Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

88. For an analysis of the transformations within the Soviet leadership and higher ranks of the CPSU in the last decades of the USSR, see Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); and Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1980).

89. See Georgii Arbatov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Times Books, 1992); and Aleksandr Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).

90. English, “The Sociology of New Thinking,” p. 76. R. English’s article is part of a thematic issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies 2 (Spring 2005) on the role of ideas in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. See also Nina Tannenwald and William C. Wohlforth, “Introduction: The Role of Ideas and the End of the Cold War,” 3-12; Nina Tannenwald, “Ideas and Explanation: Advancing the Theoretical Agenda,” 13-42; Andrew Bennett, “The Guns That Didn’t Smoke: Ideas and the Soviet Non-use of Force in 1989,” 81-109; Daniel C. Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” 110-41; and William C. Wohlforth, “The End of the Cold War as a Hard Case for Ideas,” 165-73.

91. For an intellectual history of the ascendance of this group and of their ideas, see English, Russia and the Idea of the West.

92. Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 132.

93. Pravda , February 6, 1990.

94. See Gorbachev and Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev , pp. 56-58.

95. See comments along these lines in Stephen F. Cohen, “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 459-88; Archie Brown, “The Soviet Union: Reform of the System or Systemic Transformation?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 489-504; and Mark Kramer, “The Reform of the Soviet System,” p. 506.

96. Anatoly S. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev , trans. and ed. Robert D. English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 105.

97. Daniel C. Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 129.

98. Brown, Seven Years , p. 157.

99. X. I. Ding, “Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism: The Case of China,” British Journal of Political Science 24 (July 1994): 293-318.

100. I am employing Frederick Corney’s terminology. See Corney, “What Is to Be Done,” p. 267.

101. Quoted in Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997). See Aleksander Yakovlev, Ce que nous voulons faire de l’Union Sovietique: Entretiens avec Lilly Marcou (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), p. 104.

102. See Labor Focus on Eastern Europe 9, no. 3 (November 1987-February 1988): 5-6.

103. Stephen Cohen, “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” pp. 487-88.

104. Brown, “The Soviet Union,” pp. 494-95.

105. Karen Dawisha, “The Question of Questions: Was the Soviet Union Worth Saving?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 513-26; and Stephen Hanson, “Reform and Revolution in the Late Soviet Context,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 527-34.

106. Hanson, “Reform and Revolution,” p. 533. It is no surprise that Stephen Cohen, who throughout his scholarly work has sought to find the ever elusive solution from above (Bukharin, Gorbachev) to counter Stalin’s Great Break, dismisses arguments in favor of an anti-Soviet revolution from below. For descriptions of the development of alternative politics from below before and during Gorbachev’s reign, see Steven M. Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Edward W. Walker, Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); also Walter D. Connor, “Soviet Society, Public Attitudes, and the Perils of Gorbachev’s Reforms: The Social Context of the End of the USSR,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 43-80; Astrid S. Tuminez, “Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Break-up of the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 81-136; and Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 1,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 178-256; Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 2,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 3-64; Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 3,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 3-96.

107. Kramer, “The Collapse: Part 1,” p. 214.

108. Gorbachev and Mlynář, Conversations , pp. 110-21.

109. Levesque, The Enigma of 1989 , pp. 3-5 and 252-58.

110. Brown, “The Soviet Union,” p. 489.

111. Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), pp. 33-34.

112. Ibid., p. 35.

113. Kramer, “The Collapse: Part 3,” pp. 69 and 94. For his discussion of the “demonstration effects” for the Soviet Union, see “The Collapse: Part 2.”

114. In making this statement, the historian invokes the authority of the founding fathers of the Soviet human rights movement, Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev. See Zubok, Zhivago’s Children , p. 265.

115. George Konrád, Antipolitics (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 123.

116. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence , p. 313.

117. Horvath, “’The Solzhenitsyn Effect,’” p. 907. Also see Jan Plamper, “Foucault’s Gulag,” Kritika: Explorations in Russ ian and Eurasian History , n.s., 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 255-80.

118. I am developing Neil Robinson’s argument in “What Was Soviet Ideology? A Comment on Joseph Schull and an Alternative,” Political Studies 43 (1995): 325-32. See also Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System: A Critical History of Soviet Ideological Discourse (Aldershot and Hants: E. Elgar, 1995).

119. “There’s More to Politics than Human Rights,” an interview with G. M. Tamás, Uncaptive Minds 1, no. 1 (April-May 1988): 12.

120. Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

121. Jan Josef Lipski, KOR: A History of the Workers’ Defense Committee 1976-1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

122. Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and György Márkus, Dictatorship over Needs (London: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 137.

123. Brown, Rise and Fall , p. 588.

124. Johann P. Arnason, “Communism and Modernity,” in Multiple Modernities , special issue, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 61-90.

1. Goerge Lichtheim, Thoughts among the Ruins: Collected Essays on Europe and Beyond (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1973); Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1991); Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).