Victor Zaslavsky

The Causes of Disintegration in the USSR and Yugoslavia

Recently there has been a dramatic resurgence of nationalism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. While nationalist politics plays a significant role even in relatively homogeneous countries, ethnic mobilization has reached unprecedented levels in multinational Communist states. Today two such states — the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia — have disintegrated, while a third — Czechoslovakia — is also experiencing a political identity crisis. Seventy years after its formation, and forty-five years after its borders were “definitely” drawn following WWII, the Soviet Union has collapsed. Gorbachevs desperate attempt to promote a new union treaty through the March 1991 referendum failed. After the failure of the August 1991 coup, Baltic independence has been recognized internationally while several republics have added their names to the list of republics proclaiming political independence.

Soviet Society and the World Systems Analysis

In his review of The Neo-Stalinist State, Luke reproaches me for neglecting both “the new importance of the USSRs and Eastern Europes niche in the world economic system” and the use of the East-West economic exchange by the Soviet regime to “sustain its ‘neo-Stalinist’ state.” These criticisms are well taken. Yet, I deliberately concentrated on the inner workings of the Soviet state in its mature form without going into the problems of the Soviet position in the global system. After pointing to these weaknesses, Luke suggests his own interpretation of Soviet developments in the past decades. They can be summarized as follows.

Three Years of Perestroika

The third year of Gorbachevs rule has come to an end. From the outset he proclaimed the policy of perestroika and proceeded to elaborate a strategy for restructuring Soviet society. Today this strategy is undergoing its third reformulation. Gorbachev launched his policies in a rather traditional fashion, stressing scientific and technological progress and a radical improvement in labor discipline and responsibility. On the one hand, he decided to reduce investment in new industrial plant construction, emphasizing instead the modernization of existing facilities. On the other, he attempted to resurrect the Stakhanovism of yore. In 1985 the mass media ran stories for months about workers setting production records or managers successfully implementing technological advances.

Russia and the Problem of Democratic Transition

The failure of the August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union was both a culmination and the end of perestroika — a true revolutionary act which swept away the Soviet Communist Party as the undisputed master of the country for over seventy years. It seemed that the communist regime would never be able to reconstitute itself. But the old structures have managed to survive and reassemble themselves within the new power structure. The resulting dualism of power took on a very unusual character. The new administrators seeking to introduce market reforms have come to dominate the executive branch, while legislative power — the various Soviets within the city and the provinces, up to the Supreme Soviet and the enormous, clumsy and non-functional Congress of Peoples Deputies, the Russian parliament — have remained in the hands of the supporters of the old Soviet regime.

The Soviet World System: Origins, Evolution, Prospects for Reform

All the social sciences are now in flux and Soviet studies even more so. Many traditional approaches prove to be useless for understanding the changed world and there is a search for new explanatory models, and even for “alternative organizing myths.” All this fosters confusion and during such periods of “paradigm change” debates assume predictable characteristics. First of all, there appears a large gap between, in John Stuart Mills words, “the meaning which a term bears in common acceptation” and that which the writer “intends to annex to it.” It provides a great opportunity for sniping and passionately accusing opponents of lack of conceptual rigor.

The Price of Sovietization

The vision that has shaped and continues to shape our perception of Eastern Europe was formed largerly during the fifteen year period between the 1953 workers uprising in Berlin, the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. It is a vision of small countries crushed by the enormous might of the Soviet Union. Many of these East European countries, including East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, participated as fullfledged members in the world market and world division of labor prior to their induction into the Soviet empire. Thus, the idea remains that if the Soviet military presence were, in some fashion, neutralized, East European countries would immediately leave the Soviet bloc and return to the world market system.

Life and Fate

Rethinking his own literary fate shortly before his death, the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) said: “They smothered me in a blind alley.” And indeed, in Grossmans case Soviet censorship apparently triumphed. His most important works, the novels Forever Flowing and Life and Fate, were never published in the USSR. Moreover, the manuscript of Life and Fate was confiscated: not only all the existing copies of the manuscript, but even the carbon paper and the typewriter ribbons used in typing his novel. In 1963, after repeatedly requesting the return of his manuscript, Grossman finally obtained an interview with the “chief ideologist,” Mikhail Suslov.

The Socio-Economic Roots of Re-Armament

At a time when defense spending is increasing almost everywhere, debates have tended to focus either on the Russian expansionist plans, the relaunching of traditional imperialism by the United States, or the possibility of nuclear confrontation in Western Europe. What has been overlooked is that the changing configuration of international socio-economic relations has made most standard interpretations — both Left as well as Right-wing inspired — hopelessly obsolete. Without implying the old Marxist claim of the priority of economics over all other dimensions, it is clear that a socio-economic analysis of present developmental predicaments of the U.S., U.S.S.R., Western Europe and the rest of the world would shed considerable light — both on the actual dangers of the new arms race, as well as on its long-range domestic implications.