It was twenty years ago today that a clique of Soviet political and military officials attempted a coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev with the aim of “saving” the USSR. Their actions had exactly the opposite result – the coup collapsed within four days, political momentum shifted decisively to the radical reformers and national separatists aligned with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union had effectively ceased to exist.
The abortive coup and its aftermath brought an end to 74 years of “interesting times” (in the Chinese sense) since the Bolshevik revolution, and six years of astonishing changes under the rubrics of glasnost and perestroika (although changes have obviously continued in the republics of the former USSR and Eastern Europe since then). Coverage and commentary on the 20th anniversary of the coup include calls for martyred defenders of the nascent Soviet democracy to be honoured, reflections by Mikhail Gorbachev, an interactive guide to how the former Soviet republics have fared since 1991, reflections by Nina Khrushcheva, Mary Dejevsky, Susan Richards, Timothy Heritage and Marsha Lipman, an appraisal of Gorbachev by Lilia Shevtsova, and an interesting report by Ellen Barry on the current state of Russian democracy.
In amongst this welter of analysis and reflection, I’d like to offer some thoughts of my own. Last year I blogged my thoughts on the Gorbachev years overall on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his appointment as CPSU General Secretary. WHilst I continue to stand by the general thrust of that analysis, I would like to offer some additional reflections.
Firstly, Whilst hindsight is a wonderful thing, and counterfactual history can be great fun, it is interesting that Gorbachev himself is now of the view that he should have commenced key reforms sooner (especially to the relationship between the 15 republics of the Soviet Union), and should have left the CPSU in April 1991 to form a new party of reform. British historian Robert Service has argued that Gorbachev should have taken such a step even earlier to form such a party in alliance with the radical reformers aligned with Yeltsin, although questions have to be asked about how reliable an ally Yeltsin would have been, given his own idiosyncrasies and the strained relations between he and Gorbachev.
It has been put to me by colleagues that there were other opportunities Gorbachev may have missed. One is that he could have attempted to gazump the Stalinist conservatives by accelerating the reform process to provide for a popular election for Soviet President in 1987, and to attempt to win the election on a reform program to establish a popular mandate for change. More generally it has been put to me that Gorbachev and his supporters should have brought the Soviet citizenry into play by mobilising them in support of a reform program (as Yeltsin et al did to some extent in mobilising popular resistance to the coup) rather than pursuing a balancing act between conservatives and radicals within the party-state power structure (which came to entail too many compromises with the conservatives, led key reform supporters such as Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze to resign, and in the end didn’t forestall the coup). Whilst basically agreeing with these points, the problem was that in the period in question Gorbachev himself and his supporters (and for that matter the radical reformers as well) had yet to develop and settle on a clear plan for reform which could provide a basis for electoral or popular mobilisation.
In general, there is a widespread view that the glasnost and perestroika process in general came too late, and that if the Soviet Union was to be reformed the necessary changes had to be made in the 1950s and 1960s. Again, whilst I generally agree with this view, I think it hints at the more fundamental question of what would it have meant to “reform the Soviet Union” and whether such a goal was ever feasible. The late Fred Halliday concluded that it wasn’t:
Yet it is essential to look, without ambiguity, at the failure of communism, and not avoid the issue that too many retrospective analyses have avoided: the fact that its failure was necessary, not contingent. This system, denying political democracy and based on the command economy, did not just fail because of a false policy here or there, let alone because classical Marxist theory was abandoned. As even sympathisers like Rosa Luxemburg realised in 1917 itself, it was bound from the beginning to fail.
It is common, and somewhat too easy, for defenders of Marxism in the contemporary world to argue that Marxist theory and communist practice were divergent, and that, hence, the theory bears no responsibility for the communist record. If by this question is meant whether another Marxism, a more liberal or “genuine” or “democratic” one, or, if you incline in the other direction, a more resolute, militant, disciplined one, could have prevented the collapse of the communist states then the answer is no.
There were certainly, throughout its seventy-year history, choices for the Soviet system: the “new economic policy” (NEP) could have been continued after 1928, there could have been a different trajectory in the middle 1930s if Stalin not Kirov had been assassinated, or Nikolai Bukharin had become party leader; if Nikita Khrushchev had not been ousted in 1964; if economic reform, of a kind Mikhail Gorbachev was to attempt after 1985, might have begun twenty years earlier. And so on.
As for the final period, the Soviet system could certainly have continued for another generation, if another Soviet leader, a conservative like Grigory Romanov or Viktor Grishin, had come to power in March 1985 instead of Gorbachev. But, in the longer run, neither prevailing Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) ideology, nor (in my view) any variant of the Marxist tradition remotely related to 1917, could have saved, let alone developed that regime. It had reached a dead end; but that aporia, although contingent in timing and form, was inevitable sooner or later.
If one agrees with Halliday, the questions about what Gorbachev could or should have done become questions about what Gorbachev and like-minded reformers could have done in order to preside over a kind of social-democratic transition from communism which would have been kinder and gentler than the neo-liberal “shock therapy” transition which Yeltsin was to preside over.
This also raises the issue canvassed by Jonathan Steele in his interview with Gorbachev:
Some analysts say the whole Soviet system was unreformable and any change was bound to lead to an unstoppable process of increasingly dramatic transformation. It was inevitable, according to this analysis, that Gorbachev lost control.
I would reformulate this as a more general point that any reform process which aimed to replace a totalitarian regime with a substantially liberal and democratic alternative would, almost by definition, entail a relinquishing of control by the ruling party and its leader/s at some point. Even in the far more manageable circumstances of Hungary in 1989-90, the erstwhile Hungarian Socialist Workers Party oversaw a swift transition to multi-party democracy, reinvented itself as a social democratic party, contested the first free elections on that basis – and lost, as Hungarian voters, like others throughout Eastern Europe that year, took the chance to vote for whichever party seemed to represent the sharpest break from the old regime.
The other hugely important fact to note is that, twenty years after the “death of communism”, and contrary to what many may have expected twenty years ago, a number of communist regimes – China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea – remain in place and remain largely unreconstructed politically, even where they have presided over major economic reform. Is Mikhail Gorbachev right when he says “Do you think the Chinese [and, by implication, the Vietnamese, etc.] will be able to avoid the same hard choices at some point in time? There will be a moment when they will have to decide on political change and they are already nearing that point.”? Or have the leaderships in Beijing, Hanoi, Havana and Pyongyang drawn a different lesson from the denouement of glasnost and perestroika? Time will tell.
Update #1: Hellin Kay at Huffington Post, G.F. at the Economist.
Update #2: Kathy Lally and Will Englund.
Update #3: Bridget Kendall, more from Gorby, more from Bridget Kendall.
Paul, there is a piece in today’s fin review on the coup against Gorbachev that would interest you.
Thanks Terry.
If only Lenin hadn’t died so soon …. just kidding
The lessons of the failure of the Soviet Union have not been lost on the Chinese Communist Party. Get rid of all the Marxist economics, make the country ruthlessly capitalist, dramatically increase the living standards of the population, and you can keep absolute Leninist control for as long as you like, or at least as long as there still several hundred million peasants who would like to live on more than a dollar a day. Unfortunately Stalin and his successors never quite figured this out.
Mind you, the Chinese stole the idea from Lee Kuan Yew.
Oh, and I didn’t know that Fred Halliday had died. He was one of the most clear-eyed Marxists around; reading his stuff was always stimulating.
“Or have the leaderships in Beijing, Hanoi, Havana and Pyongyang drawn a different lesson from the denouement of glasnost and perestroika? Time will tell.”
The regime in Hanoi is corrupt, incompetent and brutal but life for the average Vietnamese citizen has improved dramatically since capitalism was introduced. I was sickened to the pit of my stomach when I first visited Vietnam and the late 1980s and saw the intense poverty, decay and hunger Uncle Ho had inadvertently inflicted upon his countrymen.
My Vietnamese in-laws tell me much is written and said among Vietnamese emigrants about liberating Vietnam but it all comes to naught. The Marxists still have an unshakeable and paranoid grip on the country. Vietnamese people have to register at police stations if they sleep away from home even for a single night or if they have a party and any suspicious activity is reported to police very quickly by informers in exchange for cash. What a nightmare.
Actually, Start, the Marxists in VN have an incredibly and increasingly weak hold on the country and the leadership of the Party itself (a hold they arguably lost a few years ago now).
The (admittedly corrupt and frequently incompetent) leadership is increasingly pro-market (occasionally almost pro-neoliberal), and the only challenges they face are manouevering past the old rhetoric, the (Marxist) old timers, and an increasingly pissed-off and active working class.
Also, given the several decades of war fought against the French, USA, Chinese and then the Khmer Rouge – wars which killed millions of people in total and more or less bombed VN back into the Middle Ages – the introduction of capitalism into VN (through the Doi Moi) was always going to be a step forward.
In light of that, it’s also pretty unfair (and incorrect) to lay blame for the extremes of poverty and misery the Vietnamese people faced in the early 80s at the feet of Ho Chi Minh (inadvertent or otherwise).
The challenge of the socialist project in VN was therefore always going to be one of steering VN ‘through’ capitalism while maintaining social justice and democracy. Clearly the second part of the project has largely failed. The first part looks a bit dodgy too…
Wombo you are right that Ho Chi Minh should not be blamed for the economic desolation of Vietnam and with the extreme poverty and misery of its people in the 1980s. After all he died in 1969.
You should lay the blame for that squarely at the feet of his successor Le Duan.
With the end of the war in 1975 Le Duan instituted, within months, the economic and social policies of the Soviet Union across the whole of Vietnam, which Ho never did because he never had the opportunity to do so, and brought in Soviet advisers to help do this. He proceeded to beggar Vietnam to the point that by the early 1980s the peasants of northern Vietnam, the very wellspring of north Vietnamese resistance against the United States, started rising up against their communist government.
The Russians (referred to locally as the lobsters for lying around on the beaches and getting sunburned) are a great deal more hated in northern Vietnam than the Americans who were seen as at least being honest enemies.
As soon as Le Duan died in 1986 the Vietnamese dumped his policiies and moved to Doi Moi, although it did not really get traction until 1991.
It is sad and ignorant, and indeed pathetic, that you are so unfamiliar with the economic history of Vietnam that you do know this but blame the “French, USA, Chinese and then the Khmer Rouge” for Vietnam’s travails.
Correction to my post @7. In the last paragraph “do know” should be “do not know”.
The Chinese avoided political collapse by introducing ruthless perestroika and kicking anyone who glasnosted in the head, hard. The Soviet Union was killed in 1918 by Lenin. He said all power to the Soviets and then he took them away.
Jefferson conceived of them in old age when contemplated the drawbacks of the American constitution. Marx and Lenin were both confronted by these ‘soviets’ or ‘people’s councils’ which sprung up in Paris in 1871 and then in Russia in 1905 and 1917, but their manifestation, which took both men by surprise, did not alter their politically elitist views. It wasn’t just an absence of a plan, it was the assumption that one was needed.
The same spontaneous council arose in 1956 in Hungary. Guess what killed them.
Rosa Luxemburg’s status in the Soviet Union declined sharply after Lenin’s death. I think it was perhaps as early as ’21 where Sov mouthpieces were sent to German conferences of the revolutionarily enthused to declare her and all her works toxic puss.
And then those nice Social Democrats had some fascists shoot her in the head and throw her body out a car.
Ya think maybe somebody at some point might have asked how you get an entire nation-state to join together in unity when such power struggles were commonplace within the movement to bring such a paradise about?
Did Lenin ever read Aristotle and Machiavelli? Maybe that’s why America worked finally, cause Jefferson had absorbed their cautionary discourse. But Robespierre and Lenin just looked at other people and saw bits of Lego, small, blank human figures in a shining city all white gold and platinum. Gleams in the mind like a Maserati ad in the dreams of an accountant.
gregM, don’t you think that the war deserves just a tiny bit of blame for what happened in Vietnam between 1975 and 1986? I don’t think you’ll find me a particularly strong apologist for communism, but it seems realistic that a war that (according to Wikipedia) killed between 200k and 2 million Vietnamese civilians and about 1 million soldiers, out of a population of just over 40 million, would have some effect on its economy. Not to mention the destruction of infrastructure and subsequent embargo, and the oil shock of 1973-74 that damaged the South Vietnamese economy. And as wikipedia notes, the surrender of the South Vietnamese president in 1975 marked the end of 116 years of war, either alongside or against one of the world’s great powers.
If anything, it’s a miracle the Vietnamese had anything left to build a new society on.
Greg M, I’m actually more than familiar with the economic history – and present economic and political reality – of VN. In great detail, as it happens.
sg’s points are right on the money, and are a salutary reminder that the failure of “communist” regimes is not a simple and direct result of those regimes’ policies. There is this little thing called objective reality, which doesn’t slip easily into anybody’s Cold War ideological straightjackets.
This is excellent news Wombo.
Since you are more than familiar with the economic history of Vietnam in great detail, as it happens, tell us what the rate of inflation was running at there in 1986.
I’m sure you can’t. Or wouldn’t want to.
But I look forward to your answer.
No I don’t sg. The war can be blamed for what happened in Vietnam up to 1975 and perhaps extended a tiny bit for what happened between 1975 and 1978 with Cambodia, although that was a minor and localised irritant quickly snuffed out in December 1978/January 1979. And I don’t criticise Le Duan for that. I give him full credit.
One good thing the war did, and this saved hundreds of thousands, and perhaps, millions of lives, was to delay the introduction of the insane economic “reforms”, that Le Duan pursued, according to the Leninist principles to which he was committed, from the time the North Vietnamese chose to pursue a civil war in 1956 in order to re-unify with the south, until the war was over.
Then, with the the war over, he introduced his insane economic policies and beggared Vietmam.
Vietnam was and always had been a self-reliant agricultural nation, able to feed its people and not dependent on foreign powers nor, in any significant way, foreign trade in doing so. They lived a life of subsistence by our standards but for them it was a good life. Le Duan’s policies wrecked that.
What were his policies, you wonder?
The collectivisation of agriculture according to Stalinist principles was the worst of it. The north Vietnamese peasants were forced out of their established practices of food production and famine followed.
And being a Stalinist he emphasised heavy industry in the usual unproductive Stalinist way, resulting in ten years of economic stagnation, and the impoverishment of what were already a pretty poor people, with the economy held up by Soviet loans.
Any other country would have experienced an economic upturn with the end of war. Le Duan made sure that Vietnam did not.
But let Wombo, who is more than familiar with the economic history of Vietnam in great detail, as it happens, tell you what the inflation rate was in Vietnam in 1986.
Then you’ll see my point.
That seems a bit of a reach, gregM. War destroys infrastructure and kills people, and Vietnam had only one source of external support for post-war reconstruction – the Soviet Union. Surely you agree that’s not the best country to be looking for help from when you’ve been beggared by a war?
Which isn’t to say that Le Duan’s policies weren’t disastrous, but maybe they wouldn’t have been so bad if the South hadn’t been devastated. After all, the North managed to fight a 10 year war under those same policies.
Also, during the 70s Vietnam had a war with Cambodia and China, a trade embargo, and a baby boom. That’s hard going. People credit the post-85 reforms with improving the economy, but it’s worth noting that trade relations with the USA only began to normalize after those reforms, so maybe the embargo was important, eh?
A more interesting side point for me of this discussion though is the question of why Asians are so much better at communism than Europeans. It took the Vietnamese 10 years of mistakes to work out that they needed to ditch large chunks of their ideology (and they had a lot of scapegoats they could have found to excuse continuing on their old path). China’s Great Leap Forward was disastrous but compared to the way Stalin operated, it really didn’t take the Chinese very long to change directions. Similarly, countries like East Germany and Romania seemed incapable of any kind of reform compared to their Asian “comrades”. I guess this is partly because the Asian communist societies benefited from a willing “neutral” development partner (Japan), but I wonder if it’s something about the culture of political development in Asia? Or just luck (after all, North Korea hasn’t handled its problems very well).
No sg, it’s not a bit of a reach. With the destruction of its infrasructure during the war the economic indicators should have been going down, but with the end of the war they should have gone up.
Everywhere else where a war has ended that has happened. But not in Vietnam.
But the worst of the impact of Le Duan’s policies was not in south Vietnam but in its north, the very constant source of its manpower and resolution which brought the South down.
You are plain wrong when you say “After all, the North managed to fight a 10 year war under those same policies.”
It did not.
Those policies had not been introduced in the north when its government decided in 1958 to launch a war for the reunification of Vietnam. As far as the communist government government had got to was to shoot the landlords and redistribute the land to the peasants. They had not got around to collectivising agriculuture. That policy was put on the backburner until the war was over.
But as soon as the war was over Le Duan introduced it and reduced Vietnam to economic desolation and its people to destitution.
I agree that the Soviet Union was not the best country to have as an ally. But that is what the communist leaders of Vietnam chose. Bad choice. Tough.
As to why the Asians are so much better at communism than Europeans. They are not. Your point is, I think, that they got rid of it. and adopted sane economic policies, quicker than the Europeans did.
Obviously there are the small matters of the East German uprising of 1953, put down by the Russians, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, put down by the Russians, the Czech uprising of 1968, put down by the Russians and the Polish Solidarity uprising of 1981 put down by its Russian controlled government in fear of Russian intervention.
Can you see a pattern there?
sg wrote: “China’s Great Leap Forward was disastrous but compared to the way Stalin operated, it really didn’t take the Chinese very long to change directions.
What? Are you saying that 30 years is not really a very long time?
Here’s a chapter from 2004 by Adam Fforde who is widely recognised as an authority on Vietnam’s economics and politics. Amongst other things it refers to “the so-called ‘Price-wage-money’ reforms of 1985″ which led to rapid inflation. Reading another article by Fforde from 1987 (which is unfortunately not online) I was reminded that inflation in parts of Vietnam was over 500 per cent in 1986.
I agree that the Soviet Union was not the best country to have as an ally. But that is what the communist leaders of Vietnam chose. Bad choice. Tough.
They didn’t have a choice.
Ho Chi Minh’s first choice was the United States and remained so ’til America backed France in its sad attempt to regain empire. Ho Chi Minh allied with the Comms after WWI because they were the only ones willing to indulge his nationalist aspirations for Vietnam.
Roosevelt wanted to kebosh Euro-Imperialism, especially the French sort in Indochine. If he’d lived another year history mighta been different.
What? Are you saying that 30 years is not really a very long time?
Um don’t you mean more like 13 years? What do they teach in history class these days?
Great Leap Forward: 1957, 1958.
Death of Mao: 1976.
Oops, looks like I meant 18 years.
Sorry, sg.
Is 18 years ‘not really a very long time’?
1988 in Berlin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co5kSlAMrwI
Oops, looks like I meant 18 years.
The reference was to the Cultural Revolution not the Great Leap Forward. 18 years is a long time, it’s also a hazy figure. But it’s basically this one generation that did the whole late 60s youth rebellion thang but not in a groovy Sgt Pepper kinda a way.
Mao was just so fab. A genius and a psycho. Two for the price of one.