Comments Elsewhere

Kennedy’s certainly right that the “crash” of the Soviet Union—for all its many problems—is a reason to take some hope in the possibility of a “soft crash”. (One needn’t imagine very hard to imagine how much worse it could have been—one just need look at the failed coup against Gorbachev.)

I’m not sure, though, what Kennedy means when he asks us to “Also note that the Soviet Union did not end because it’s citzens woke up.”

I think this is clearly true in one sense and clearly untrue in another sense. It’s not that the vast bulk of the people in the Soviet Union and its sattelites suddenly got the right pamphlet at the right time and realized, “Hey, this kinda sucks!” and thus fell the regime. An accurate assessment of Soviet cultural history (rather than the view from the pages of Pravda) would indicate that a lot of Soviet subjects were already awake to the nature of the regime for quite a while—some of them from the get-go. But while bare knowledge didn’t change, organization did—the dissident movement flourished across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and, once organized people began to realize the power they had available, people began to “wake up” in the sense of using the resources they now had in place to act on their knowledge. It would, I think, be really odd to marginalize the role played by the dissident movement and mass demonstrations by people inspired by it, in the implosion of, say, the Polish Communist regime, or the failure of the coup in the USSR.

I don’t know which (if either) of these two claims Kennedy is making here, or whether he’s making both. So I’d be interested to hear more about what he has to say on what citizens “waking up” means and why he takes it not to have been important to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.