from Stalin to Gorbachev (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988). . Russia: The Roots of Confrontation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

For Further Reading

221

Daniels, Robert V., ed. Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath, 1995). Davis, Christopher and Murray Feshbach. Rising Infant Mortality in the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s, Series P-95, No. 74 (Washington, D.C: Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, September 1980). Davis, Tani R. and Sean M. Lynn-Jones. "'Citty Upon A Hill,'" Foreign Policy 66 (Spring 1987), pp. 20-38. Deudney, Daniel and G. John Ikenberry. "After the Long War," Foreign Policy, 94 (Spring 1994). . "Who Won the Cold War?" Foreign Policy 87 (Summer 1992). Fainsod, Merle. How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). Feshbach, Murray. The Soviet Union: Population Trends and Dilemmas, Population Bulletin 37, No. 3 (Washington, D.C: Population Reference Bureau, August 1982). Feshbach, Murray and Stephan Rapawy. "Soviet Population and Manpower Trends and Policies," in Soviet Economy in a New Perspective: A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess. (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1976). Fleron, Frederic J. Jr., and Erik P. Hoffmann, eds. Post-Communist Studies and Political Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993). Friedgut, Theodore H. Political Participation in the USSR (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). Friedman, Thomas L. "Cold War Without End," New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1993, pp. 28-45. Friedrich, Carl J. and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1956). Gaddis, John Lewis. The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). . Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). . The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). . We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Garthoff, Raymond L. Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1985). Gelman, Harry. The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). Goldman, Marshall I. Gorbachev's Challenge: Economic Reform in the Age of High Technology (New York: W. W. Norton Publishers, 1987). . USSR in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System (New York: W. W. Norton Publishers, 1983). . What Went Wrong with Perestroika (New York: W. W. Norton Publishers, 1992). Gwertzman, Bernard and Michael T. Kaufman, eds. The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: Times Books, 1992). Hahn, Jeffrey W. Conceptualizing Political Participation in the USSR: Two Decades of Debate (Washington, D.C: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1984). Halperin, Morton H. and Jeanne M. Woods. "Ending the Cold War at Home," Foreign Policy 81 (Winter 1990-91).

222

For Further Reading

Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955). Herrmann, Richard K. Perceptions and Behavior in Soviet Foreign Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). Hewett, Ed. A. Reforming the Soviet Economy: Equality Versus Efficiency (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1988). Hewett, Ed. A. and Victor H. Winston, eds. Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: Politics and People (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1991). . Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: The Economy (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1991). Hoffmann, Erik P. and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., eds. The Conduct of Soviet Foreign Policy (New York: Aldine Publishing Co., 1980). Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Press, 1963). . The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). Hogan, Michael J., ed. The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Hosking, Geoffrey. The Awakening of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990). . Russia and the Russians: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2001). Hough, Jerry F. Opening Up the Soviet Economy (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1988). . Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). . Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1980). . The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). Hough, Jerry F. and Merle Fainsod. How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). Hyland, William G. The Cold War: Fifty Years of Conflict (New York: Times Books, 1991). . Mortal Rivals: Superpower Relations from Nixon to Reagan (New York: Random House, 1987). Jervis, Robert. The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970). . Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000). Kaiser, Robert G. Russia: The Power and The People (New York: Atheneum, 1976). . Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs, His Failure, and His Fall (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). Kanet, Roger E. Soviet Foreign Policy in the 1980s (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982). Karklins, Rasma. Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below (Boston:

For Further Reading

223

Unwin Hyman, 1986). . "The Nationality Factor in Soviet Foreign Policy," in Roger E. Kanet. Soviet Foreign Policy in the 1980s (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982), pp. 58-76. Kelley, Donald R. Soviet Politics from Brezhnev to Gorbachev (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1987). Kelley, Donald R., ed. Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980). Kelley, Donald R. and Hoyt Purvis, eds. Old Myths and New Realities in United StatesSoviet Relations (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990). Kennan, George F. American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (New York: Mentor Books, 1951). . "The Kennan 'Long Telegram,' February 22, 1946," in Kenneth M. Jensen, ed., Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan and Roberts 'Long Telegrams' of 1946 (Washington D.C: United States Institute of Peace, 1991). . Measures Short of War: The George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College, 1946-47 (Washington, D.C: National Defense University Press, 1991). . Memoirs: 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1967). . Memoirs: 1950-1963 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). . Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (New York: Mentor Books, 1961). . "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947), in Michael B. Levy, Political Thought in America: An Anthology (Chicago: Dorsey, 1988). Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1970). Kull, Steven. Burying Lenin: The Revolution in Soviet Ideology & Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992). Laird, Robbin F., ed. Soviet Foreign Policy (New York: Academy of Political Science, 1987). Lapidus, Gail W. The Nationality Problem and the Soviet Future (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, December 15, 1983). Laqueur, Walter. The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). . The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost (New York: Collier, 1989). . Soviet Realities: Culture and Politics from Stalin to Gorbachev (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990). Larson, David L., ed. The Puritan Ethic in United States Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1966). Lewin, Moshe. The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1991). Linden, Carl A. Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership 1957-1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). . The Soviet Party-State: The Politics of Ideocratic Despotism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983). Linden, Carl A. and Dimitri K. Simes, eds. Nationalities and Nationalism in the USSR: A Soviet Dilemma (Washington, D.C: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1976). Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996). Lowenthal, Richard. Model or Ally? The Communist Powers and the Developing Countries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Malia, Martin. The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New

224

For Further Reading

York: Free Press, 1994). Mandelbaum, Michael and Strobe Talbott. Reagan and Gorbachev (New York: Vintage Press, 1987). Markusen, Ann and Joel Yudken. Dismantling the Cold War Economy (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Mastny,Vojtech. Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Matlock, Jack F. Jr. Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House Publishers, 1995). Mayers, David. George Kennan and the Dilemmas of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). McGrory, Mary. "America's Incurable Cold War," Washington Post Outlook, March 28, 1993, p. Cl. MccGwire, Michael. Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1987). . Perestroika and Soviet National Security (Washington, D.C: The Brookings Institution, 1991). McNeal, Robert H. The Bolshevik Tradition: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975). Mead, Walter Russell. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). Mitchell, R. Judson. Ideology of a Superpower: Contemporary Soviet Doctrine on International Relations (Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 1982). Motyl, Alexander J. Reassessing Soviet Crisis: Big Problems, Muddling Through, Business As Usual (New York: Columbia University Press, September 1988). . Will the Non-Russians Rebel? State, Ethnicity, and Stability in the USSR (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). Motyl, Alexander J., ed. The Post-Soviet Nations: Perspectives on the Demise of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). . Thinking Theoretically About Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the U.S.S.R. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Mount, Ferdinand, ed. Communism: A Times Literary Supplement Companion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. "The Soviet Economy: Boy, Were We Wrong!" Washington Post, My 11, 1990, p. A19. Nelsen, Harvey W. Power and Insecurity: Beijing, Moscow & Washington, 1949-1988 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1989. Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962). Nogee, Joseph L., ed. Soviet Politics: Russia After Brezhnev (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985). Nogee, Joseph L. and Robert H. Donaldson. Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981). Orlovsky, Daniel, ed. Beyond Soviet Studies (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1995). Paterson, Thomas G. Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Pipes, Richard. Survival Is Not Enough (New York: Simon and Schuster Publishers, 1984). . US.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Detente (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,

For Further Reading

225

1981). Prados, John. Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (New York: William Morrow, 1991). Rubinstein, Alvin Z. Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II: Imperial and Global (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985). Rumer, Boris Z. Soviet Central Asia: "A Tragic Experiment, " (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999). Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). Scott, Harriet Fast and William F. Scott. The Armed Forces of the USSR (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984). Seton-Watson, Hugh. The Imperialist Revolutionaries (Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 1978). Shatz, Marshall S. Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Shipler, David K. Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (New York: Penguin Publishers, 1984). Shultz, George P. Turmoil and Triumph: My Years As Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993). Skilling, H. Gordon and Franklyn Griffiths, eds. Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971). Smith, Hedrick. The Russians (New York: Times Books, 1983). Sodaro, Michael J. Moscow, Germany, and the West From Khrushchev to Gorbachev (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). Sonnenfeldt, Helmut, ed. Soviet Politics in the 1980s (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985). Staar, Richard F. Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 1991). Starr, S. Frederick. "Soviet Union: A Civil Society," Foreign Policy 70 (Spring 1988). Steele, Jonathan. Soviet Power: The Kremlin's Foreign Policy - Brezhnev to Andropov (New York: Simon and Shuster Publishers, 1983). "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: An Autopsy," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993). Taras, Raymond C , ed. Handbook of Political Science Research on the USSR and Eastern Europe: Trends from the 1950s to the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1992). Treadgold, Donald W. Twentieth-Century Russia (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972). Tucker, Robert C The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1963). Ulam, Adam B. The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York: Collier Publishers, 1968). . The Communists: The Story of Power and Lost Illusions, 1948-1991 (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1992). . Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). . Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-1973 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974). . The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II (New York: Penguin,

226

For Further Reading

1972). . The Russian Political System (New York: Random House Publishers, 1974). Ullman, Richard H. "Ending the Cold War," Foreign Policy 72 (Fall 1988). Urban, Joan Barth. Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). Urban, Joan Barth, ed. Moscow and the Global Left in the Gorbachev Era (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992). Welch, William. American Images of Soviet Foreign Policy: An Inquiry into Recent Appraisals from the Academic Community (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970). Whelan, Joseph G. and Francis T. Miko. Detente in Soviet-American Relations, 19721974: A Survey and Analysis (Washington D.C: Library of Congress Congressional Research Service, May 1975). White, John Kenneth. Still Seeing Red: How the Cold War Shapes the New American Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997). White, Stephen. Gorbachev and After (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Wills, Garry. Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1987). Winks, Robin. Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). Wirls, Daniel. Buildup: The Politics of Defense in the Reagan Era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

Index Academy, Washington and the, 53-55, 61, 79, 123-128, 165-167, 215-216 xenophobia within the academy, 53 Adelman, Jonathan R., 7, 128 Africa, 18, 75, 79, 90, 113-114, 136, 138, 153 Afghanistan, Soviet incursion into, 1617,31,96, 103, 110, 114-115, 138, 147, 159, 189-190, 193 Alexander II, 81 Almond, Gabriel A., 33 Alterman, Eric, 201-202 Americacentrism, 23, 152-153 American anticommunism, 9, 17, 19, 24-26, 28, 30, 42, 52-53, 55, 78, 90-91, 103, 111, 127-128, 130 (n. 36), 134, 136, 143, 164-165, 201-202, 215 loyalty oath requirements imposed on scholars, 126-128,215 diplomacy, 50-52, 112-113, 117, 128-129 (n. 1) self-righteousness of, 50-55, 78, 85-86,95, 112-113, 117, 128129 (n. 1), 191 images of the USSR, 116-117, 124, 143, 191 militarism, 124 right wing, 29-30, 53, 111-112, 121, 133,201 suspicions

of Brezhnev, 115, 150 of Khrushchev, 65-66, 78, 157 of Gorbachev, 5, 7, 18, 46-48, 91, 163-165, 171-172, 179-180, 182, 187-188, 194-195,201202,214 triumphalism, 50-55, 112-113, 117, 178, 182,211 American Association of Universities, 127 American Friends Service Committee, 55 Andropov, Yuri, 12, 44, 117, 133, 135, 142, 146-147, 156, 160, 162, 187, 195-196, 206 (n. 44) administration, 151 initiatives, 196 Arab-Israeli War, 74, 135 Arbatov, Georgi, 214 Arendt, Hannah, 33 Aristotle, 2, 69, 180 Arms control, 14-16, 20, 28, 81, 90, 93 (n. 53), 130 (n. 36), 137, 180, 191192, 198 Arms race, 29-30, 77-78, 81, 97, 102103, 108, 111-113, 117, 123, 133, 136-138, 158, 176, 179-180, 191 Asia, 75,96, 113-114, 141, 153 Aspaturian Vernon V., 78-79 Augustine, 89

228

Index

Balance of power, 23, 31, 69, 100, 107, 130 (n. 36), 139 Balzer, Harley D., 201 Barber, Benjamin R., 125 Barghoorn, Frederick C , 34, 65-66, 74-75 Politics in the USSR (1966), 65-66 Barnes, Barry, 89 Barnet, Richard J., 26 Beichman, Arnold, 217 (n. 11) The Long Pretense (1990), 217 (n. H) Bell, Daniel, 6, 8 Berlin, 15,30 Berlinguer, Enrico, 193 Bialer, Seweryn, 5-8, 12, 15, 44, 103107, 110, 120, 135, 163, 172-176, 186,204,210 Stalin's Successors (1980), 103-105 Billington, James H , 66, 97, 134 The Icon and the Axe (1966), 66 Blacker, Coit D., 7, 134, 163 Blumenthal, Sidney, 172 Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 47, 55, 65, 80, 140, 143, 147, 189 Bohlen, Charles E. ("Chip"), 66 Brands, H.W., 30 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918), 72 Brezhnev, Leonid, 3, 11-12, 14-15, 18, 20, 29, 41-43, 62, 71, 73, 79, 81, 85, 97,99, 103, 105-108, 118-120, 133, 135, 137-139, 142, 146, 150, 156158, 160-162, 164, 174, 178-179, 194-197,211,213 administration, 39, 66, 69, 80-81, 96 -97,99, 103, 106, 108, 116, 118— 120, 138, 144, 164, 192-193,212 era, 10, 15,37,41,55,62, 104, 120, 147, 176, 178, 195, 197-198,212 initiatives, 138, 157-158, 176, 196 legacy of, 138, 157, 161 tenure, 71,85-86, 105, 119, 142, 193, 206 (n. 44) trust in cadres policy, 99, 105, 118120, 196 Brezhnev-Kosygin economic policies (1965), 35, 45, 76-77, 147, 157, 181, 183, 195 Brinkley, Alan, 124 Brumberg, Abraham, 212

Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 3-4, 7-9, 12, 14, 19, 23, 27-28, 30-39, 42, 44, 48-50, 53-55,61,67-68,72,79,85, 110, 162, 173, 187, 189, 194,204 anti-Sovietism of, 32-33, 38 The Permanent Purge (1956), 32-33 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (with Carl Friedtrich, 1956), 33 Political Power USA/USSR (with Samuel P. Huntington, 1965), 33-34 The Soviet Bloc (1967), 34-35 Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (1969), 35-36 Game Plan: How to Conduct the US.-Soviet Contest (1986), 36-37 The Grand Failure (1989), 37 Bunce, Valerie, 6, 106,212 Bundy, McGeorge, 125-126 Bureaucratic politics model, 62, 68 Burke, Edmund, 2 Byrnes, Robert F., 145-146, 163 Caldwell, Lawrence T., 108-109 Campbell, John C, 107-109 Campbell, Robert W., 75-77, 163 Carter, Jimmy, 54, 95, 110-111 Carter administration, 32, 54 Catherine II, 14 Caute, David, 128 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 7, 12-13, 101-103, 124-126, 165-167, 179 Soviet estimate, 101-102, 179 "Team B" reassessment of, 179 Chernenko, Konstantin, 44, 133, 139, 162, 187, 195-196, 206 (n. 44) Chernobyl, nuclear accident at, 13 China, People's Republic of, 14, 29, 32,34,45,63,72,84,97, 108, 137, 147, 159, 186 Civil society, the USSR as a, 3, 35, 69, 109, 118, 193-194, 197-198 Coalition maintenance model, 99-100 Cocks, Paul, 5, 75, 98-99 Cohen, Stephen F., 7, 9, 84-85, 119, 128, 135, 156-159, 161, 164-165, 167, 192,214-215

Index An End to Silence (1982), 156-157 Cold War, the, 2, 15, 17-18, 34, 123125, 172, 181,201,203 end of the, 1,49-50, 151, 182,211 era, 23, 31-32, 38, 52-53, 61, 63, 67, 78, 88, 123-125, 128, 137, 145, 157, 159, 165-166, 174,201,204 lessons of, 1, 118 on campus, 61, 123-128 origins of, 28, 90, 117-118, 123 Cold War consensus, 2, 16, 19, 29, 95, 122-125, 163-165,215-216 "Cold War" liberals, 87, 111, 130 (n. 36) Colton, Timothy J., 5, 8, 11-13, 175176, 186 Committee on the Present Danger, 111-112, 114, 130 (n. 36) "What is the Soviet Union Up To?" (1978), 111-112, 114, 130 (n. 36) Communism, 1, 8, 17, 25, 30, 34, 37, 53, 55, 61, 63-64, 69, 73, 77, 80, 85, 109, 113, 124, 127-128, 136-137, 139, 143-144, 152, 158-159, 161— 162, 165, 172-173, 178, 189,200 collapse of, 1,32,37,54, 109, 165, 203, 209-210, 218 (n. 15) "goulash Communism," 66, 106 the terminal crisis of, 37, 68, 121 world movement, Moscow-led, 14, 28-29, 34, 36, 48, 64, 68-70, 74, 117, 121, 137, 162, 173, 190, 192193 Communist International (Comintern), 192-193 Comparativist methodology, 68-69 Conflict model, 6, 62, 69-70 versus stability approach, 70 Conquest, Robert, 7, 67-68, 81-82, 187,213 The Great Terror (1968), 67-68 Continuity argument, cultural and historical, 2, 9, 26, 30-32, 34, 36, 38, 46, 55, 63, 67, 72-73, 79, 82, 95-96, 116, 150-151, 153, 173, 189-191 Convergence theory/U.S.-Soviet convergence, possibility of, 33, 104105, 139, 145, 150 Corporatism, 6, 106, 119

229

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), 109 Cox, Ana Marie, 127 Craig, Gordon A., 190 Cuba, 15 Cuban missile crisis, 15, 32, 117, 122 Czechoslovakia, 14-15, 17, 20, 62, 74, 81,88, 104, 159,212 Dallin, Alexander, 31, 38, 67, 117, 128, 165, 189-191 Daniels, Robert V., 124, 144-146, 164, 184-186,212 Davis, Christopher, 10-11 Decembrists, the, 14 DePorte, A. W., 201 Detente, 3, 9, 11, 14, 20, 32, 36, 65, 71, 74-75, 77-79, 81-83, 86-88, 90-91, 96, 101, 109-110, 112-113, 115, 117, 120, 122, 130 (n. 36), 135-138, 140, 148-149, 154-156, 158, 162, 164, 181, 193,216 Deterrence, nuclear, 82 Deudney, Daniel, 123 Deutscher, Isaac, 213 Developmental model, 32-34, 62, 67 Diesing, Paul, 6, 8 Diversity, ideological and institutional, 14, 32, 34, 67 Dolgikh, Vladimir, 107 Donaldson, Robert H , 7-8, 109-110, 155 Dulles, John Foster, 164 Duncan, W. Raymond, 7 East Asia, 18 East Germany, 15,20, 104 Eastern Europe, relations with USSR, 8, 24, 27-29, 32, 34, 37, 64, 74, 104, 106-109, 114, 117, 122, 137, 139, 146-147, 154-155, 174, 176, 182, 193, 198,210-211 Eastern European revolution, 7, 20, 136, 163, 171, 173, 176, 198,202203,212 Echols, John, 6, 106 Eisenhower, DwightD., 124, 164 administration, 2-3, 164, 192

230

Index

era, 64 Ekedahl, Carolyn McGiffert, 7 Emigre scholars, Russian and East European, 42, 53, 89, 134, 165, 204 "Eurocommunist assault," the, 14, 109, 192-193 Exceptionalism, 19, 29, 51-52, 61, 89, 189 Fainsod, Merle, 33, 63-65 How Russia is Ruled (1953), 63-64 Feiwel, George, 100 Feshbach, Murray, 10-11, 13 Fleron, Frederic J., 8, 166 Freedman, James O., 53 Friedberg, Maurice, 163 Friedgut, Theodore, 12, 97-98 Friedman, Thomas L., 124 Friedrich, Carl, 11, 27-28, 30, 33, 39, 54,61 Fukuyama, Francis, 7, 218 (n. 15) Gaddis, John Lewis, 24-27, 32 Garthoff, Raymond L., 7, 115, 161-162 Gates, Robert, 7 Gelman, Harry, 7, 137-138 Germany, 26-28 Glasnost, 4, 18, 37, 145-146, 156, 158159, 181, 188, 197,213 Goldgeier, James M., 7, 72 Goldman, Marshall I., 32, 77, 140-142, 145, 163-164,210-211 What Went Wrong With Perestroika? (1992), 210-211 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 1, 3-4, 9, 15-20, 29, 37, 44-^18, 64, 91, 98-99, 107, 133, 139, 142, 147, 150, 163-164, 171-172, 174, 176, 178-183, 185, 187-188, 192-194, 196-198,201202,212-213,217 domestic opposition to, 45-46, 48, 188, 193-194, 196-197 elevation to power, 44, 46, 99, 105, 112, 137, 147, 162, 171, 176, 186187, 194 initiatives, 2-3, 5, 7, 15, 18, 37, 45, 47-48, 70, 85, 96, 98, 149-150, 165, 171-172, 174, 176-186, 188,

193, 198,202,212-214 Graebner, Norman, 51 Grayson, Benson L., 116-117 Grossman, Gregory, 100 Gustafson, Thane, 146 Gwertzman, Bernard, 16 Hahn, Jeffrey W., 38, 97 Halberstam, David, 28 Halle, Louis, 125 Harkavy, Robert E., 25 Harriman, Averell, 25, 53 Hartz, Louis, 52, 61 Hauslohner, Peter A., 26, 188 Henry, David D., 126-127 Henze, Paul B., 150 Herrmann, Richard K., 7-8 Hewett, Ed A., 149-150, 182 Hixson, Walter L., 23-24, 28 Hoffmann, Eric P., 8, 166 Hosking, Geoffrey, 12, Hough, Jerry F., 4, 6-7, 9, 12, 15, 19, 23, 29, 35, 39-50, 54-55, 70, 72, 83, 103, 106-107, 116, 119, 122, 135, 161-162, 166, 194,213 Hungarian economic model, prospects that the USSR would institute, 44 Hungarian uprising (1956), 15, 67, 81, 106-107, 193 Hungary, 15, 17, 20, 45, 66, 107, 147, 212 Hunt, Michael H , 52, 204 Huntington, Samuel P., 12, 33-34, 194 Hyland, William F., 146-147, 178-180 Ikenberry, G. John, 123 Inherent bad faith model, 38 Institutional pluralism, 15, 17, 35, 40, 55, 106, 194 Interest group theory/interest groups in the USSR, the presence of, 35, 62, 67-68, 70-71, 121, 144, 159-160, 174, 185 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations, 191-192 Iranian hostage crisis (1979-1980), 110, 121 Italian Communist Party (PCI), 192-

Index 193 Jervis, Robert, 17,38, 145, 189 Johnson administration, 125 Jowitt, Ken, 7-8 Kagarlitsky, Boris, 121 Kaiser, Robert G., 4, 78, 180-182, 211 -212 Karklins, Rasma, 159-160, 199-201 Kaufman, Richard F., 101-102 Kelley, Donald R., 118-119, 195-197, 210 Kennan, George, F. 2, 4, 7-9, 19, 2 3 31, 39, 48-54, 72, 89, 124, 137, 139, 154, 162, 164, 178,204,215 containment doctrine, 27-30, 36, 137, 154, 164, 176,216 militarization of the, 28, 137 early anti-Sovietism of, 25-26, 2829 imperial analogue, 139 on Soviet motives, Memoirs (1967, 1972), 29 The Long Telegram (1946), 25-26 The Mr. X Article (1947), 2, 24, 2627, 29, 39 Kennedy, Donald, 126 Kennedy, John F , 2, 125, 164 Kennedy, Paul, 179 Kissinger, Henry A., 31-32, 110, 130 (n. 36), 172, 217 (n. 11) Khrushchev, Nikita, 14, 33, 35, 41-43, 45, 63-70, 72-73, 77, 79-81, 85, 97, 99, 103, 105, 107, 109, 112, 118119, 137-138, 146-147, 156-158, 160-161, 178, 185, 189, 192-196 administration, 63, 67, 158 de-Stalinization campaign, 3, 14, 62, 65-66,68,80,86, 109, 118, 155156, 158, 161,204 era, 31, 33, 84,88,97, 117, 176, 194 initiatives, 62-63, 67-73, 81, 85, 97, 109, 118-119, 137-138, 155-158, 161, 164, 176, 178, 185, 194 legacy, 156-157, 161, 185 ouster of, 62, 67, 70-71, 75, 118, 120, 147, 157, 185, 188

231

tenure, 70, 80, 206 (n. 44) Kolkowicz, Roman, 96-97, 101, 143144 Korbonski, Andrzej, 163 Kordig, Carl R., 90, 94 (n. 75) Korean War, 189 Krauthammer, Charles, 202 Kuhn, Thomas S., 17, 56, 89-90, 165, 215 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 17, 89-90 Kull, Steven, 2 Laird, Robbin F., 187-188 Lapidus, Gail W., 7, 44, 147-149, 163, 165, 184 Laqueur, Walter, 8, 31, 150-151, 187, 213-215 Latin America, 75, 113 Legalistic-moralistic approach to foreign policy, 50-52, 61, 89, 112113, 117, 128, 189 Legvold, Robert, 7, 102-103, 182 Lenin, Vladimir I., 14, 47, 63, 69-70, 79-80, 84, 108, 160-161, 183-184, 189 Leninism, 8-9, 37, 63, 79-80, 84, 161, 175, 198 Leninist subschool, 8 Lewin, Moshe, 69, 193-195, 197, 212213 Lewis, Flora, 157 Liberal tradition, the American, 16, 52, 61,89, 111-112, 117, 128,215 Linden, Carl, 6-7, 41-42, 69-70, 80, 83-84, 118-119, 156, 160-161 ideocratic despotism, Soviet politics as, 160-161 Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964(1966), 69-70 Lippmann, Walter, 115, 125 Lukacs, John, 94 (n. 75) Malia, Martin, 187, 212-213, 215 Mandelbaum, Michael, 122, 151, 174, 180, 186,211 Manifest destiny, 19, 29, 51-52, 61, 89

232

Index

Markusen, Ann, 123 Marxism-Leninism, 6, 24, 26, 30, 39, 42^13, 55, 64, 67, 69, 72-73, 84, 117, 137, 140, 144, 150-151, 153, 156-158, 160-162, 169 (n. 53), 176, 181, 185, 187, 191, 198, 217(n. 11) Masherov, Peter, 107 Massell, Gregory J., 6, 8 Mastny, Vojtech, 117-118 Mayers, David, 27-29 McCarthy, Joseph, 55, 128 McCarthy ism, 17, 28, 52, 127, 181 MccGwire, Michael, 191-192 McNeal, Robert H , 80-81 The Bolshevik Tradition (1975), 8081 McNeill, William H , 123 Medvedev, Roy, 75, 118, 156 Medvedev, Zhores, 118 Menand, Louis, 126 Meyer, Alfred G., 68, 214 Middle East, 15, 79, 113, 121, 136, 138, 153 Miko, Francis T., 77-78 Milburn, Thomas W., 7-8 Military-industrial complex, 124 Mitchell, R. Judson, 217 (n. 11) Getting to the Top in the USSR (1990), 217 (n. 11) Modernization model, 7, 62 Moffit, Robert Emmet, 114 Moore, Barrington, 69 Terror and Progress - USSR (1954), 69 Soviet Politics - The Dilemma of Power (1965), 69 Morgenthau, Hans, 8, 24 Moscow Spring, prospects of a, 176 Moses, Joel C, 6-7 Motyl, Alexander J., 8, 166, 176-178 Mydans, Seth, 15 NSC-68, 28 Neoconservatism/Neoconservative movement, 20, 31-32, 43, 71-72, 79, 83-84, 87-88, 93 (n. 53), 95, 102, 110-111, 114-116, 121-122, 130 (n. 36), 133-134, 139, 141, 150, 155, 179, 186, 198,201,216

New Economic Policy (NEP), 14, 47, 66,74, 158, 184 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 8, 24, 51 Nineteenth Party Conference, 20, 172 Nitze, Paul, 2, 25, 53 Nixon, Richard M., 110, 164, 172, 217 (n. 11) Nogee, Joseph L., 7-8, 109-110, 143 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 26, 28, 135, 139 Novosibirsk Report, 12, 144 Odom, William, 190 Obolenski, Dimitri, 38 Orlovsky, Daniel, 8-9 Orwell, George, 213 Osgood, Robert, 6-8 Ostpolitik, 14 Palmieri, Deborah Anne, 128 Paterson, Thomas G., 24 Peter the Great, 14,81 Pipes, Richard, 4, 6-7, 9, 31, 55, 65, 79, 82-83, 91-92 (n. 9), 112-115, 135, 139, 145, 148, 153-155, 160161, 173, 176, 179, 187, 189-190, 204 U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Detente (1981), 112-114 "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War" (1977), 82 Plato, 2, 89 Platonic-Christian assumptions of western culture, 2, 17, 19, 24, 89 Ploss, Sidney I., 67 Soviet Political Process (1971), 67 Pluralism/Pluralist school, 9, 39^48, 68 -71, 83-88, 116-122, 155-164, 188204,214-215 Poland, 14, 37, 54, 104, 107, 137, 142, 193 relations with USSR, 64, 66, 136, 159 Solidarity movement, 14, 44, 136, 142, 176, 193 Political cultural-historicist school, 9, 31-38, 79-83, 85-88, 110-116, 121-

Index 122, 150-155, 162-164, 186-188, 201-204, 212-214 suspicions of, toward the Soviet Union, 72, 150, 190,204 Prados, John, 54 Prague Spring (1968), 14, 62, 67, 71, 74-75,81,85,88, 122, 144 Protestant millenarianism, 51 Puritanism, 19, 29, 89, 128 Purvis, Hoyt, 210 Rakowska-Harmstone, Teresa, 75 Rapawy, Stephan, 13 Rationality/Rational actor theory, 3, 25, 100, 114-115, 139 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 18, 91, 111, 133134, 144, 169 (n. 53), 172, 179-180, 217(n. 11) Reagan administration, 5, 16, 30, 91, 133, 163-164, 179, 190-192,201 anti-Sovietism of the, 163, 191 Reagan revolution, 31, 133 Realism/Realist school, 8, 23-31, 6 3 67, 72-79, 85-88, 96-110, 121-122, 134-150, 162-164, 172-186,201204,210-212 hard realist perspectives, 9, 72-77, 96-100, 134-143, 172-180 soft realist perspectives, 9, 77-79, 100-110, 143-150, 180-186 Realpolitik, 31,67 Reddaway, Peter, 112-113, 163, 188 Remington, Thomas F., 7, 31 Reykjavik Summit, 15 Romanov, Gregory, 107 Roselle, Laura, 33 Rosovsky, Henry, 126 Ross, Dennis, 99-100 Ross, Dorothy, 51 Rostow, Eugene, 125 Rubinstein, Alvin Z., 7, 138-140 Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II (1985), 138-140 Rumer, Boris Z., 202 Russia, pre-revolutionary, 14, 35, 55, 73,79, 107, 113-114, 116-117, 140, 151, 189-190 Russian tradition and culture, 24, 31, 34, 38, 43, 47, 55, 67, 72-73, 78, 80,

233

82-84, 86, 96, 116, 134, 140-141, 150, 152-154, 160, 173, 184-185, 189, 191 Sakharov, Andrei, 75, 189-190 Samizdat literature, 156 Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur, 125 Schmemenn, Serge, 15-16 Schroeder, Gertrude E., 45, 142-143, 146, 183-184 Serfaty, Simon, 32 Shatz, Marshall S., 112, 120 Shcherbitskiy, Vladimir, 107 Shipler, David K., 151-153 Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (1984), 151-153 Shulman, Marshall D., 101 Shultz, George, 5 Simes, Dmitri K., 83 Sino-Soviet conflict, 74, 109, 149, 159 -160, 192 Skilling, H. Gordon, 9, 34-35, 70, 99 "pluralism of elites," 70, 99 Smith, Gaddis, 31-32 Smith, Hedrick, 4, 7, 9, 114-115, 151152, 169 (n. 53) The Russians (\9S3), 151-152, 169 (n. 53) Smith, W. Y., 101 Snyder, Glenn H , 6, 8 Sodaro, Michael, 7-8 Soviet art and literature, 73-74, 173, 188 bloc relations, 3, 34, 109, 137, 173, 198 bureaucracy, 40-42, 44, 55, 63, 7677,81,83,98-99, 103, 105-107, 109, 112, 117-119, 135, 140, 142144, 146-147, 149, 151-153, 158, 176, 183-185, 194-197 change/reform, political, economic, and social, 1-5, 8-9, 14-18, 20, 24-28, 30-50, 54-55, 62-69, 7 1 75, 77-87, 89-91, 95-96, 98-100, 104-113, 118-122, 133-140, 142152, 154-165, 171-186, 188-196, 198, 201-204, 209-211,213-216, 217 (n. 11), 218 (n. 15) indicators of, 3, 10-19, 23, 43, 48

234

Index -A9, 73, 85-87, 89-90, 95-96, 109, 121-122, 150, 152, 154, 156, 162-164, 169 (n. 53), 171— 172, 188, 194, 197,203-204 agricultural failure, 3, 12, 4849,65-66,73,76-78,81,8687, 102, 104, 107, 120, 139140, 143, 148, 150, 176, 181, 203 antiquated technology, 3, 13, 27, 45, 49, 76, 78, 99-103, 107, 113, 136, 140-143, 145, 149-150, 163, 173, 175-176, 181, 184, 196,203 citizen and worker attitudes and participation, 3-4, 11-12, 27, 37-38, 40-43, 49, 65-67, 6971,73,76,84,86-87,96-98, 100-101, 105, 112, 117, 121, 134, 138, 140-142, 144, 148150, 152, 156-158, 163, 173175, 181, 190, 194, 197-200, 203,211-212 demographic shifts, 3, 10, 4849,79, 104, 121, 136, 142, 148, 154, 163, 175, 197,200201 escalating military costs, 3, 1213,44,48-49,68,77-78, 101-104, 107-109, 111, 113, 141-142, 145-146, 174, 176, 179,203 ethnonationalistic tensions and problems, 3, 6, 11,28,30, 34_36, 44-45, 48-49, 65-67, 75, 78-79, 83-84, 86-87, 97, 101, 104, 121-122, 136, 139, 142, 144, 147-148, 152, 155, 159-161, 163, 173, 175, 177, 183-184, 199-202 foreign trade inefficiencies and imbalances, 13,77,81, 108, 136, 141, 149, 181 generational leadership change, 15,36,39,43-44,46-47,49, 66,74,78,80-81,85,90,9697,99, 103, 105, 107, 109110, 112, 116, 120, 133-138, 140, 144, 148, 150, 155, 163, 176, 197,203

geopolitical events, 14, 48, 79, 86-87,96, 100, 122, 148, 163, 174, 188 Gorbachev's new thinking, 3, 15,48-49,98, 171-172, 175, 179, 186-188,203,211,217 (n. 11) health problems and mortality statistics, 3, 10-11,48-49, 100, 163, 175, 181 living standards and consumption, 3, 11, 13, 18,30,41,45, 48-49, 64, 66, 73-74, 76-77, 86-87,97,99-100, 104-106, 108, 111, 113, 119-121, 136, 140-142, 145, 148-149, 154, 157-158, 161, 163, 174-177, 181, 188, 193, 195-196,203 modernization, 3, 9-10, 18, 33, 46, 48-49, 64-65, 67, 72-73, 76,86-87,96-98,116,119, 121, 140, 150, 163, 175, 184186, 188, 193, 195-197,203, 212 polycentrism, 14, 28, 34-35, 48-49, 64, 68-70, 72, 85-87, 121, 159, 163, 193,203 reformative Soviet tradition, 14, 27, 47, 49, 66, 78, 84-87, 101, 116, 119, 121-122, 149, 156-158, 163, 172, 178, 185, 188-189, 194, 196,211,214 responsible Soviet crisis management and arms control behavior, 15,28-29,48-49, 73-74,78,86-87, 101, 115, 121-122, 149, 163 slowed gross national product (GNP) and production \ growth, 3, 12-13, 18,45,4849,64,68,71,76-78,96,99, 101-102, 104-105, 108, 121, 140, 143, 149-150, 163, 175, 177, 181, 183,203 unsettling manpower trends, 10, 13,49,99, 101-102, 104, 142, 159, 175, 183,200 minimal/incremental reform, 4, 8, 49,75,96,99-100, 109, 120, 135, 141, 145-146, 149, 151,

Index 163, 185, 197 moderate reform, 175-176, 183 radical/systemic reform, 4-5, 48, 104-105, 109, 144, 149, 176177, 180, 184,210 U.S./western role in bringing about, 9, 27-29, 32, 34, 36, 53, 81,85, 112-114, 145-146, 154, 158, 174, 176-177, 190-191 collectivization, 76, 117, 187 Communist Party (CPSU), 2, 8, 26, 35, 40, 42, 47, 63, 65, 67-68, 7 1 75,80-81,83,85, 106, 118-119, 138, 140, 147, 151, 156-157, 160, 172, 175, 181, 193-198,200 correlation offerees, 20, 71, 96, 104, 135-136, 181 degeneration, collapse, 1, 6, 8, 32, 35-37, 44, 48-49, 65-67, 68, 73, 75,81,83,86-87,96, 104-105, 113, 117, 122, 135, 141, 148, 150, 152, 154, 158, 161, 163, 165, 169 (n. 53), 171, 173, 175, 177-179, 182, 184,203,209-210,213 democratic movement, 74-75, 116, 156 democratization, possibility of, 114, 116, 139, 142-143, 150-153, 156, 163, 176, 188, 217 (n. 11) dissent, political, 107, 112, 117, 142, 148, 151, 154, 156,211 dissidents, 106, 112, 148, 177, 188, 211 dissident movement, 177 domestic policy, politics, 24, 27, 36, 39^11, 43, 45-46, 48-49, 55-56, 62-^63, 65, 67-68, 70-71, 74-77, 84-86, 88, 98-100, 103, 106, 109, 116-118, 121, 139, 143-144, 146 -147, 149, 151, 153, 157-161, 176-177, 180, 193 economy, 12-13, 36-37, 44-45, 6566,68,71,75-77,96,99-101, 103-110, 112-113, 119, 121-122, 133, 135-145, 147-149, 151-152, 154-155, 169 (n. 53), 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 183-184, 188, 193 -194, 196-198,210-211 Western perceptions of a "twotrack" civilian and military, 36,

235

76,96-97,101-104, 108-109, 113, 122, 141, 155, 174, 176, 198-199,210-211 energy difficulties, 100, 102, 104, 106-107, 111, 140 foreign policy, 3, 7-8, 13, 24-26, 28, 39, 43-45, 62-64, 69, 73-75, 7778,84,86,90,96, 100, 103,105110, 112, 114-117, 134-139, 141, 144, 149, 151, 153-154, 158, 163, 176, 181-182, 187-188, 198 influences on, 24-26 "Hobbesian outlook," 98 leadership, 27-28, 32, 35, 39-43, 45-47, 56, 63-72, 74-75, 77-78, 80-81, 83, 85, 96, 98-100, 103105, 107-110, 112, 114-118, 120, 134-139, 141-142, 144, 146-147, 152-153, 155, 157, 159-162, 172 -175, 181-182, 184-187, 192194,212,216 legitimacy/illegitimacy, political, 26, 39,49-50,83,86-87,97, 104, 112, 122, 138, 174, 176, 193,203 liberalization, 3, 27, 32, 42-43, 47, 62, 71, 74, 78-79, 81-85, 104106, 112, 158 military technology, 101-103, 142, 173, 176 military threat, 13, 17-18, 24-29, 35-37, 53, 62, 64, 67, 69, 74, 76, 78-79, 81-82, 85, 90, 96-97, 101 -103, 108-114, 120-122, 128, 130 (n. 36), 134, 136-139, 141, 143, 150, 153-154, 157, 160-161, 173-174, 176, 178-181, 187-188, 191, 198, 217 (n. 11) U.S. role in countering, 24, 29-30, 32,36-37,53,82, 113-114, 154, 177, 180, 191 pluralism, 34-35, 39-43, 63, 65-68, 70-71,75,78,84, 119,121-122, 143, 152-153, 156, 159-161, 174, 184-186, 189, 192-193, 198, 200 -201,214 relations/comparisons with the West, 26, 28, 43—47, 61-62, 64, 66, 72, 74, 77-78, 84, 101, 103, 106, 108109, 112-114, 135, 137, 139, 145, 149, 153-154, 162, 164, 174-175,

236

Index

181, 188, 190-191, 198,212,216 repression/authoritarianism, possibility of, 3, 36-38, 41, 44-45, 67, 73-74, 84-85, 96-98, 104-105, 137, 139, 142-143, 145-146, 152, 188 social contract, 105, 148, 157-158, 160-161, 194 stability/instability, 4-5, 27, 31, 3436, 44, 49-50, 56, 62, 70, 80-81, 83, 86, 97-98, 102-105, 122, 135, 137, 139, 147-148, 150-152, 155, 157-158, 160, 173, 176-179, 182 -184,194,201,203,213 stagnation, economic and political, 106, 173, 177-179, 182, 185, 196197,212 Soviet Union, 1, 4, 6, 16-19, 25, 2 8 29,32,42,45,64,100,106-107, 113, 145, 147, 151, 160, 181,212, 214-215 schizophrenic depictions of, as both strong and weak, 24-25, 82, 102103, 110, 114, 134, 141, 160-161, 179-181 scholarly perception of, 1-3, 8-9, 42, 133-134, 173 systemic crisis of, 119, 172-173, 176 -178 Sovietologists, 4, 16-19, 23, 55-56, 85 -90, 121-128, 162-167,201-204, 209-212,214-216 cooptation of, 54, 121-123, 125126, 128, 164-167, 204, 215-216 through government funding of academic research, 18, 20, 126, 165-167,215-216 misperceptions of, 66, 68, 70-71, 89-91, 115, 178, 189, 195,201, 209,211-214 Sovietology, 1, 4, 16-18, 88-89, 122123, 164-167, 201-204, 209-210, 215-216 philosophical and methodological divisions within, 134 schools of, 8-9, 23, 48, 87-88 Sovietophobia, 127-128, 134, 164 Stalin, Joseph, 6, 14, 25, 29-30, 33, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 56, 62-65, 67-71, 73, 79-80, 85, 90, 103, 106-107, 109-

110, 117-119, 140, 143, 146, 149150, 157-158, 160, 178, 183, 185 administration, 158, 164, 192 atrocities committed by, 28, 63, 6768,73,76,78,99, 107, 117, 120, 149, 156, 158, 161, 173, 185, 187 era, 41, 46, 56, 85, 115, 117, 173, 185 influence of, on Cold War-era Soviet politics/leaders, 67-68, 80, 83, 85, 103, 105-106, 147, 156-157, 161, 173, 187 initiatives, 178 tenure, 185, 206 (n. 44) Stalinism, 6, 9, 15, 33-34, 37, 43, 47, 67^68, 73, 76, 78, 80, 85, 103, 108, 115-119, 121, 140, 142, 144, 147, 157, 160-161, 164, 172-173, 184185, 189, 192, 198,212 neo-Stalinism, 157 Starr, S. Frederick, 14, 69, 197-198 Steibel, Gerald L., 79 Stent, Angela, 163 Stewart, Philip D., 7-8 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I), 14, 74, 88, 112, 136, 164 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), 191-192 Talbott, Strobe, 4, 180, 214-215 Taras, Raymond C , 8, 166 Taubman, Philip, 11, 15-16 Third World, 36, 43, 71, 78, 84, 88, 90, 96, 108, 110, 114, 122, 135-138, 153-154, 159, 181, 189-190,210 Togliatti, Palmiro, 193 Totalitarianism, 17, 24-25, 27, 32-35, 37, 39, 43, 48, 64, 67, 69, 73, 79, 99, 106, 118, 144, 151, 153, 160-161, 172, 177-178, 185,212,216 Totalitarianism model, 3, 5-7, 15, 27, 30-33, 38-39, 54-55, 61-63, 67-68, 70-71, 79-80, 84-85, 87-91, 95, 106, 112, 137-138, 143-144, 146147, 159, 164-165, 177, 181, 185186, 189, 195,201,212-213,215 the USSR as sui generis, 33, 46, 68, 84,111,113-114,116-117,122, 146, 178, 190, 195,201,215

Index Treadgold, Donald W., 66 Twentieth Century Russia (1972), 66 Truman, Harry S., 217 (n. 11) Truman administration, 25, 28, 192 Truman Doctrine, 24, 26 Tucker, Robert C, 64-65, 119-121, 188 The Soviet Political Mind (1963), 64 -65 Tucker, Robert W., 124 Turchin, Valenyin, 75 Twentieth Party Congress, 68, 109, 204 United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 124 United States-Soviet relations, 2, 23, 26-29, 36-37, 39, 43, 47, 49, 55, 62, 74, 77-78, 85-86, 90-91, 95-96, 110 -111, 114-115, 117, 123-124,128, 130 (n. 36), 133, 135-138, 140, 145, 151, 154-155, 161, 163-165, 172, 174-175, 178-180, 182, 186, 190191, 193,201 demonization in, 51, 114-115, 117, 121, 124, 128, 133-134, 143, 157, 164, 190-191,201,212 Manachaean attitudes in, 3, 5, 7, 1415, 17,51,74,77-78,89,91, 111, 116, 128, 136, 138, 143, 145, 157, 181, 191, 193,201 mirror imaging in, 33-34, 51, 74, 78, 82-83, 111, 115, 128, 145, 161, 164, 174-175 misperceptions in, 17, 25, 41, 47, 52, 65,71,89, 102-103, 117, 143, 145, 164, 190-191, 193 peaceful coexistence in, 101, 113, 119, 137, 162, 173, 178 Ulam, Adam B., 8-9, 72-75, 135-137, 144, 163,211 Dangerous Relations (1983), 135— 137 Ullman, Richard, 198-199 Urban, Joan Barth, 11, 63, 192-193 Vance, Cyrus, 110 Vietnam, 15, 17, 110, 135, 138 Vietnam war, 20, 48, 71, 86, 91, 93 (n.

237

53), 95, 110, 125, 127 Waltz, Kenneth N., 8 War, nuclear, 25-26, 64, 82, 146-147, 161-162, 173, 177, 179 dangers of, 15-16, 103, 113, 115, 117, 135, 147, 162, 179, 191 planning for, 82, 113-114, 119, 130 (n. 36), 134, 139, 146-147, 191 Warnke, Paul, 114 Warsaw Pact, 109, 139, 146, 188 comparison with NATO forces, 139, 154, 173 Watergate scandal, 71, 93 (n. 53), 95, 110, 135 Western Europe, 30, 32, 55, 84, 108109, 137 Soviet attack on/undermining of, 24, 30, 137, 154, 174 Whelan, Joseph G., 77-78 White, John Kenneth, 124, 126 Wilson, Robin, 127 Wilson, Woodrow, 61 Winks, Robin, 61, 124 Winthrop, John, 19, 29 World War I, 51 World War II, 3, 17, 25-27, 40, 47, 51, 61,82, 107, 117-118, 123-124, 136 Yeltsin, Boris, 48 Yergin, Daniel, 6, 8 Yudken, Joel, 123 Yugoslavia, 14, 28, 63, 184, 212 Yugoslavian market socialism, 184 prospects that the USSR would institute, 44 Zaslavskaia, Tatiana, 12, 144 Zimmerman, William, 115

About the Author CHRISTOPHER I. XENAKIS is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Tidewater Community College, Norfolk, Virginia.