The Modernizing Imperative

The Modernizing Imperative

Mini Teaser: The Gorbachev-era earthquake that led to the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet state was due in significant part to autonomous changes in Soviet civil society.

by Author(s): Francis Fukuyama

The usefulness of "post-totalitarian" as a distinct category of regime suggests that we will not find evidence of an autonomous Soviet civil society in the usual places, that is, embodied in concrete civil institutions. We should not expect to look back and see that Soviet newspapers, labor unions, churches, and the like were in fact much stronger and more independent than we thought. The weakness of Russian civil society today, more than a year after the formal dissolution of the  USSR, is evident for everyone to see: there have been elections, but no political parties to speak of; privatization, but no strong private sector. Labor unions and churches are only now gaining an independent voice.

A Proto-Civil Society

What we must look for, then, are not concrete civil institutions prior to Gorbachev, but a "proto-civil society" that laid the groundwork for what was to follow. This proto-civil society is evident in two respects. The first were changes in Soviet institutions that reduced their functionality as guardians of Soviet power, and became the basis for the emergence of a new, non-Soviet civil society after perestroika. The second were changes in consciousness-that is, in the way that elites and the population more broadly thought about their own system and its legitimacy, which in turn influenced how they would respond to revolutionary change when it was initiated from above.

In the first category, there was a clear diffusion of power within the Soviet Communist Party from the center to the periphery, on a republic, an oblast (regional government), and even a local party level. It was a truism of the classical model of totalitarianism that while the party rules called for democracy from below, the reality was always strictly dictatorship from above. But by the early 1970s there was growing evidence that the lower reaches of the party were acquiring a substantial degree of bargaining leverage against the center.[4] This was evident in economic affairs, where powerful oblast first secretaries were in a position to stymie reforms and initiatives coming from Moscow, just as enterprise directors were in a position to resist orders from central and republican ministries. The various economic and political institutes of the  USSR Academy of Sciences, many designed as propaganda instruments, quickly became sources of intellectual opposition to the old Soviet state. The decentralization of Soviet institutions was most clearly evident in certain of the Union republics, where the local party organization in effect became entities independent of the central committee apparatus back in Moscow. While Leonid Brezhnev played a critical role in placing his friend Sharaf Rashidov as first secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, it was Rashidov and not the Central Committee personnel department who thereafter controlled most appointments in the Uzbek Party apparatus. Moscow may have tolerated the vast, corrupt cotton empire off which Rashidov got rich, but it did not create or control it.[5]

The growth of official "mafias" within the Communist Party was paralleled by the growth of mafias outside it. To this day we do not have reliable statistics on the size of the informal economy during the Brezhnev period, but estimates for the size of its overall contribution to Soviet gnp range as high as 25 percent. Much of this economic activity outside the official plan was either the work of private entrepreneurs-mostly kolkhozniks raising fruits and vegetables in their garden plots-or was carried out by informal groups who performed arbitrage, middleman, and even manufacturing functions. Though these sorts of activities flourished most in the non-Slavic republics, even in Russia they constituted an important source of flexibility in the otherwise rigidly controlled economy.

The importance of this "proto-civil society" is evident from subsequent events. In many cases, it was the local party organization, like Brazauskas's Lithuanian Communist Party, that took up nationalist themes and propelled the republics toward independence. In other cases, rather than form independent political parties, reformers were able to hijack parts of the old cpsu and government structures, and use them to advance reformist aims. This is essentially what Yeltsin did with the Russian Federation's structures in 1990-91. Indeed, without the concept of a proto-civil society, it would be impossible to account for the great differences in post-communist political development in Eastern Europe. Those countries with more developed proto-civil societies, like Poland and Hungary, were much better able to make a transition to genuine democratic structures later.

The decay of the classical "circular flow of power" model or any other institutional aspect of classical totalitarianism would not have been very consequential were it not for the second category of changes, those in the realm of consciousness. The almost universally held Western belief in the rock-solid stability of the Soviet system was based, ultimately, on certain assumptions about the nature of normative beliefs in the former  USSR. The first was the belief that over the years, the "system" had legitimated itself, if not in the eyes of the people, then at least in the eyes of the Soviet elite that ran it.[6] The "system" was not simply coterminous with Marxist-Leninist ideology; rather, what was legitimate was what in the Brezhnev period was called the "real socialism" that had industrialized the country, beaten Hitler, risen to global superpower status, and achieved a significant degree of economic growth (at least up through the late 1970s). While Western observers recognized that there was a considerable amount of cynicism within the Soviet elite over ideology, most assumed that the administrators of the system had a very powerful self-interest in its perpetuation, and would not accept change that seriously threatened to undermine it.

It went beyond this, however. There was a widely held assumption among Sovietologists that the broad mass of the Soviet population as well as the elites had also come to view the system as "legitimate." Unlike some Eastern European populations, the Soviet people-and particularly Russians-were seen as atomized, dependent and authority-craving. This was held to be a characteristic of Russian society from pre-Bolshevik days that had only been reinforced by Stalinist terror. In the words of the nineteenth-century French traveler, the Marquis de Custine, the Russians were a race "broken to slavery." Soviet society was not, therefore, a tinderbox of revolutionary passions held down only by the brute force of police terror; rather, it was a functional society, organized according to different normative standards than the democracies of the West.

Ironically, the view that both elites and the broader population accepted the legitimacy of the Soviet system was held by Sovietologists on both the right and left. On the right, many wanted to emphasize the deeply rooted character of Soviet expansionism and dictatorship, while on the left there was a desire to see the old Soviet Union as a real if imperfect alternative to Western capitalist democracy. Fewer scholars on the right thought communism had achieved a broad legitimacy, but they for the most part believed that legitimacy counted for much less than power in that system.

It was in the realm of consciousness, however, that totalitarianism failed most completely. Gorbachev did not force the Soviet intelligentsia to take up the cause of reform. Brezhnev-era academic institutes were staffed with several echelons of economists who were familiar with "bourgeois" Western economic theory and ready to implement it. From the late Brezhnev period on, the Soviet intelligentsia had almost complete access to contemporary Western materials, regardless of ideological content. Within the party itself the corrective mechanisms that were supposed to keep the totalitarian machine on course failed, largely because critical people in its apparatus came quickly to see the old system as illegitimate. Not only could Gorbachev tap the Yakovlevs, Shevardnadzes, and Yeltsins for top posts, but custodians of the old system throughout the party, army, and police of the kind who in 1964 conspired to remove Khrushchev from power did not have the competence or the drive to do so in the late 1980s. (Yegor Ligachev has told Western audiences that no one in the Politburo even considered the possibility of intervention during the emigration crisis in East Germany in mid-1989.)

As a measure of the broader Soviet population's ability to think for itself, the various elections that were held beginning in 1990 could serve as a limited but revealing measure. In the local elections held in the spring of 1990, candidates from the liberal Democratic Russia movement won fifty-seven of sixty-five seats in Moscow; while seventy "patriotic" nationalist or neo-Bolshevik candidates ran, only two were elected.[7] The percentages of votes for "democrats" were lower in provincial cities and in the countryside, but this kind of voting pattern is absolutely typical for non-communist democratizing countries at a comparable level of social development. The Party apparatus put its weight behind electing Ryzhkov in the election for Russian president in June 1991, and there were plenty of other unsavory authoritarian candidates who could have been elected. But it was for Boris Yeltsin that Russians voted.

 

An Ordinary Country

If we want to explain why the political system began to diffuse power, and why there emerged a broad crisis in the Soviet belief system, we can look to two sorts of explanations, one particular to totalitarian systems, the other a more general one applicable to all societies. The first concerned the inability of totalitarianism to perpetuate itself in a pure form. The crucial event in this respect was the ending of the terror. For once it became clear that the state would not kill or incarcerate large numbers of people to enforce its rule, the balance of power between the state and society began to shift. From now on, failure of a ministry, region, or enterprise to meet its plan targets would not be punishable by death or imprisonment. Coercion took many other forms than outright terror, of course, and kept the nature of autonomous social action within strict limits. Still, the cessation of terror meant that the state-Party apparatus would increasingly have to bribe or cajole economic actors to get them to do its bidding.

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