Joshua Muravchik: After The Fall... 1989, Twenty Years On
[Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His most recent book is The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East.]
Nineteen eighty-nine was a most extraordinary year. There are other years that are imprinted on historic memory, but most of them were occasions for horrible events (1917 or 1939) or disappointing ones (1789 or 1848) or the conclusions of great tragedies (1648 or 1945). The year 1989 was that rare moment when dramatic things happened that were overwhelmingly beneficent. As we watched the world change before our eyes, we learned many things. Looking back today on how the world has evolved in twenty years since that momentous time, we can distill several additional insights.
The economist Robert Heilbroner wrote in 1989: “Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.” This outcome reflected a startling reversal because as recently as the decade before, socialism—considering all its diverse forms lumped together—seemed at the apex of its global sweep, apparently confirming Marx’s prophecy that it was not merely desirable but destiny.
Heilbroner’s observation was noteworthy because he himself was not unsympathetic to socialism, and doubly so because he was no Communist. Given the hostile breach between Communism and democratic socialism, why should Heilbroner have conceded that the fall of the Soviet empire was tantamount to the end of socialism? Why did he not accept the claim advanced by some socialists that the end of Communism would only clear the way for a purer form of socialism?
Heilbroner saw how much the allure of socialism rested on the eschatological claims that Marx had made for it. Democratic socialists may have disdained—even detested—the Soviet version, but the fact that systems calling themselves “socialist” had proliferated around the world seemed to confirm the claim that history was marching inexorably away from capitalism toward something newer and presumably better and more efficient. Whether or not Lenin and Stalin interpreted Marx correctly, their enshrinement of him as the patron saint of a mighty empire gave his theories an unsurpassed weight in twentieth-century thought.
Heilbroner also saw that the fall of Communism culminated a trend. With social democratic parties having already forsaken the dream of replacing capitalism and with the developing world having realized that markets rather than state planning offered the surest path from poverty, the Soviet collapse sealed the issue. Socialism was finished.
Has the economic meltdown of 2008–09 reopened the question? Is socialism on the table again? Not at all. It only shows that you can always have too much of a good thing. The fact that free markets are the best mechanism for making economic decisions does not imply that freer is always better. The smooth functioning of the private sector depends on government to maintain a legal framework, to protect the public against unscrupulous behavior, and to provide vital goods that are not profitable for the private sector to furnish. Libertarians who dream of an economy entirely free of government are no less utopian than socialists.
In the realm of politics Mikhail Gorbachev has cut a sad figure these last two decades: first supporting Putin then criticizing him, clinging to vestiges of socialist ideas, and rebuking Washington for necessary exercises of power, all the while unable to raise his own popularity among his countrymen above single digits. Nonetheless, he is arguably the greatest figure of the twentieth century.
The most famous names of the century were mass murderers. Of those who are remembered for the good they did, who was irreplaceable? The Axis would have been defeated without Roosevelt and even without Churchill, although Britain might have fallen first. India would have gained independence without Gandhi. Segregation would have been ended in America without Martin Luther King Jr. But would the Soviet empire have dissolved, the Cold War ended, and Communism been repealed—all these blessings achieved peacefully—without Gorbachev?
I don’t think so. It has been argued that the Soviet Union collapsed under the dead weight of its absurd economy, but its economy had been absurd for generations and it had not collapsed. Would Soviet inefficiency and low productivity eventually have brought the whole system to its knees? Perhaps, but that might have taken generations more—and in the meantime the state might have been able to replenish itself by means of blackmail and plunder, or it might, in its desperation, have generated a new world war. The dinosaur’s brain was dead, but its massive tail still might have lashed destructively.
Yes, goods and construction were shoddy: televisions containing cardboard parts sometimes combusted spontaneously in people’s living rooms (except that most Soviet citizens didn’t have living rooms). But the weapons worked, and while a tad less advanced than those of America, what the Red Army lacked in quality it made up for in quantity.
The point is underscored by the coda to the famous “Team B” saga of the 1970s—when two groups of analysts were asked by the CIA to produce rival estimates of Soviet military expenditures. That debate is often erroneously remembered as having been about the size of the Soviet military. In truth, Soviet military assets were pretty well known and not in dispute. What was not known, because it couldn’t be photographed by satellite or spy plane, was how much it had cost the Kremlin to field those assets. The price tag, it was rightly supposed, would reveal something about Soviet priorities and hence Soviet goals. In essence, while the regular CIA analysts had calculated that the USSR was spending about 6 percent of its GDP on arms and soldiers, a level modestly above that of the U.S., Team B concluded that the costs probably amounted to 12 percent. When the cloak of secrecy was torn from the Soviet state in 1989, we discovered that the true percentage was apparently twice as high as Team B’s estimate, which itself was twice as high as that of the CIA’s regular analysts. This immense discrepancy was not because the Soviet Union turned out to have more weapons than we had thought, but because it turned out to have less of everything else. As a proportion, one-quarter of its economy was devoted to war.
In other words, despite its economic difficulties, the Kremlin fielded as much military might as it wished, more than any other state then or ever. If this required shortchanging the consumer sector of the economy, so be it. No one dared complain. Further, the rule of the Communist Party was entirely unchallenged, as was Gorbachev’s ascendancy within the party, at least until very late in the game. He was the most powerful single individual on earth, and he could have held that power—and all the perks that went with it—until he went to his grave, as had most of his predecessors. Instead he tossed it away.
This is to take nothing away from Solidarnosc, Charter 77, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, or Ronald Reagan. Each played a heroic part. But Gorbachev could have survived them all.
That this most cynical of political systems could have produced a man of Gorbachev’s sensibilities at the top tells us something hopeful about the human spirit. But the story also has its disheartening side. In her famous essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Jeane Kirkpatrick made two essential points about the differences between totalitarian regimes and more prosaic forms of dictatorship. The latter were less likely to disrupt the norms and habits of everyday life, she said, and furthermore they were more susceptible to being overthrown, something that had never happened to a totalitarian regime short of being defeated in a war.
The collapse of the Soviet empire seemed to disprove the second proposition. But did it really? True, mass action led to the downfall of Communist rule in what was then called Eastern Europe, but these were all colonial regimes that had been imposed by Soviet arms. The revolt against them was not only against Communist rule but perhaps even more so against rule by foreign agents. The two Communist governments that had been brought to power by indigenous revolutionaries rather than by Russian soldiers—those of Yugoslavia and Albania—held onto power for another couple of years. And the Soviet Communists faced little domestic challenge. In other words, Kirkpatrick’s melancholy observation that repression works and regimes that do not shrink from ruthlessness are very hard to unseat seems sadly robust...
Read entire article at World Affairs
Nineteen eighty-nine was a most extraordinary year. There are other years that are imprinted on historic memory, but most of them were occasions for horrible events (1917 or 1939) or disappointing ones (1789 or 1848) or the conclusions of great tragedies (1648 or 1945). The year 1989 was that rare moment when dramatic things happened that were overwhelmingly beneficent. As we watched the world change before our eyes, we learned many things. Looking back today on how the world has evolved in twenty years since that momentous time, we can distill several additional insights.
The economist Robert Heilbroner wrote in 1989: “Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.” This outcome reflected a startling reversal because as recently as the decade before, socialism—considering all its diverse forms lumped together—seemed at the apex of its global sweep, apparently confirming Marx’s prophecy that it was not merely desirable but destiny.
Heilbroner’s observation was noteworthy because he himself was not unsympathetic to socialism, and doubly so because he was no Communist. Given the hostile breach between Communism and democratic socialism, why should Heilbroner have conceded that the fall of the Soviet empire was tantamount to the end of socialism? Why did he not accept the claim advanced by some socialists that the end of Communism would only clear the way for a purer form of socialism?
Heilbroner saw how much the allure of socialism rested on the eschatological claims that Marx had made for it. Democratic socialists may have disdained—even detested—the Soviet version, but the fact that systems calling themselves “socialist” had proliferated around the world seemed to confirm the claim that history was marching inexorably away from capitalism toward something newer and presumably better and more efficient. Whether or not Lenin and Stalin interpreted Marx correctly, their enshrinement of him as the patron saint of a mighty empire gave his theories an unsurpassed weight in twentieth-century thought.
Heilbroner also saw that the fall of Communism culminated a trend. With social democratic parties having already forsaken the dream of replacing capitalism and with the developing world having realized that markets rather than state planning offered the surest path from poverty, the Soviet collapse sealed the issue. Socialism was finished.
Has the economic meltdown of 2008–09 reopened the question? Is socialism on the table again? Not at all. It only shows that you can always have too much of a good thing. The fact that free markets are the best mechanism for making economic decisions does not imply that freer is always better. The smooth functioning of the private sector depends on government to maintain a legal framework, to protect the public against unscrupulous behavior, and to provide vital goods that are not profitable for the private sector to furnish. Libertarians who dream of an economy entirely free of government are no less utopian than socialists.
In the realm of politics Mikhail Gorbachev has cut a sad figure these last two decades: first supporting Putin then criticizing him, clinging to vestiges of socialist ideas, and rebuking Washington for necessary exercises of power, all the while unable to raise his own popularity among his countrymen above single digits. Nonetheless, he is arguably the greatest figure of the twentieth century.
The most famous names of the century were mass murderers. Of those who are remembered for the good they did, who was irreplaceable? The Axis would have been defeated without Roosevelt and even without Churchill, although Britain might have fallen first. India would have gained independence without Gandhi. Segregation would have been ended in America without Martin Luther King Jr. But would the Soviet empire have dissolved, the Cold War ended, and Communism been repealed—all these blessings achieved peacefully—without Gorbachev?
I don’t think so. It has been argued that the Soviet Union collapsed under the dead weight of its absurd economy, but its economy had been absurd for generations and it had not collapsed. Would Soviet inefficiency and low productivity eventually have brought the whole system to its knees? Perhaps, but that might have taken generations more—and in the meantime the state might have been able to replenish itself by means of blackmail and plunder, or it might, in its desperation, have generated a new world war. The dinosaur’s brain was dead, but its massive tail still might have lashed destructively.
Yes, goods and construction were shoddy: televisions containing cardboard parts sometimes combusted spontaneously in people’s living rooms (except that most Soviet citizens didn’t have living rooms). But the weapons worked, and while a tad less advanced than those of America, what the Red Army lacked in quality it made up for in quantity.
The point is underscored by the coda to the famous “Team B” saga of the 1970s—when two groups of analysts were asked by the CIA to produce rival estimates of Soviet military expenditures. That debate is often erroneously remembered as having been about the size of the Soviet military. In truth, Soviet military assets were pretty well known and not in dispute. What was not known, because it couldn’t be photographed by satellite or spy plane, was how much it had cost the Kremlin to field those assets. The price tag, it was rightly supposed, would reveal something about Soviet priorities and hence Soviet goals. In essence, while the regular CIA analysts had calculated that the USSR was spending about 6 percent of its GDP on arms and soldiers, a level modestly above that of the U.S., Team B concluded that the costs probably amounted to 12 percent. When the cloak of secrecy was torn from the Soviet state in 1989, we discovered that the true percentage was apparently twice as high as Team B’s estimate, which itself was twice as high as that of the CIA’s regular analysts. This immense discrepancy was not because the Soviet Union turned out to have more weapons than we had thought, but because it turned out to have less of everything else. As a proportion, one-quarter of its economy was devoted to war.
In other words, despite its economic difficulties, the Kremlin fielded as much military might as it wished, more than any other state then or ever. If this required shortchanging the consumer sector of the economy, so be it. No one dared complain. Further, the rule of the Communist Party was entirely unchallenged, as was Gorbachev’s ascendancy within the party, at least until very late in the game. He was the most powerful single individual on earth, and he could have held that power—and all the perks that went with it—until he went to his grave, as had most of his predecessors. Instead he tossed it away.
This is to take nothing away from Solidarnosc, Charter 77, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, or Ronald Reagan. Each played a heroic part. But Gorbachev could have survived them all.
That this most cynical of political systems could have produced a man of Gorbachev’s sensibilities at the top tells us something hopeful about the human spirit. But the story also has its disheartening side. In her famous essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Jeane Kirkpatrick made two essential points about the differences between totalitarian regimes and more prosaic forms of dictatorship. The latter were less likely to disrupt the norms and habits of everyday life, she said, and furthermore they were more susceptible to being overthrown, something that had never happened to a totalitarian regime short of being defeated in a war.
The collapse of the Soviet empire seemed to disprove the second proposition. But did it really? True, mass action led to the downfall of Communist rule in what was then called Eastern Europe, but these were all colonial regimes that had been imposed by Soviet arms. The revolt against them was not only against Communist rule but perhaps even more so against rule by foreign agents. The two Communist governments that had been brought to power by indigenous revolutionaries rather than by Russian soldiers—those of Yugoslavia and Albania—held onto power for another couple of years. And the Soviet Communists faced little domestic challenge. In other words, Kirkpatrick’s melancholy observation that repression works and regimes that do not shrink from ruthlessness are very hard to unseat seems sadly robust...