Comments Elsewhere

Kennedy clarifies:

“What I mean is that the fall of the USSR was driven by economic reality not movements. That’s not to say that movements had no role it how things played out, but the USSR didn’t fall because it’s citizens wanted it to.”

There’s an important truth in this: the USSR and its sattelites had grinding through a state of internal economic collapse for decades when things finally fell apart. But it’s also important to remember that economics is a discipline that concerns what people choose to do no less than politics is. If it’s true (as it is) that individual people’s economic decisions under the conditions of Bolshevism made it so that the Eastern bloc suffered a long, steady, grinding economic collapse (as it did), to the point that people began to be forced by economic realities to decide that they could no longer get along by cooperating with the government, or (if they’re within the government), no longer sustain the institutions of the regime, then that’s just one convoluted way in which a regime can fall because its citizens want it to—or, at least, no longer want to commit the resources needed to sustain it. If John’s account of the fall of Moscow-line Communism is correct, then I think we have to be careful about where it is that we draw the distinction between that explanation and explanations in terms of coordinated political action by movements of people: the difference would not be that in one case people wanted the regime to fall and in the other case it just fell without them wanting it. It would be that in one case, the conditions that made people want the regime to fall were produced by an intentional, coordinated plan; in the other case, the conditions that made people want the regime to fall were unintentional consequences of other things that people wanted and acted to get.

Fair enough: it would be foolish to deny that unintended consequences are important, or to dismiss the importance of the economic situation that people were acting from when trying to explain the fall of the USSR and its sattelites. But while that may explain part of the context (not all of it—see, for example, North Korea) in which the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc was possible, I don’t know how well it explains how it came to fall apart when and how it did. (Did the economic realities in Poland explain why the Communist regime collapsed in 1989 rather than, say, 1987 or 1993? Do they explain why in Poland and in the Soviet Union, there was a soft crash rather than the worst happening? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that these facts—pretty important for giving an accurate causal account of the fall of Moscow-line Communism—had a lot to do with the widespread strikes, the organization of groups such as Solidarity, the weakened ability (both in terms of resources and in terms of political will) of the regimes to crush dissident movements, the effect in coordination and inspiration that this had for, e.g., turning crowds of ordinary Russians out to resist the attempted coup against Gorbachev, etc. (If it hadn’t been for popular movements, that coup would very likely have gone off without much of a hitch. And what would the collapse of the USSR have looked like then?)