What brought about the end of the Long War and the adoption of the parliamentary nation-state by Russia and a united Germany? At present, most accounts of these extraordinary events can be grouped in two general categories: those that argue that economic pressures—perhaps intensified by the defense policies and diplomacy of the Reagan administration—forced the Soviet state to buckle; 1 and those accounts that argue that it was Mikhail Gorbachev's drive for domestic reform that opened up the path that led eventually to Paris.2 To the extent that they recognize the interconnection between domestic and international events, either approach might provide a satisfactory account: if the Soviet regime was compelled to adopt market methods in order to compete strategically, it may be that these reforms led to an unraveling of the command ideology even though they were merely intended to modify the command economy (as is often prophesied for China); if glasnost and perestroika (policies we may roughly translate as transparency or openness as applied to government and restructuring as applied to the economy) loosened the grip of the police state, this made it harder to crack down on secessionists in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet republics. And, of course, these approaches might be seen as complementary, or even as mutually reinforcing. Perhaps Gorbachev's domestic policies of liberalization were intensified by a sense of strategic desperation, or perhaps his conciliatory posture towards the West reflected the more humane norms of his efforts at domestic reconstruction.
I propose, however, to offer a somewhat different account. The two approaches I have thus far described are the consequence of separating strategy and law. The former treats international relations as driven by the strategic requirements of force and the relative comparison of capabilities alone. As the Athenians told the Melians, the strong do what they wish, the weak suffer what they can. From this point of view, the bipolar world should have continued even after the constitutional changes brought about by glasnost and perestroika, because these did not significantly affect the correlation of forces between the superpowers.* I do not believe the facts will bear out any abrupt shift in the force capabilities between the superpowers that would have compelled the change in Soviet policies that occurred in the late 1980s (although significant changes did occur thereafter). Yet while the relative capabilities of the United States and the USSR did not change very much during the years from Gorbachev's accession to power in 1985 until 1989, international relations were fundamentally transformed during that one year. In any case, such an account does not tell us why the Soviets reacted to their dilemma in the way they did (rather than by heightening tensions, as Andropov chose to do when confronted by Reagan's adversarial posture, or by simply grafting market mechanisms onto the party state, as the Chinese have chosen to do).3
The second approach treats constitutional developments as causing, but not caused by, international change. In this view, Gorbachev's domestic reforms led to the collapse of the communist system because he sought to dismantle a totalitarian system that had previously held the states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics in thrall. I am skeptical, however, that Gorbachev came to power committed to parliamentarianism and determined to effectuate its triumph over communism. Nor do I believe that he was willing to permit the subordination of the Soviet position internationally in order to achieve domestic reform, nor that he was foolish enough to believe that he could delegitimate the communist system without placing increased strains on his ability to restrain defections from the Warsaw Pact, including the option to use force. Nor does this account tell us why Soviet reformers did not embark upon political liberalization coupled with a demand for international concessions, that is, a radical extension of the Brezhnev/Helsinki policies or any of the other plausible programs of domestic constitutional reform that did not entail a strategic retrenchment.
The Long War ended when General Secretary Gorbachev—as he was before he sought a new constitution that styled him president—attempted to mimic the strategies of the West in order to compete more successfully internationally, and this mimicry led, unintentionally, to constitutional changes he was unable to control. These changes, in turn, prevented him from falling back on the old strategy of international coercion and he was forced irresistibly into an ardent effort to join the community of parliamentary states—the Versailles/San Francisco community—as the only way of saving the geopolitical position of the USSR, which his own policies had jeopardized. The political problem for the West, without a satisfactory solution to which the Peace of Paris would not have been possible, was to keep Germany from succumbing to the temptations of neutrality during the process of Soviet change, without so alienating Germany that it would go off by itself when that process was complete. This required the United States not only to persuade President Gorbachev that he should urge that the United States stay in Europe—a complete reversal of Soviet policy hitherto—but also to concert American allies in the acceptance of a stronger, unified Germany. If the principal character in this account is Gorbachev, the figures of the American secretary of state, James Baker, and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze—both, like Bismarck and Castlereagh, political party men and not professional diplomats—and the U.S. president, George H. W. Bush, were equally crucial.
Thus the Soviet Union under Gorbachev followed the historical pattern of states mimicking their successful competitors.4 This brought about the loss of legitimacy experienced by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. Eventually the history of Communism came to be seen as one of moral and physical impoverishment. The communist state became detached from the legitimating basis of the nation-state, the mission to better the welfare of its people.5
Gorbachev did not set out to dismantle communism or the Soviet state; rather he was a committed communist who frequently reaffirmed that commitment. “We are looking within socialism,” he declared, “rather than outside it, for the answers to all the questions that arise.” In his devotion to the socialist alternative he was no less committed than Deng Xiaopeng, the other pivotal figure in the communist world during this period. As Adam Michnik acutely observed in 1987, Gorbachev's reforms should not be interpreted as advancing liberal democracy but instead as efforts on behalf of the “socialist counter-reformation.”
Essentially Gorbachev attempted to retain control over [the Soviet empire] through allowing, and then even encouraging, reform of communism domestically with the expectation that his own model of perestroika would prevail and bring to power similarly minded leaders in the Soviet bloc. The need for Gorbachev's counter-reformation was provoked by the legitimation crisis of the Communist party…6
I believe it can be shown that the strategy of counter-reformation was not the result of an economic decline in the Soviet Union in the years leading up to Gorbachev's accession to power. In the four years following Gorbachev's election as general secretary in 1985, however, the consequences of his mimesis of the West—the attempt to graft market management techniques* of decentralization onto socialist planning—drove the Soviet leader into increasingly desperate maneuvers until, in 1989, admission to the society of parliamentary nation-states was the only way left to preserve a role for himself and unity for the Soviet Union. Even this failed him, but it is important to see this development as a culmination in tactics that resulted in the astonishing decisions to combine international conciliation with pro-market and pro-democracy domestic policies. Indeed, only if we appreciate that the need for legitimation was driving Gorbachev's improvisations once the program of radical reform of the economy failed, with each new maneuver further sapping the stature of the Party in the Eastern bloc as well as in the Soviet Union, can we appreciate how unilateral concessions to the West were a rational response by a leader anxious to preserve a bipolar world. The Soviet Union was no weaker militarily, and the United States no stronger, in 1989 than in 1985, yet
[f]or Gorbachev and those closest to him the game in world politics had changed profoundly in the four years that separated his elections as CPSU general secretary and the collapse of Soviet power in Europe; if prior to 1985 the overarching object of Soviet foreign policy had been to strengthen the “positions of socialism” at the expense of the West, by 1989 a new goal—to secure Soviet admission to the elaborate collection of institutions that constituted the Western economic and political system—had arisen to take its place.7
This change in strategic objectives had come about as a result of the interplay between the international and the domestic, between strategic and constitutional change. It was Stalin's insistence on transforming the constitutional order of the states of Eastern Europe and the West's refusal to permit Germany to join this order, that kept the war going after World War II. As he told Milovan Djilas in the spring of 1945, “[w]hoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” Just as Napoleon had taken the tactics of artillery siege and broadened these, first to battle itself, and then to war against other states, so Stalin took the tactics of interstate conflict—the internationalized civil war of classes—and turned these tactics against the peoples of his own state and those he conquered.
This transposition was at the heart of the Long War, and it was no differ-ent in its way for liberal parliamentarians or for fascists. Each ideology sought to use its military victories against other nations as a means of imposing that variant of the nation-state that it championed. Thus, speaking of Poland's twentieth century conquerors, Michnik wrote:
In contrast to the Nazis, the Soviets imposed their own organizational structures on the Poles. [The Nazis] could not be bothered to create political organizations for the conquered people, whom they wanted to transform into a race of slaves [to serve the German nation]. The Soviet[s] systematically destroyed all social ties, political and cultural organizations, sports associations, and professional guilds, and abrogated civil rights and confiscated private property.8
And, it should be added, after the Japanese defeat the Americans rewrote the Japanese constitution, instituted a multiparty bicameral legislature and the Australian ballot, and provided for an independent judiciary.9
The real difference with respect to such forced conversions is between the nation-state, of whatever variant, and its state-nation predecessor. The imperial states of the nineteenth century were largely indifferent to the domestic social structures of their colonies so long as they were compliant. This point is ignored by those who claim that the Soviet Union was no more than a contemporary manifestation of historic Russian barbarity in politics. As John Gray noted in 1987,
this [claim] neglects the role of Marxian theory in constituting and reproducing the Soviet system and the relentless hostility of both to the traditions and achievements of the Russian people. [It fails] to grasp the radical modernity of the Soviet totalitarian system…10
This is the system that Gorbachev inherited: one that was preoccupied with the control of domestic society, which preoccupation was highly sensitive to global politics because international events had a profound effect on the legitimacy of the domestic regime. When Gorbachev attempted to transform Soviet and Eastern European domestic societies, it was with the goal of enhancing communism as a strategic actor; when this transformation only succeeded in delegitimating the socialist system itself, there were important consequences for Soviet international operations.
This process was begun by Gorbachev's adoption of the “revolutionary” methods of his predecessors, altered in content by the generational change which Gorbachev reflected and which was characterized by an attraction to some Western methods. Roughly speaking, Gorbachev went through three periods of cultural and political revolution: from 1986 to 1988, he attempted to renovate the domestic economy—not to prevent an imminent collapse, as sometimes appears in retrospect, but to make the socialist model more competitive internationally. In 1988 he broadened this agenda by introducing Western political reforms into the Warsaw Pact states (including the Soviet Union), though for different reasons abroad than at home. By 1989 he faced an unmanageable revolt in Eastern Europe, and economic and political disintegration in the Soviet Union, and he turned to the society of Western states for integration.
Radical economic upheaval was a periodic tactic of political reform in communist systems.11 Stalin's “Second Revolution” discredited the NEP,* reversed Lenin's own reversals of his original program, and campaigned against the Old Bolsheviks. Gorbachev's program of perestroika was the last of such revolutions, and even its most memorable phrases were repetitions of slogans that originated with the Second Revolution, had lain dormant, and had been picked up again during the period of Khrushchev's radical populism.12 From 1929, the beginning of the Second Revolution, to 1938 fourteen books used the word perestroika in their titles, but only two between 1939 and 1956. During the period of Khrushchev's radicalism, the term reappeared and nineteen such titles were published.
Gorbachev was a generation younger than the other members of the Brezhnev politburo of which he became a full member in 1980. His colleagues at that stage had lived through, and perhaps been formed by, the Stalinist “revolutions,” including the attacks on “left revolutionaries” and the adoption of “Socialism in One Country” that had subordinated international socialism to the improvement of the USSR. By contrast Gorbachev and his contemporaries described themselves as “children of the Twentieth Party Congress,” the congress at which Khrushchev had attacked Stalin and attempted to liberalize Soviet politics. If we may say that Brezhnev brought stability and predictability to a state that had been repeatedly jarred by Khrushchev, then we might also say that Gorbachev was eager to bring energy and innovation to a state that was widely perceived to have become sclerotic.
It was not a state, however, that was in deep economic difficulties or that was unable to hold its own in the superpower confrontation with the United States. Gorbachev's response to Reagan's challenge had more to do with his own dynamism and desire for innovation than with any particular difficulties imposed by the United States on the Soviet position. One can see this by simply comparing Gorbachev's response to American strategic initiatives in the world with those of Andropov and Chernenko, who worked in the early 1980s with virtually the same economic resources that Gorbachev had in 1985. When NATO refused to cancel its long-range theatre nuclear force deployments in Europe, Andropov abruptly withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks rather than bargain away the SS-20 forces that had prompted the NATO deployments in the first place. When Chernenko agreed to return to the talks, he offered a proposal—the so-called “zero option”—that eventually was accepted by the United States after Gorbachev had come to power. There was no noticeable difference in the strategic or economic conditions faced by the Soviet leadership under any of these men prior to 1988. The economy, which had grown at rates of 5 percent in the early 1970s, was, according to official estimates, slowing down to a rate of 2.5 percent by 1984, but this decrease was hardly unique to the Soviet Union. Growth in the United States, which had been at an average rate of 4 percent throughout the 1960s, had declined to about 2.7 percent in the 1970s and 1980s. Most Western European economies, already lagging behind the United States in per capita income, also experienced slower growth during the 1980s than the United States.
What did occur was a contraction of absolute growth in 1979 – 1982, but this was in part caused by a series of poor harvests and a drop in the utilization of industrial capacity, both temporary. In fact, grain yields rapidly improved from 1981 to 1986, apparently due to the adoption of improved agricultural technologies. Andropov's program of enhanced discipline also seems to have had a positive effect: industrial growth rebounded in early 1983. If the “core legitimation of Soviet rule was provided by the Marxist thesis that public ownership of the means of production, and the unified direction of production toward public objectives, would make a socialist economy more efficient than a capitalist one”13 and thereby enable the state better to provide for the welfare of the nation, then the contractions of the late seventies and early eighties were cause for some concern. After a long period in which the much poorer Soviet economy had grown at a faster rate than that of the richer and more developed West, it now appeared to be slowing down. This occurred, however, for so short a period and at so slight a rate that it is difficult to believe that it was in fact the source of the legitimation crisis that Gorbachev eventually found himself forced to confront. Rather, it was when Gorbachev sought to streamline the Soviet economy in order to make it more competitive strategically that his efforts inadvertently threw the Soviet state into a crisis in which his increasingly desperate measures—all efforts to copy successful Western programs to some degree—only furthered ensnared him. Partly this occurred because the piecemeal adoption of Western practices was counterproductive; partly because championing Western methods tended to enhance the prestige of the West at Soviet expense; but mainly because Gorbachev himself attempted to delegitimate Soviet practices in order to win support for his reforms—in much the same way that earlier internal revolutions had been conducted by Soviet leaders. When his program of economic reform failed, however, he himself had too greatly weakened the state apparatus for it to recover, and there was left only the residue of the delegitimation campaign he had all too successfully conducted. This climactic story began, it must be recalled, not with a Soviet program of conciliatory rapprochement with Western states, but with a pulsating ambition to compete with them.
Even before his election as general secretary, Gorbachev had warned that “[o]nly an intensive, fast-developing economy can ensure the strengthening of the country's position in the international arena, enabling it to enter the new millennium appropriately as a great and prosperous power.” When Chernenko died in 1985, Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party. In one of his first speeches after assuming the leadership, he asserted that “the fate of the country and the place of socialism in the world” depended upon the Soviet Union reaching its economic objectives.
Gorbachev's first major announcement was the initiation of a strategy he termed the “acceleration” of economic growth, to be achieved by a quantum shift of resources into the machine-tools sector. This sector was directed to increase innovation and the share of new products in its output. Abrupt shifts of investment, which are characteristic of command economies, can bring about serious sectoral imbalances, slow growth, and cause inflation in the short term, but if the leading sector has been correctly identified, such investment strategies can bring competitive benefits. The Japanese approach of encouraging investment in certain identified sectors has, on the whole, been a success. And indeed the main feature of the Soviet 1986 – 1990 Five-Year Plan was a tremendous shift of investment into high technology.
For the USSR, however, the payoff of a stronger machine-tools industry never arrived because the government abruptly switched strategies. In 1987, barely two years after its adoption, the “acceleration” strategy was abandoned to the accompaniment of harsh attacks by Gorbachev on the command economy ideology that had produced such a policy. An alternative strategy of “radical economic reform” was announced. It is worth emphasizing that “radical economic reform,” far from implying a step toward a noncommunist program, was actually intrinsic to the communist system. Because the state was in charge of central planning for the economy—setting prices, allocating production targets, enforcing managerial discipline—any changes came from the top where advances in knowledge were expected to be reflected in refinements in policy. “Reforms reflected confidence in the strength of the system and its potential for improvement, and the revealing expression ‘further perfecting' was a standard part of reform decree titles. Some of the most sweeping economic reforms had been announced in the later 1950s, the golden age of Soviet society… when national income grew by more than 7 percent per year.”14
Gorbachev's new economic reforms consisted of attempts to graft market practices on to the centrally planned Soviet economy. Profit incentives were introduced and output targets deprecated. These reforms tended to undermine the authority of the command economy without actually producing the benefits of the market because they operated in isolation, without the background of the market and its free flow of labor, decentralized transactions, and demand pricing. In the Soviet environment, partial market practices either were of little effect or operated in perverse ways, as if to vindicate the microeconomic “theory of the second best.”15 Gorbachev's radical reforms brought about this contradictory environment: output targets were abolished but the state retained the right to requisition products at levels that encompassed most of enterprise output; the state renounced liability for enterprise debt but if losses were incurred, the ministry was the creditor of last resort; the ministry could no longer direct particular enterprises but was responsible for their overall performance; the “Law of the Enterprise,” which was supposed to give managers more discretion, stipulated managerial duties down to minute details.16 The economist Vladimir Kontorovich concluded of this reform agenda that
it could not work. Three elements of reform proved to be most destructive: managerial discretion over the output in excess of the state order, flexibility in wage and price setting, and strong incentives to earn above planned profit. Taken together, they frequently allowed the managers to raise prices of their products and the wages of their employees while cutting output.17
The effect was to increase inflation, which, in a command economy where prices were fixed, was reflected in worsening shortages of consumer goods. The actual economic contraction brought about by these reforms, however, was far less visible than the empty store shelves of which consumers complained.
During a series of addresses in 1986 – 1988, Gorbachev ridiculed central planning and the methods of the command economy, and called for “unleashing” the creativity of individuals, freeing them from overregulation and control and giving them a share in ownership. Compensation was to be tied to performance, not to a lock-step system that discouraged initiative. Part of the radical reform plan of 1987 provided for the election of enterprise managers by their employees. Nor was this delegitimation campaign confined to the shop floor:
The destruction of authority had actually started in 1986 with media criticism of managers, officials, and bureaucrats. This was a vintage communist campaign: high pitch, unrelenting, blanket demagogy…. The de-legitimation of authority and demoralization of those who wielded it swiftly led to an erosion of discipline. [By] 1988 it was becoming difficult to get workers for night or weekend shifts. Relations between suppliers and users, previously moderated by local Party committees, became more chaotic. Personnel cuts led to fewer and less coherent commands.18
More players moved into the vacuum thus created: miners went on strike, chemical and power plants were shut by environmental protests, and local authorities began to assert more independent control. The election of managers proved so costly to management control that it had to be reversed in 1990, but the collapse of managerial authority could not now be reversed.
Soviet statistics estimated the growth in national income in 1988 at 4.4 percent and in GNP at 5.5 percent (although the CIA estimated GNP growth at 2.2 percent). By 1989 there was widespread recognition that the reform agenda had failed. Most of Gorbachev's original policies had been reversed or abandoned; “acceleration” and “radical reform” were scrapped. Investment in high technology was frozen, and steps were taken to propitiate new players, the consumers and the workers. The Soviet Union had suffered other similar periods of recession but what now occurred was unprecedented: in the attempted reversal of the “acceleration” program and the “radical reform” program, it soon became clear that decrees to roll back these policies were simply being ignored and that the government in 1989 had lost control of the Soviet economy. By his attacks on the legitimacy of the system of central planning, Gorbachev had crippled the mechanisms that might have allowed him to halt the recession.
Broad public awareness of the impact of the reforms only came in 1990 when official statistics showed actual declines in GNP of 2 percent and 4 percent in national income. In 1990 military expenditures began to decline and higher priority was given to the production of consumer goods. By 1991 official data showed an extraordinary contraction of 15 – 17 percent, and the following year the rate of decline exceeded 20 percent.
There can be no doubt that the general secretary of the Communist Party played a decisive role in the collapse of the Communist system, 19 as did the United States president, but these roles are often distorted. President Reagan's confrontational anti-Soviet scheme, his increase in U.S. defense expenditures—particularly on missile defense—and his program of denying the Soviet Union hard currency (by holding oil prices down and thwarting the completion of a European pipeline) and high technology (by enforcing export controls) did not force the Soviet Union into an economic collapse. But these measures did focus attention on the superpower confrontation and challenged the complacent Soviet leadership, accustomed to détente in the Brezhnev years, to take up that challenge. This was enthusiastically done by the dynamic Gorbachev, who proceeded to mimic what he took to be the most successful strategic innovations of the West. This policy of partial strategic adaptation proved to be an economic mistake, but it only became an economic disaster when the political underpinnings of that adaptation began to be felt, because these disabled the Soviet Union from making the midcourse corrections that would have allowed it to stabilize and avoid the catastrophic economic events of 1990 – 1991. Moreover, the process of delegitimation used to win domestic support for these adaptations set in motion events on the international front—particularly in Eastern Europe—that ultimately played back into the constitutional politics of the Soviet republics and triggered the final collapse. All of these events followed the pattern of mutually affecting strategic and constitutional change described in Book I.
The Gorbachev of 1986 was hailed in many Western quarters as a conciliatory international leader; with the events of 1989 (including the acquiescence of the Soviet Union in German unification and Eastern European autonomy) and 1990 (especially the signing of the Charter of Paris) this view became the general opinion. Nevertheless, a less anachronistic description is probably closer to the truth.
For the confident Gorbachev of 1986 was by no means the supplicant of 1989. Two moves on the international scene won for him a wide following in liberal circles in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere: the surprise proposal made at Reykjavik in October 1986 to scrap nuclear weapons and the INF agreement signed in Washington in December 1987. I am inclined to believe that neither of these events justifies the conclusion that Gorbachev had abandoned, with these proposals, the Soviet aim to win decisive strategic advantages over the United States. On the contrary, both measures struck at the vitality of U.S. extended deterrence.
It is easy to lose sight of what was at stake in these dramatic negotiations, yet only if these stakes are kept firmly in mind can we make sense of the course of the talks. Very briefly, it can be said that the United States wished to treat Western Europe as part of its homeland (NATO having arisen in the period when there was only central deterrence), despite the reality of the end of deterrence identity between the United States and Europe (owing to U.S. homeland vulnerability to Soviet nuclear systems and the resulting birth of extended deterrence). At the same time, however, the USSR wished to treat Western Europe as a mere launching platform for the United States, not as a superpower in itself nor as a part of a superpower's homeland (because a threat against it was manifestly not as forceful as a threat against the U.S. homeland), despite French and British independent nuclear deterrents and the presence of American troops defended by nuclear weapons. Unwilling to concede the identity of security interests between the United States and Europe, the USSR could not, however, insist on wholly separate treatment either because to do so would have jeopardized the Russian insistence that its position as a superpower entitled it to parity with “the other half,” the rest of the developed world, then largely arrayed against it. This explained the constant Russian pressure on Western Europe to identify itself as distinct from U.S. interests, coupled with the contradictory refusal to treat Western European security concerns as on a par with those of the United States and the USSR.
One might draw the comparison in this way. For the Soviet Union, a superpower was entitled to pose threats (deployments) equal to the threats it faced from all sources; a balance existed when each superpower faced equivalent threats. For the United States, a superpower was entitled to pose threats equal to the threats posed by the other superpower; a balance existed when each superpower faced threats equal to those it posed. These paradigms are derived directly from the respective superpower relationships to Western Europe, one threatening, as it had to if its empire in Eastern Europe was ever to be truly secure, the other protecting, as it had to if its political and philosophical positions were not to be isolated in the world.*
There are two reasons why Gorbachev's strategic proposals have been regarded as evidence of his transcendence of previous Soviet thinking. First, many Western observers were themselves supporters of the abandonment of U.S. extended deterrence, that is, the abandonment of the protection of Europe by American nuclear weapons. Just as Soviet market-oriented reforms were applauded because they were associated in the West with economic efficiency and seemed likely to bring political liberalization, so dramatic cuts in nuclear weapons were also hailed as evidence of a reasonableness that heralded progressive political evolution. Second, later events did in fact lead Gorbachev to make significant concessions, and these—like the later economic collapse—imperceptibly color the way we see his earlier actions. Principal among these was his decision not to intervene to shore up the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. This was, I think it can be shown, a decision, as Gorbachev's admirers assert, dictated by his vision and not, at least at first, by necessity. That vision, however, was not one of a pluralistic Central Europe, independent of Soviet control. Rather it was a strategic vision, animated by a rather daring innovation: he would make the Warsaw Pact over in the image of NATO in order to protect it from the buffeting of developments in the domestic politics of its members, remove the stain of the Prague intervention when the Pact had been turned against one of its members, and use the alliance as a lever to pry away older leaders with whom he had little sympathy and replace them with younger ones who shared his dynamism and zest for innovation.
Throughout the 1980s various political and human rights movements in Eastern Europe had exploited the Helsinki Final Act declarations in order to develop civil institutions within socialist constraints. In Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia there arose movements that anticipated the market state by bypassing state institutions and creating a sphere of private, associational action within which democratic methods and ideals prevailed. This was a daring intellectual leap, because it reversed the Marxist notion that materiality determines human consciousness. By simply creating a space where persons could speak the truth, recount their memories without self-conscious editing, and cooperate to perform nonpolitical tasks, these movements struck at the passivity that underlay the grip of Communism on Eastern Europe since its crushing of the popular revolts of the 1950s and 1960s.20 The military strength of Soviet forces was no less in 1989, however, than it had been in 1968 when Warsaw Pact troops invaded and quickly overwhelmed Czechoslovakia. What had changed was not Soviet military dominance in Eastern Europe but the growth of an organized civil society there—as well as a different mood in the Soviet Union itself as a result of perestroika and glasnost. This new consciousness was reflected in literary works21 and philosophical essays, 22 but it found its most powerful institutional instrument in the Polish labor coalition Solidarnosc (Solidarity). Eventually this group embraced 90 percent of Polish workers; it assumed responsibility for managing production, settling trade disputes, and wage bargaining, thus bypassing communist institutions and rendering them obsolete by informally assuming their functions. When General Jaruzelski felt compelled to seize control of the country in 1981—in order to pre-empt Russian troops poised to cross the Soviet-Polish border—it was a tacit admission that the communist state had failed to legitimate itself with its principal constituency, the mass of industrial workers.
The Jaruzelski crackdown and the subsequent imposition of martial law were closely studied by the new Soviet leadership that came to power four years later. Shevardnadze concluded that imposing martial law had stimulated rather than silenced the noncommunist opposition. “So there is no reason,” he asserted, “to hiss at perestroika and cheer for military force. It would not be a bad idea for us to learn the lesson of martial law in Poland for ourselves.” Instead of opting for force—and here Shevardnadze and Gorbachev may have made an error by not distinguishing between Polish and Soviet force—the new Soviet leadership chose a strategy of counter-reformation, disclaiming the Brezhnev Doctrine and attempting to distance itself from the traditional communist leaderships in the other Warsaw Pact states, while striking the pose (which Gorbachev believed would be alluring) of a new, more humane socialism. This was certainly no mere miscalculation. Gorbachev was well aware that popular revolts had broken out in the Central European states whenever a Soviet leader had signaled the advent of a program of liberalization. This had occurred in Germany in 1953 after Stalin's death when Georgy Malenkov had briefly appeared to be contemplating a less restrictive relationship between the USSR and her allies; and again in Hungary and Poland in 1956 following the distribution of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin.
Moreover, Gorbachev was also aware that the regimes which these revolts had briefly brought to power in Hungary and Poland had announced their intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev was eager, however, to discredit the prevailing communist leaders in Eastern Europe in order to rally support for his own policies in the Soviet Union. If he were ever forced to order troops to fire on workers, the delegitimation crisis would grow even worse for communism in both places. He had to avoid being lumped with the leadership of a past generation, for whom (with the exception of Andropov) he had no great regard, and also thwart popular movements that might defect from the Warsaw Pact military alliance if these movements took power. A misstep in either direction would risk destroying the Warsaw Pact, as the inevitable domestic turmoil accompanying Gorbachev's liberalizations erupted in the member states.
If, instead, he could decouple domestic politics from membership in the Pact—as NATO had successfully managed to do—he might also be able to use the prestige and power of his role in the Warsaw alliance to improve his position at home without being dragged into embarrassing positions vis-á-vis the Soviet client states of Europe. If the communist governments could no longer maintain, let alone improve, the welfare of the populations they ruled in exchange for passive political and social compliance, it might nevertheless be possible to give responsibility for the economic problems with which these leaders had to deal to persons less tightly linked to the Soviet apparatus. Gerbachev thought he had found a way to detach the Warsaw Pact from the vulnerability of the Party, and even to strengthen his own control when like-minded leaders came to power in the associated states. The opportunity to test these ideas first presented itself in Poland.
A new round of strikes in 1988 forced the Polish regime to negotiate with Solidarity. Two outcomes of these negotiations were the acceptance of free associations—the cornerstone of the civil society developed in Poland and indeed the basic idea of Solidarity itself—and an agreement to hold partially free elections in June of 1989. Solidarity candidates proceeded to win virtually every seat for which they were allowed to compete, preventing Jaruzelski from forming a communist government. He then asked Solidarity to come into the government as a coalition partner. When Polish Communist Party leader Mieczyslaw Rakowski balked at this, Gorbachev telephoned him on August 22, 1989, and directed him to go along. In exchange, Solidarity promised to remain within the Warsaw Pact and to preserve communist control over the state organs of security. Jaruzelski would become president and chief of the armed forces; the Ministry of Defense would remain in communist hands. Now, Gorbachev calculated, the economic crisis triggered by the accumulation of debt from the previous communist regime would have to be dealt with by Solidarity. The Warsaw Pact was, if anything, stronger than before and promised to survive the domestic upheavals that seemed to be spreading throughout its membership.
This perception was flawed in two respects. First, to the Poles and to others in Central Europe, Gorbachev's policies reflected Soviet doubt about the effectiveness of coercion. This tended to embolden the nonCommunist opposition. Second, events in the Central European states inevitably reverberated in the Soviet Union itself. To Soviet citizens what was happening in Central Europe was unsettling, and made the communist alternative appear to be shunned by peoples thought to be fraternal allies.
The next opportunity to test Gorbachev's plans came in East Germany. When thousands of East Germans began packing the embassies of sympathetic Warsaw Pact states in an effort to expatriate to the West, Gorbachev gave approval to the Hungarian regime's proposal to open its border with Austria, permitting East Germans to flee. This triggered a mass exodus from East Germany and began the political crisis there that toppled the Honecker regime. As Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott wrote:
The Hungarian government had obtained the Kremlin's tacit consent in advance…. [Gorbachev] privately told his aides that Honecker would have to go, as soon as possible. “The East German leadership can't stay in control.” He ordered his General Staff to make sure that Soviet troops stationed in East Germany did not get involved in the strife that was sure to envelop the country.23
After letting some nine hundred Germans escape in August, Hungary opened its borders in September. In October, Gorbachev met with Honecker in East Berlin and urged him to adopt “reforms”; twelve days later Honecker was removed from power and replaced by Egon Krenz. On November 9 the East German government opened up the Berlin Wall. Krenz announced that he was planning free, democratic, and secret elections. These elections removed him from power.
As Fyodor Burlatsky has put it, Gorbachev's original hope was to have “mini-Gorbachevs” come to power. As is now clear, he overestimated the degree of legitimacy of communist reformers in Eastern Europe. While his counterreformation might have worked in 1968, communist revisionism was long dead by 1989. A civil society had developed and with it, legitimate leaders had emerged [who] could demand greater concessions from the revisionist communists who were espousing the perestroika line.24
Because these concessions were constitutional in nature they ultimately worked to defeat Gorbachev's strategic plan by destroying the Warsaw Pact.
On November 17, enormous spontaneous demonstrations erupted in Prague. Within one week the communist party leaders had resigned and a new government was formed. Now the process of constitutional mimicry began to operate against Gorbachev. Czechoslovakia and Hungary eliminated the leading role of the Communist Party from their constitutions in the fall of 1989, something hardly contemplated by perestroika. This quickly led to Czechoslovakia's decision to assert an independent foreign policy and to demand the removal of Soviet troops from Czech soil. On December 14, Poland announced that the agreement by which the Soviet Union had stationed troops in Poland was no longer valid. As Koslowski and Kratochwill concluded,
by allowing the eclipse of the leading role of the Communist Party within the bloc and at home, Gorbachev, probably unwittingly… defeated the rationale for the very existence of the bloc and its domestic institutions. When socialism was not automatically accorded a privileged position in the constitutions of any bloc state, the Warsaw Pact had lost one of its fundamental reasons for existence, making its continuation as an effective alliance less likely.25
In February 1990 Gorbachev took two fateful decisions: He agreed to a plan for German unification and he essentially jettisoned the Communist Party as the vehicle for guiding the Soviet state. In that month he engineered the decision by the Central Committee to give up the Party's monopoly on power and allow a multiparty system. This move was completed when in March, Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution was abolished, thus legitimating opposition parties, and at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in July, when the Party voted to give up its supervision of government by removing all government officials (except Gorbachev) from the Politburo.
But the Czech, German, and Polish revolutions in which Gorbachev had collaborated had encouraged rebellions in the Soviet republics. Widespread noncompliance with Soviet draft calls swept the country in 1990. The republics attempted to enhance their own legitimacy by declaring their separateness from Moscow, and assuring their publics that troops would not be used to suppress national movements. Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Russian Republic, instructed Russian soldiers not to use force during the Lithuanian revolt, which occurred when the Baltic states asserted their independence from the USSR.
Gorbachev was no longer attempting to forge a more powerful and competitive Soviet Union; it was now a matter of simply preserving the Soviet state. This he decided could only be accomplished by joining the West. The vehicle for this partnership was collaboration in German unification. Such a partnership would offer him two advantages: it would enhance his personal political prestige as he would now be allied with the desirable West rather than the crumbling Party, and it would offer him access to financial support with which he might halt the Soviet state's quickening slide into bankruptcy.
This collaboration ended the Cold War. First fascism and then communism had been discredited, strategically and then constitutionally in the case of fascism, in the reverse order in the case of communism. Gorbachev's attempts to create a more strategically dynamic Soviet Union through constitutional innovation had in fact engineered a strategic collapse. In the wake of that collapse, legitimacy deserted the Soviet state.