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.
[4]The first major effort to document this was Jerry Hough's The Soviet Prefects (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969).
[5]There were, of course, individual Muscovites who prospered under this scheme, like Brezhnev's own daughter Galina and her husband Churbanov.
[6]For one of the standard works on the subject of legitimacy in the former ussr, see T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher, eds., Political Legitimation in Communist Systems (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982).
[7]See Julia Wishnevsky, "Patriots Urge Annulment of rsfsr Elections," Radio Liberty Research Bulletin (April 6, 1990), pp. 18-21.
[8]Obviously, this freedom does not have to be as extensive as in Europe or America; the rapidly developing Asian nics were economically free but authoritarian politically.
[9]Aron quoted in Jeremy Azrael, Managerial Power and Soviet Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p.4.
[10]On this broader point, see my article, "Capitalism and Democracy: The Missing Link," Journal of Democracy (July 1992): pp. 100-110.
[11]See Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation, expanded edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 30-31.
[12]Ibid., p. 45.
[13]One of the most sensible of these was Richard Lowenthal; see his "The Ruling Party in a Mature Society" in Mark G. Field, Social Consequences of Modernization in Communist Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
[14]Jerry Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 8.
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