29

What Caused the Collapse of Communism?

Communist systems had, as we have seen, many ways of surviving, even though their command economies performed less efficiently than market economies, their societies were unfree, and their polities lacked democratic accountability. Lack of freedom and lack of accountability in the short run assisted survival by obscuring and outweighing the relative economic failure. In the long run, they were at least as likely as economic stagnation to be the undoing of Communism. However, as Keynes remarked, in the long run we are all dead. Why the system ended when it did in the various European Communist states is a topic already addressed in Chapter 26. In this chapter, the main focus is on the Soviet Union. The reason for that is straightforward. The Soviet state held the key which could unlock doors throughout Eastern Europe. If it ceased to be Communist, it was clear that the survival hopes for Communism in all other Warsaw Pact countries were minimal. In contrast, Communism in Asia has been more resilient. While that has owed much to lack of information about – or opportunities to explore – possible alternatives, it is also related to transition from predominantly agricultural to industrialized economies. Although that was true also of a number of European Communist states, it was more comprehensively true of their Asian counterparts. The massive social mobility which resulted was in the short and medium term a support for the regimes which had overseen such sweeping change.

On a long time-scale, social and economic factors are of fundamental importance in explaining how Communism came to be rejected in the Soviet Union and, as a consequence, collapsed in Eastern Europe. The more immediate reasons for the dramatic changes of the late 1980s were, however, the result of particular political choices. The choices that were made owed a lot initially to the stimulus of relative economic failure, but the radical political changes which were introduced in the Soviet Union after 1985 were by no means economically determined. Since, however, everyone by the mid-1980s could agree that the Soviet economy was not performing well, that weakened the conservative opposition to reform proposals. Moreover, it was initially easier to put forward ideas for political reform by arguing (rightly or wrongly) that they were essential for economic progress. Before long, though, political change was advocated for its own sake.

Nationalism contributed greatly to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, but in the Soviet Union it became a powerful force leading to the break-up of the USSR only after fundamental changes had already taken place in the political system. Ultimately, it was the combination of new ideas, institutional power (the commanding heights of the political system having fallen into the hands of radical reformers), and political choices (when other options could have been chosen) which led to the end of Communist rule in Europe.

Social Change

Over time, the successes of Communism as well as the failures increased the system’s vulnerability. In the Soviet Union of 1939, only 11 per cent of the population had received more than an elementary education. By 1984 the percentage who had attended at least secondary school had risen to 87 per cent. The more educated the population became, the more they were inclined to seek information denied to them by the party-state authorities. Those who knew foreign languages could do so more readily, since broadcasts other than in the languages of the particular Communist state were not, as a rule, jammed. By the mid-1980s the Soviet Union had quite a large, educated middle class.* The proportion of people with higher education had grown substantially in the post-Stalin years. In 1954 just a little over 1 per cent of the population had completed higher education. By 1984 there were well over five million students currently in higher education and eighteen and a half million people who had completed such an education, the latter making up almost 7 per cent of the total population of the USSR.¹

This meant that the percentage of the adult population with a higher education was in double figures – and particularly high in Moscow and Leningrad. By nurturing a highly educated population, Communism contained the seeds of its own destruction. It became harder to treat adults like Victorian children who should be seen but not heard and who should simply accept that those in authority knew what was good for them. It became, for example, increasingly anomalous that educated Soviet citizens could not travel just as freely as did the Westerners they saw visiting their own country. It was no less frustrating that they should be denied access to books or films of their own choice as distinct from those that party-state officials decided were suitable for them.* For open-minded members of the Soviet political elite who had been given the opportunity to travel abroad, that experience was important. Seeing for themselves countries that were both more democratic and more prosperous than the Soviet Union significantly influenced the outlook of Mikhail Gorbachev and that of the second most important reformer of the perestroika years, Alexander Yakovlev.²

Demographically, Communist parties became more representative of their societies over time. All major social groups were represented, although some much more than others. The highly educated and city dwellers had a disproportionately large presence in the party. In all Communist parties the full-time officials wielded more power than any other group, although at certain times and places (especially China during the Cultural Revolution) officialdom was attacked in the name of revolutionary renewal. In the major ruling parties well-educated specialists became over time a larger component of the party membership. Where liberalization took place from above, as in Hungary, their reformist influence was important. In Poland, the outstanding example of democratization from below, a larger proportion of social scientists than in other European Communist states were able to pursue their careers without joining the Communist party. But Poland was in a more significant way unique, being the only country in which organized workers were in the vanguard of a movement against Communist rule. Together with their supporters within the intelligentsia, they would probably have brought about systemic change in Poland at the beginning, rather than the end, of the 1980s but for their consciousness of Poland’s geopolitical position and their taking into account the possibility of Soviet intervention.

Economic Problems

If the successes of the Communist era, including educational advances, were part of the explanation of the transformative change of the second half of the eighties, it was an accumulation of serious problems that was the initial trigger for radical reform. Even though economic reform was to become a lower priority for Gorbachev than political reform, and less of a preoccupation than ending the Cold War, the most important initial stimuli to perestroika were economic. The slowdown over time in the rate of economic growth, the fact that technological innovation was occurring faster in the newly industrialized countries of Asia than in the Soviet Union, and the excessive burden placed by the military-industrial complex on the Soviet exchequer were major concerns for Gorbachev and his supporters. This relative economic failure was accompanied by a host of social problems which had accumulated during the Brezhnev era – a declining birth rate, an increase in the infant mortality rate, an increased death rate among middle-aged men and (linked to the last point) a major problem of alcoholism.

One of the greatest failures of Communist economic systems was in creating new technology. As the Hungarian economist János Kornai noted, the economies of the Communist world compared very unfavourably in this respect with market economies.³ Among the reasons for the poor performance were the meagreness of the rewards for success and the weakness of the penalties for failure. High efficiency and speedy technological development did not bring any special advantages; continuing to produce the same old product did not count as failure. Shortfalls and waste, arising in part from technological inertia, were ‘automatically excused in retrospect by the soft budget constraint’.⁴ Kornai’s concept of ‘soft budget constraint’ highlights important defects of the command economy, in which ‘soft’ credit can be obtained, the budget is not controlled by the need to make a profit (as it is in a market economy), and prices are determined bureaucratically. When extra costs were incurred, prices were allowed to rise, either openly or in a disguised form through a lowering of the quality of the product (which was not usually high to begin with).⁵ And purchasers, whether of consumer goods or producer goods, did not have the option of taking their custom elsewhere.

In the Brezhnev era, countless books and articles were published in the Soviet Union on the ‘scientific and technical revolution’. Yet this was not where that revolution was happening. Conservative Soviet Communists placed a lot of faith in computers as the ultimate panacea for solving the problems of economic planning, believing that they would show that those calling for movement towards a market economy were misguided. Yet computerization did not turn out to be a substitute for the market. A cartoon – in Hungary – captured this when it showed a group of serious-looking men standing beside a massive bank of computers, waiting for the answer to all the country’s economic problems. One of them reads out the verdict the computer has come up with: ‘It says that supply should be adjusted to meet demand.’ In spite of the enthusiasm of Soviet technocrats for computers, the USSR was particularly backward in information technology. Making that point, the head of the Soviet section of the British Foreign Office, Nigel Broomfield, in an internal government document in 1983, accurately predicted that ‘the Soviet system will change from within’ and ‘whether it will collapse or evolve is perhaps the key question’. What would be decisive, he maintained, was ‘economic failure and the inability to understand and control the technological communications revolution which is now sweeping the developed world’.⁶

The Soviet Union’s inability to participate in the information revolution meant that it was, indeed, ill equipped to benefit from economic globalization. So long, however, as the rulers of the Soviet state were more concerned with maintaining their sovereign, and highly authoritarian, control over domestic developments, being laggards in information technology was not a wholly negative factor for them. As became very clear in 2008, to be part of the global economy had its down side. Among the countries to suffer serious economic difficulties as a result of the global financial crisis were post-Soviet Russia – and, still more, Ukraine. Standing aside from the revolution in information technology certainly prevented the Soviet Union from maximizing its economic potential. Even if it had continued to stand apart, however, and had eschewed political changes of the kind introduced during perestroika, this would not necessarily have led to economic or political collapse. The rest of Europe would still have bought Soviet oil and gas. Moreover, China’s Communist rulers in the twenty-first century have found a halfway house of participation in information technology, whereby parts of the internet (containing politically awkward information) are closed off to Chinese citizens, while those parts which are economically useful remain open.

Nationalism

There was no uniform path from Communism to post-Communism (and the latter term, rather than democracy, is used advisedly, for post-Communist states include many authoritarian and hybrid regimes). Communist parties changed over time. All, sooner or later, diluted or even abandoned their original revolutionary ideology. Some, more than others, began to reflect values more broadly held within their own societies. The party, in some places more than others, embraced distinctively national sentiments. Thus, for example, after becoming First Secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania in October 1988, Algirdas-Mikolas Brazauskas cautiously, but increasingly, espoused the Lithuanian national cause and got into arguments not only with conservative Communists but also with the reformist wing of the Soviet leadership in Moscow, while being attacked at home by his anti-Communist domestic rival, Vytautas Landsbergis.⁷ When, however, a party leader in a multinational state became aggressively nationalist, as did Miloevi in Serbia, the result could be disastrous.

Nationalism was always a potential threat to Communist rule, though some liberalization of the system was needed before that potential became reality. Its potency was especially great in multinational Communist states. In particular, nationalism was never far below the surface of Yugoslav or Soviet life. There were those both within Communist states and outside who dismissed it as a serious threat to the systems with the argument that – as distinct from hard economic facts – nationality is a slippery and subjective concept and difficult to delineate with any precision. However, if enough people share a subjective perception – even if it is based on myth, as is all national identity to a greater or lesser degree – this becomes part of the objective reality with which politicians have to deal. The two main ways in which Communist rulers responded to that reality were through severe repression of any demonstration of nationalism and by manipulation of symbols of national identity to steal some of the clothes of anti-Communist nationalists. Even the East German Communist authorities got in on the act. Martin Luther, Frederick the Great and Bismarck were among the major figures from a Prussian past who were co-opted as part of the GDR’s supposedly distinctive inheritance.⁸ During the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, Peter the Great and even Ivan the Terrible were viewed as ‘progressive for their time’, creators of a greater Russia, and precursors of the great Stalin.

The more ethnically heterogeneous the society, the more difficult a trick this was, however, to pull off. Russian nationalism or Serbian nationalism could be used to rally Russians or Serbs, but was liable to alienate other nationalities within the Soviet and Yugoslav states. Moreover, with federal structures based on national boundary lines, regional differences and grievances became bound up with national sentiment. Even so, nationalism did not lead to the demise of Communist rule in any country until the radical reforms of the Soviet perestroika had made their mark. And in the case of the USSR, nationalism’s role in the dismantling of the Soviet state was substantially more important than the part it played in the transformation of the Communist system. The strength and political significance of nationalism in the last years of the Soviet Union were unintended consequences of the far-reaching changes introduced from above by Gorbachev in 1987–88.

Critical Thinking within the Party

The closest precursor to perestroika was the Prague Spring.⁹ Quite early in the Gorbachev era, the new spokesman of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Gennady Gerasimov, himself a within-system reformer of longstanding, was asked what the difference was between the Prague Spring and perestroika. His droll reply was ‘Twenty years.’ In both instances the movement for change came from within the Communist Party and reached fruition when the coming to power of a new party leader altered the balance of forces within the political elite. There were, of course, some fundamental differences between the two cases. Dubek, unlike Gorbachev, was the facilitator rather than the driver of reform within the party leadership. A decent and fairly open-minded man, Dubek leaned more in the direction of his reformist colleagues than in that of the conservatives within a deeply divided Central Committee and Politburo. Another major difference was that far-reaching reform in Czechoslovakia was interrupted after only eight months, whereas its Soviet equivalent lasted for almost seven years. Moreover, influential as the Prague Spring was within the international Communist movement – especially on the West European ‘Eurocommunists’ – it was incomparably less important than liberalizing and democratizing change within the Soviet Union. That paved the way for the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe.

The development of critical thinking within the party intelligentsia in the years leading up to the Czechoslovak reforms and those in the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1989 (discussed in Chapters 19 and 20) is crucial to understanding both the Prague Spring and perestroika. For many observers such spectacular change came out of the blue, but its preconditions were established in both countries well in advance of actual measures of liberalization and democratization. In Communist states generally, and in the Soviet Union specifically, the vast majority of leading specialists in the social sciences – academic lawyers as well as economists, sociologists and political analysts – were members of the Communist Party. It was from their ranks that the most influential ideas for change emanated. The availability of fresh and critical thinking on the political and economic system, and from within the ruling party itself, was of decisive importance when chance, rather more than conscious choice, produced party leaders open to fresh ideas and innovative policy. However, the system was such that, barring revolution – an undertaking so hazardous in Communist states that it was rarely attempted – only change at the apex of the political hierarchy could determine whether fresh and critical thinking would remain a mere intellectual diversion or whether it would influence the real world of politics.

Reform-minded intellectuals who remained in the ruling parties throughout decades in which only minimal reform occurred were often regarded as time-servers by those of a critical turn of mind who chose to stay outside the party’s ranks. They could be accused of self-deception in believing that only from within the official structures could they hope to bring about radical reform or (for their aims were generally more modest) at least influence the direction of state policy. There is no uniform answer across the whole Communist world to the question of whether ‘within-system reformers’ (or ‘intrastructural dissenters’) were right or wrong in their assessment that the most realistic way of bringing about change for the better was from inside the party.¹⁰ In more than half the Communist states, in so far as there was such a presence of reformist intellectuals within the ruling party, there was very little to show for it. However, in Hungary to a considerable extent, in Czechoslovakia until the reform movement was snuffed out by Soviet tanks, and in the crucially important cases of the Soviet Union and China, intra-party reform was more decisive than pressures from outside the party ranks in changing the system in highly significant ways.¹¹

It is clear that only a minority of people joined the party with the idea of reforming it from within. One who can be believed when she says she did join with that aim in view is Ludmilla Alexeyeva, who later became a prominent Soviet dissident, having decided that ‘my belief that the party could be reformed from within was nothing but an illusion’.¹² Yet though the Communist Party was not successfully reformed in the Soviet Union – most of its leading officials supported the August coup of 1991, which was intended to turn the clock back to pre-perestroika times – it was from inside the party that the changes to the entire political system were introduced and promoted. Initiated by Gorbachev, listening to the advice of ‘intrastructural dissenters’ who had endured a long wait for a reformer in the Kremlin, the changes were pushed through in the face of foot-dragging and opposition from the party conservatives, some of whom were eventually sufficiently desperate to put the general secretary (who was also president) under house arrest.

If only a minority of radical reformers within the CPSU joined the party with the express intention of changing the system, that raises the question of what changed the minds of the party reformers. I have already quoted, in Chapter 19, the remark of a Czech economist that ‘the greatest stimulus to change is failure’. To recognize an unsatisfactory economic performance or lack of freedom as failure, however, requires some standard of comparison. Even then, the policy implications of failure have to be determined – more discipline and tighter controls, or more market and a new respect for civil libertie? Some of the influence on party reformers, as we have seen in Chapter 23, came directly from the West. People within the political elite and leading specialists in various fields, who were also party members, had much more chance of travelling to Western countries than had the average citizen in Communist countries, and what they saw and heard had an impact.

Nevertheless, the initial stimulus to think differently often came from people who were, in some sense, writing from ‘within the ideology’, rather than as opponents of it. As Kornai put it, referring to a time when he was ‘still half or three-quarters a Communist’: ‘The works that affect a person most strongly in the state of mind I was then in are not ones diametrically opposed to the views held hitherto by the doubter – that is, not those attacking the Communist Party from without.’¹³ He himself was influenced at that early period of his intellectual evolution by the Yugoslav Communist theorist Edvard Kardelj and by Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Stalin (which he read in German). Many reformers within the ranks of ruling parties broke with Communist orthodoxy in stages. First of all they came to reject the cruelty of Stalinism, while continuing to believe that the Communist Party should retain a monopoly of power and that all would be well if only there were a return to Leninist norms. For many, a more fundamental stage was eventually reached, at which, as Kornai puts it, ‘former believers understood that the real system that had developed in the Soviet Union and the other Communist countries embodied not only Stalin’s but Lenin’s and even some of Marx’s basic ideas’.¹⁴

This did not usually lead reformers within the ruling parties to mount direct attacks on Lenin. Rather, in a war of quotations, they used whatever in Lenin’s voluminous writings suited their purpose. In the Soviet Union, in particular, Lenin remained a source of legitimation of political views at least until the end of the 1980s. Even Alexander Yakovlev, who in post-Soviet Russia came to regard Lenin with abhorrence, was citing him respectfully as late as 1989.¹⁵ Gorbachev retained an esteem for Lenin not only up to the end of his time in power but also beyond it. However, he broke with Leninism on one fundamental principle after another.¹⁶ He abandoned democratic centralism in favour of what in 1987 he called ‘socialist pluralism’. By early 1990 he had endorsed ‘political pluralism’. He accepted the need for checks and balances and emphasized the importance of the rule of law. His political beliefs evolved to the point at which they were virtually indistinguishable from those of the social democrats of Western Europe. Even while he remained General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Gorbachev told his aides he felt close to social democracy. The major programmatic documents of the CPSU in 1990 and 1991 reflected this political evolution. Above all, Gorbachev broke with Lenin by recognizing that means in politics are no less important than ends, and that utopian goals, which are always likely to be illusory, will be all the more of a chimera if pursued by violent and undemocratic means.

Transformational Leadership and Institutional Power

What made possible largely peaceful change away from Communism in the Soviet Union was a similar evolution in the views of a small minority of party officials and a larger minority of party intellectuals while they were already in positions of responsibility. No one who thought as Gorbachev did in 1988, not to speak of 1990–91, could have become general secretary in 1985 unless he had been an actor of Oscar-winning talents who kept all his real opinions to himself. Gorbachev was already, when he became party leader, much more of a reformer than his Politburo colleagues realized, but it was, precisely, reform of the system, not transformative change, he had in mind at that point. The further development of his thinking was of exceptional importance because he already occupied the post of supreme institutional power within the Soviet system and became thereby the single most influential person in the Communist world.

Lech Walesa in 1980–81 was a rare case of a leader from outside the Communist party having a major impact on the policy of a ruling party, forcing a series of retreats – up to the point at which the party-state authorities returned to the offensive and imposed martial law. Even within the ruling party it was uncommon for supreme authority to belong to anyone other than the party leader, whether he was called general secretary, first secretary or chairman. But in his later years such authority did accrue to Deng Xiaoping in China, even after he had given up his major party offices. Nevertheless, he had attained that status as a result of his long and respected service to the party. Boris Yeltsin also was a hugely influential leader between 1989 and 1991, at a time when he held no high party office, other than nominal membership of the Central Committee up to the point at which he resigned from the CPSU in July 1990. However, by that time the system had been transformed to such an extent that election to state offices – first, the all-Union legislature, then the Russian legislature, and finally the Russian presidency – provided an alternative and, by this time, superior source of authority and legitimacy to that offered by the party.

Had there not, however, been an evolution in the views of a number of people a rung or two lower in the party hierarchy, even such a reform-minded leader of the CPSU as Gorbachev would have been hamstrung. But there were such people. Yakovlev had been brought back into the party apparatus by Gorbachev, who subsequently promoted him with exceptional rapidity. Shevardnadze had been a relatively enlightened first secretary of the Communist Party in Georgia and was to become Gorbachev’s surprise choice to succeed Gromyko as foreign minister. Deputy heads of Central Committee departments, Chernyaev (from the International Department) and Shakhnazarov (from the Socialist Countries Department), were to become especially important aides to Gorbachev. They, and other enlightened officials who were brought into Gorbachev’s circle of advisers, were highly supportive of his innovative foreign policy and reform of the political system. They also themselves made important contributions to what was called the ‘New Political Thinking’, especially on foreign policy. These were people whose contacts with the intelligentsia within their own country and experience of the outside world had led to gradual, but fundamental, change in their way of looking at the world. (Shevardnadze was the exception. He had extensive contact with the Georgian intelligentsia, but practically none with ‘abroad’ until after he became foreign minister.) Like Gorbachev, these various officials had in their youth taken most of the official doctrine in Stalin’s USSR for granted. By the second half of the 1980s, their political evolution had brought them close to social democracy.

Which Came First – Crisis or Reform?

In the long run, it was often argued before 1985, the Communist system could not survive without being reformed. That was doubtless true, and China is an example of a state which has introduced radical economic reform and has – thus far – preserved many of the essential features of a Communist polity. What perestroika demonstrated, however, was that Communism could not survive with radical reform of its political system. By the time political pluralism had been introduced, it was, quite simply, no longer meaningful to describe the state as Communist. The introduction of such reform produced fissures within the ruling party itself. What had been the most powerful institutions in the country – the Politburo and secretariat of the Central Committee – began to send mixed signals to the society, as their members visibly pulled in different directions. Once democratization had affected the ruling party, it could not be confined to it. There turned out to be a logical link between the two principal political characteristics of a Communist system. The party’s monopoly of power depended on the preservation of democratic centralism. In the absence of strict limitation on political debate and of tight central control over the flow of information, the Communist Party’s grip on the levers of power was seriously weakened. Even before other political parties were legalized, democratizing reform of the Soviet political system led to the speedy erosion of the CPSU’s ‘leading role’.

In the Soviet Union reform produced crisis more than crisis forced reform. The fate of the Soviet system and of the Soviet state did not hang in the balance in 1985. By 1989 the fate of both did. A majority within the party-state apparatus of the USSR fervently wanted to preserve both the system and the state, believing that the destiny of one was linked to that of the other. But by the end of the 1980s Gorbachev and the reformist wing of the party leadership had already introduced change that made the political system different in kind. From 1988 they consciously pursued systemic change, but they wanted speedy evolution rather than sudden collapse. As distinct from their intention of dismantling the Communist system, Gorbachev and most of his advisers were strongly opposed to the break-up of the Soviet state. They recognized, however, the intimate relationship between means and ends, and they were not prepared to sacrifice the liberalized and democratizing political system on the altar of violent suppression of national separatism. The views of Gorbachev and like-minded supporters such as Yakovlev, Chernyaev and Shakhnazarov had evolved, at varying speeds and under different constraints, from wishing to reform the system to seeking a ‘third way’ – a new model of ‘socialism with a human face’. Gorbachev in 1989 used approvingly that phrase from the Prague Spring which had so infuriated Brezhnev, since it seemed to cast aspersions on his face and that of the system he represented.

Yet Gorbachev (the evolution of whose views mattered so much because of his institutional power – as general secretary and, from March 1990, also as president) moved beyond that. By 1990–91, he no longer aspired to build something which had not yet been seen on earth, but a society which had produced a tangible enhancement of the quality of political life and which would, he hoped, produce comparable improvements in the standard of living. In other words, the model had become that of the European social democracies or the kind of social market economy which existed in West Germany. Gorbachev and his associates did not, of course, come remotely close to attaining such an economic goal. Whether it could eventually have been reached if there had been no August 1991 attempted coup, and if the break-up of the Soviet Union had been partial rather than so complete, remain unanswered, and unanswerable, questions. But perestroika had achieved a great deal. Along the way, fear of the state authorities was removed, liberty was introduced, competitive elections took place, and democratic accountability emerged in the USSR. It was not simply coincidental that these things happened shortly before the Soviet state itself ceased to exist. The task of holding together a democratized multinational state, in which each nation could point to a long list of grievances, was far harder than preserving the Union as a highly authoritarian state. Until the mid-1980s it had been taken for granted that every manifestation of nationalism would be stamped out ruthlessly. It was when that ceased to be the case that expectations were raised and Soviet statehood was called into question.

The Free Flow of Information

‘It’s a sociological law that the more information you give people, the more government policy becomes dependent on public opinion.’ Those were the words of Rafael Safarov, an Armenian political sociologist and a senior researcher in the Institute of State and Law in Moscow, in a conversation I had with him in the mid-1970s. Perhaps sociological law was pitching it a bit high, but it was a good generalization. What is more, Safarov made essentially the same point, in somewhat more convoluted language, in a book, Public Opinion and State Administration, published in an edition of 6,000 copies in Moscow in 1975.¹⁷ Although the Helsinki agreement later in the same year declared that the participating states must ‘Make it their aim to facilitate the freer and wider dissemination of information of all kinds’,¹⁸ this certainly did not become an aim of any of the Communist states. It was only some three years into Gorbachev’s perestroika that a free flow of information became a political reality in the Soviet Union. Only then, indeed, did public opinion, as understood in Western countries, became a serious factor in the political equation. It transpired that a better-informed public did become much more critical of the party and state authorities. Even the reformist wing of the leadership, which had been in the vanguard of change in the first four years of perestroika, was often responding to public opinion more than it was leading it in the last two years or so of the Soviet state.

Although it is difficult to overestimate the significance of the institutional changes that were agreed at the Nineteenth Party Conference in 1988–especially competitive elections for a working legislature – the earlier introduction of glasnost, not only as a concept but as a developing reality, should never be underestimated. Glasnost and institutional innovation worked in tandem. Contested elections and publication in the mass media of the results of opinion polls on sensitive political issues became concrete ways in which popular opinion could exert influence.¹⁹ By the late 1980s, glasnost had become almost identical to freedom of speech, and the flow of information had reached unprecedented levels for the Soviet Union. The jamming of foreign broadcasts had stopped, but the Soviet domestic mass media had changed so much that even highly critical Soviet citizens turned first to their own newspapers, and especially to the most radical of the home-grown and officially published weeklies and journals. It is not surprising that conservative Communists complained at virtually every meeting of the Politburo about the press being out of control. A free flow of information and a Communist system were mutually incompatible. Highly authoritarian regimes need state censorship and give rise to self-censorship. During perestroika, the first withered away before being formally replaced by an enlightened press law, and the latter was abandoned in the new atmosphere of tolerance. Freedom of speech and of publication became the most important manifestations of the new pluralism, and a bulwark against a return to the past.

The International Context

Finally, the collapse of Communism must be seen in international context. Since the Soviet Union was the hegemonic power in Eastern Europe, the transformation of both its political system and its foreign policy is explanation enough of the collapse of Communism in all the regimes which had either at their foundation or later been placed in power by Soviet force of arms. Changes within the international Communist movement had already made an impact on the thinking of members of Communist parties, going back to the Soviet – Yugoslav split. The changes in China after the death of Mao Zedong were even more important. Whereas ruling Communist parties, not least the CPSU, found themselves in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s defending themselves against accusations of ‘revisionism’ emanating from China, by the middle of the 1980s economic reform had proceeded further in China than in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, with only Hungary coming close to Chinese economic reform (while surpassing China in terms of political relaxation).

The improvement in East – West relations was even more important than the continuing diversity (but decline in antagonism) within the international Communist movement. One cannot say that Communism ended in Europe as a result of the end of the Cold War, for the dismantling of a Communist system in the Soviet Union and a qualitative enhancement of Soviet relations with both the United States and Western Europe went hand in hand. However, Cold War tensions invariably worked to the advantage of hard-liners within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Western powers (including the one which mattered most, the United States) had been prepared to see East Europe as a region in which the Soviet Union had considerable influence. When, however, Stalin imposed Soviet-type systems on these states, that was the single most important cause of the development of the Cold War. The hostility was intensified at various times by the actions of both sides, including the Soviet military interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Afghanistan in 1979. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia made a greater impact in Western Europe than in the United States, although in Europe, as well as the USA, it was quite soon followed by improved relations with Brezhnev’s Soviet Union – the détente of the early 1970s.

A central paradox, however, is that the Cold War, which was seen on the Western side as a struggle to keep Communism at bay and to restrain the Soviet Union, also helped to sustain the Soviet system. It is true that the arms race was proportionately a much heavier burden on the Soviet than on the American economy, although it was not negligible even in the latter case.²⁰ But, as Alec Nove put it: ‘The centralized economy, Party control, censorship, and the KGB were justified in the eyes of the leaders, and of many of the led, by the need to combat enemies, internal and external.’²¹ On the one hand, excessive military expenditure overstrained and distorted the Soviet economy. On the other, it was the Cold War which helped the party leadership to maintain control, and even loyalty, and to accord the military-industrial complex and the security forces their major roles within the system. Throughout the post-war period, the icier the Cold War became, the stronger was the position of hard-liners inside the Soviet Union. One corollary of Gorbachev’s efforts to end the Cold War, in which he found a much readier partner in Ronald Reagan than many on either side of the Atlantic had expected, was a weakening of the Ministry of Defence and the KGB as institutional interests within the Soviet system, and a rapid decline in the influence of conservative Communist opponents of domestic reform.

Before perestroika, the most that could be achieved in US – Soviet relations was an agreement on the rules of the game and enough prudent interaction to avoid getting on a slippery slope to nuclear war. Lessons were learned from the extreme danger in which the world was placed by the Cuban missile crisis. But only with the coming to power of Gorbachev, his appointment of a new foreign policy team, and his willingness to look afresh at the fundamental issues of East – West relations did a qualitative change in the relationship become possible. Ronald Reagan, George Shultz and Margaret Thatcher were among those who declared that the Cold War was over by the end of 1988. If the visit of President Reagan to Moscow in the summer of 1988 signalled the psychological end of the Cold War, Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations in December of the same year brought it to an end ideologically. It was, however, the acquisition of national independence, together with the rejection of Communist systems, in Eastern Europe in the course of 1989 which put the seal on the Cold War’s ending. Gerasimov, the adroit press spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, produced the best sound-bite (and speaking in English rather than his native Russian). At the end of the harmonious summit meeting between Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush in Malta in December 1989, he said: ‘We buried the Cold War at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.’ Earlier that year, confirming that the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ was dead, Gerasimov quipped that it had been replaced by the ‘Sinatra doctrine’ – letting the East Europeans do it their way.