From revolution to Krizis: The transcending revolutions of 1989-91

Comparative Politics

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 459-478

  Sakwa, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KENT   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749669190     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20434012     Document Type: Review

References (117)

1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 11.
2. Some of the ideas in this chapter are drawn from Richard Sakwa, "The Age of Paradox: The Anti-revolutionary Revolutions of 1989-91," in Moira Donald and Tim Rees, eds., Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 159-76.
3. Vladimir Tismaneanu, "Introduction," in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 1.
4. Timothy Garton Ash, "Resolution in Hungary and Poland," The New York Review of Books, Aug. 17, 1989, pp. 9-15;
5. also, Timothy Garton Ash, "Reform or Revolution?," The New York Review of Books, Oct. 27, 1988, pp. 47-55.
6. Jürgen Habermas, "What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left," New Left Review, 183 (September-October 1990), 3-21.
7. Leslie Holmes, The End of Communist Power (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993), p. xi and passim;
8. also, Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
9. See Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Philip Allan, 1990);
10. Jerzy Szacki, Utopia i traditsiya (Moscow: Progress, 1990).
11. For application to the USSR, see Jerome M. Gilison, The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
12. For an interesting Soviet analysis, see M. P. Kapustin, Konets Utopii? Proshloe i budushchee sotsializma (Moscow: Novosti, 1990).
13. Robert V. Daniels, The End of the Communist Revolution (London: Routledge, 1993).
14. Neil Harding, "The Marxist-Leninist Detour," in John Dunn, ed., Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp 155-88.
15. For a useful empirical analysis, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). However, the concept of experiment is not developed theoretically.
16. Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 31, notes that, when the concept of revoluzione emerged in late medieval Italy, it signified radical change that returned to an earlier era.
17. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 40.
18. Keith Tribe, "Translator's Introduction," in Koselleck, Futures Past, p. xv.
19. The American revolution from 1776 might have been epochal in its consequences, but in form it was a revolt of colonists in defense of what they claimed to be ancient liberties and rights. It was on the night of July 14, 1789, that Louis XVI, on hearing news of the fall of the Bastille, exclaimed, "C'est une révolte," to which his informant, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, gave his famous correction: "Non, Sire, c'est une révolution." Arendt, On Revolution, p. 47. The word "revolution" was here used for the last time in its old sense of the restoration of legitimacy, but also for the first time in its new sense of an irresistible movement to the future. Liberatory revolution of the type pursued by the American colonists in 1776 now gave way to a new type of universal revolutionism.
20. This paper stresses only one aspect of Enlightenment thought, the late Enlightenment philosophisme that suggested benevolent outcomes would be worth human sacrifices. This view was condemned, for example, by Michael Oakeshott. For a recent study, see Roy Tseng, The Sceptical Idealist: Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of the Enlightenment (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003).
21. The sacrificial approach was far from universal. Rousseau, for example, came out against revolution. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 161, n7.
22. The main work by Antoine de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, is A Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, written in 1794, the year that he poisoned himself in prison. As a Girondin deputy, he had been incarcerated by the Jacobins.
23. Marquis de Condorcet, A Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (London: 1955), p. 4,
24. cited in Alex Callinicos, Social Theory: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 25.
25. The characterization is by Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975), p. 167.
26. Cited in Arendt, On Revolution, p. 29.
27. For a recent study, see David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
28. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 42.
29. For a brilliant exposition of this theme, see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995), esp. ch. 5, "Time and History."
30. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History," The National Interest (Summer 1989), 3-17;
31. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
32. For comments on Marx's weakness as a theorist of politics, see, for example, Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. ix and passim.
33. See Jean L. Cohen, Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1982);
34. also, Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
35. Cf. Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
36. Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968);
37. Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970).
38. John Gray, "Fanatical Unbelief," Prospect (November 2004), 68.
39. E. A. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin: Revolutionary Machiavellism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
40. In his introduction to a collection of hitherto unpublished documents, Pipes notes Lenin's "utter disregard for human life, except where his own family and closest associates were concerned." "Lenin is revealed in these documents as a thoroughgoing misanthrope." Richard Pipes ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 8, 11.
41. Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
42. Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin (London: Routledge, 2002).
43. David L. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
44. Robert V. Daniels, "Revolution, Modernization and the Paradox of Twentieth-Century Russia," Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 42 (September 2000), 250.
45. Tribe, p. xv.
46. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (New York: Schocken Books, 1961).
47. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992).
48. Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 23-24.
49. See, in particular, S. M. Frank, "Etika nigilizma," in Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii (Moscow: 1909, reprinted Frankfurt a.M., Posev, 1967), pp. 175-210.
50. David Anin noted that in 1917 the inability to understand the threat posed to the achievements of the February revolution by left-wing maximalism "was not an accidental feature but a 'psychological state' that pervaded all parties or, rather, the whole Russian intelligentsia." Cited by John Keep, "1917: The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd," Soviet Studies, 20, (1968-69), 22.
51. John Keep, Soviet Studies, Ibid., p. 34.
52. Iz glubiny: Sbornik statei o russkoi revolyutsii (Moscow: 'Iz glubin', 1989).
53. A. Solzhenitsyn et al., From under the Rubble (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974).
54. Although the role of westernized elites is important, as argued by Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), native sources of antirevolutionism were no less significant.
55. In English, see Alexander Yakovlov, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993);
56. Alexander Yakovlov, Striving for Law in a Lawless Land: Memoirs of a Russian Reformer (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995);
57. Alexander Yakovlov, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
58. Sovetskaya kultura, July 15, 1989, p. 3.
59. See Philip Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005).
60. Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya, The Challenge of Revolution: Contemporary Russia in the History of Revolutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
61. Quoted retrospectively in M. S. Gorbachev, On My Country and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 11.
62. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (London: Collins, 1987), p. 49.
63. K gumannomy, demokraticheskomu sotsializmu: Programmnoe zayavlenie XXVIII s'ezda KPSS (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), p. 7.
64. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zden?k Mlynáfi, Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
65. Archie Brown argues that Gorbachev was "an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary by conviction." Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 308.
66. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Ibid., p. 309 and passim.
67. Pavel Palazchenko, My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 370.
68. A. S. Chernyaev, Shest' let s Gorbachevym: Po dnevnikovym zapisyam (Moscow: Progress-Kultura, 1993), p. 519.
69. See Stephen F. Cohen, "The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the Soviet Union," in Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 5.
70. Gorbachev's continued declarations of allegiance to Communism up to and beyond the 1991 coup is sensitively portrayed by Leszek Kolakowski, "Amidst Moving Ruins," in Tismaneanu, ed., p. 56.
71. Krishan Kumar, "The Revolutions of 1989: Socialism, Capitalism and Democracy," Theory and Society, 21 (June 1992), 309-56;
72. Krishan Kumar, "The 1989 Revolutions and the Idea of Europe," Political Studies, 40 (September 1992), 439-61.
73. Habermas, "What Does Socialism Mean Today?," p. 5.
74. Claus Offe, "Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe," Social Research, 58 (Winter 1991), 865-902.
75. François Furet, Le Passé d'une illusion: Essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle (Paris: Robert Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, 1995), p. 13.
76. Alain Touraine, "The Idea of Revolution," Theory, Culture and Society, 7 (June 1990), 121.
77. Krishan Kumar "Introduction," in Krishan Kumar, ed., Revolution: The Theory and Practice of a European Idea (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 2.
78. Joseph de Maistre, "Supposed Dangers of Counter-Revolution," in Considerations on France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 105.
79. The original, cited in Arendt, On Revolution, p. 18, reads as follows. "La contre-révolution ne sera point une révolution contraire, mais la contraire de la révolution."
80. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 18.
81. Agnes Horvåth and Arpåd Szakolczai, The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary (London: Routledge, 1992).
82. Dmitrii Furman, "Revolyutsionnye tsikly Rossii," Svobodnaya mysl', 1 (1994), 9.
83. S. N. Eisenstadt and Eyal Ben-Ari, eds., Japanese Models of Conflict Resolution (London: Kegan Paul, 1990).
84. See also S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolution and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations (New York: Free Press, 1978).
85. For an illuminating discussion of the question, see Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1991).
86. See also S. N. Eisenstadt, "The Breakdown of Communist Regimes," in Tismaneanu, ed., pp. 89-107.
87. David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
88. Adam Michnik, "A New Evolutionism," in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 135-48.
89. Jeffrey C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), esp. the chapter "The Meanings of 1989."
90. Jeffrey C. Isaac, "The Strange Silence of Political Theory," Political Theory, 23 (November 1995), 640.
91. Jeffrey C. Isaac, Political Theory, Ibid., p. 648.
92. Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003).
93. Alain Touraine et al., Solidarity: Poland 1980-81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 135.
94. Cf. Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland's Self Limiting Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
95. Arato, "Interpreting 1989," p. 613.
96. The landmark western formulation of the strategy is Andrew Arato, "Civil Society against the State: Poland 1980-81," Telos, 47 (1981), 23-47.
97. See, in particular, John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988);
98. and John Keane, ed., Democracy and Civil Society (London: Verso, 1988).
99. George Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
100. L. Nowak, Power and Civil Society: Towards a Dynamic Theory of Real Socialism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 57.
101. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), stresses the long-term, eclectic, and popular nature of the movement that swept the Communist systems away in 1989, encompassing environmentalists, feminists, peace campaigners, pop musicians, and even professors of sociology.
102. David Selbourne, Death of the Dark Hero: Eastern Europe, 1987-90 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), p. 236.
103. Konrád, Antipolitics, p. 129.
104. See M. Stephen Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
105. One of the founders of the Russian Christian Democratic Movement, the former priest Vyacheslav Polosin, notes how at the time of the RCDM's founding congress in 1990 he "refused the honour of being the clerical version of Zhirinovsky." "Zamysly i ikh realizatsiya," NG-Religii, Apr. 12, 2000, p. 4. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, was accused of being a KGB stooge in the democratic movement.
106. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), chs. 7 and 8.
107. Capitalism, of course, is still prone to crises, but the immediate prospects of an ideology based on the abolition of private property and the market would appear to be slim. For an excellent debate on the subject, see Alexsandras Shtromas ed., The End of "isms"? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism's Collapse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
108. See, for example, Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution (London: Continuum, 2003).
109. The Observer, May 7, 1995, p. 16.
110. Andrew Gamble, Politics and Fate (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
111. Timothy Garton Ash, "Does Central Europe Exist?," in G. Schopflin and N. Wood, eds., In Search of Central Europe (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 200-1.
112. A point argued, for example, by Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 203.
113. One author who has most systematically tried to deal with this question is Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993);
114. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000); and other works.
115. Koselleck, p. xxiii.
116. See, for example, Bo Petersson, National Self-Images and Regional Identities in Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), esp. pp. 107-12.
117. An argument made by Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, p. 252.