As fate has it, Russia is given to the power of extremes,...and what we need here is not pale, unemotional theories, but fiery, new ideas.
--Nikolai Berdyaev,
The Russian Gironde" (1906)
The attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev obliges us to take a new and closer look at the dynamics of the anticommunist revolution. From the moment that the old Soviet Empire began to shake in 1989, participants and observers alike saw the principal threat to democracy in political extremism. These countries had, after all, only the thinnest constitutional traditions, and the tough policies needed to get postcommunist economies working right were bound to be an excruciating test. Amid political confusion and social tension, the enemies of democracy--whether unprincipled rabble-rousers or generals in tanks--were expected to find their opening. By contrast, politicians guided by a spirit of conciliation and compromise were sure to lose out.
Is this what has happened in the Soviet Union? The coup against Gorbachev certainly confirmed the threat of neo-authoritarianism, but what of the threat to democracy we once detected in radical populism? Yesterday's threat became today's salvation. The statements of Western officials and commentators suggested that the future of freedom in the Soviet Union depended on the ability of one angry man to raise the masses in a rage against their oppressors.
This ironic result should not have been so unexpected. The post-revolutionary experience of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet revolution still underway, refute our fear of "extremists," who in almost all these dramas have strengthened--not subverted--democracy. An indispensable role has been played by a character many considered a simple contradiction in terms: the liberal demagogue. This unlikely political figure taps popular hatreds, resentments, and grievances in the mundane work of creating and fortifying a pluralist constitutional order.
