THE RUSSIA THAT EMERGED from the fall of communism in 1991 has always been a bit suspect. The revolution that ended the Soviet Union was exceptionally bloodless and peaceful for a country whose leadership–for the more than a few Sovietologists in this country and at least on president–represented the focus of evil in the modern world. How could the oppressed so easily overthrow such diabolical oppressors? And isn't it odd that the land whose gulag archipelago disappeared tens of thousands has never focused the nation's attention on the crimes of the past as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has? Just what kind of revolution was this?
For Jerry Hough, it was a revolution as thoroughgoing as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and even more sweeping in its political and economic transformations than the French Revolution of 1789. But, he argues in Democratization and Revolution, it was a revolutionfrom within–a top-down revolt that was a battle of elites centered on a titanic struggle between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. More fundamentally, it was a revolution that came about because those in control of the party-state had lost faith in the ruling ideology and found personal enrichment at the state's expense a greater calling. Communists became capitalists in 1991 not because of a conversation, but because capitalism offered a way to legitimize personal gain.
Of course, in making this argument Hough must deal with the dominant perception that it was pressures from below, especially restive nationalities, a newly energized civil society, and the pervasive influence of the media, that caused the Soviet Union's inevitabledisintegration once Gorbachev loosened the totalitarian controls that had prevented these forces from coming to the fore. He does this less by offering individual counterarguments than by noing that the "objective" conditions of strength–a strong army, a government that still totally controlled the economy, however enfeebled–were not in jeopardy. "The problem was not the weakness of the state as such, but the weakness of the state of mind of those running the state." And nowhere was this weakness more apparent than in Gorbachev's aversion to the use of force to control the "tiger" he had unleashed, an aversion that Hough finds difficult to understand and that remains a major unanswered historical question.
The evidence Hough brings forth to bolster his argument composes the bulk of his book; only readers with a strong taste for a political scientist's reconstruction of the past will find an easy go of it. Aatol Lieven makes the argument much more directly and succinctly: "Unike in Eastern Europe of the Baltic states, the processes within Russia that contributed to the destruction of the Communist system and the Soviet Union were predominantly elite-led and dominated." Lieven, like Hough, finds an elite that had jettisoned ideological commitments for the pursuit of of personal gain through clientelism and rent-seeking behavior years before perestrokia and glasnost were unleashed. True, there were protests, but the major events that led to the Soviet dissolution and the rise of the new Russia were not initiated or propelled by mass movements (neither Lieven nor Hough fully grapples with contrary interpretations or evidence, such as David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb).
For Lieven, however, this was a "passive revolution," one in which although "many of the personnel have stayed the same, the basic economic relations in society have been utterly transformed." The old nomenklatura may lay claim to much of Russia's industrial base, but it must share power with a new force of robber barons who have emerged from the "privatization" process.
Lieven offers a penetrating discussion of how this has happened and how Russia functions today–while at the same time providing a riveting account of Moscow's attempt to crush the Chechen secession. He has succeeded in writing an extremely perceptive, provocative, and original work on postcommunist Russia.
William W. Finan, Jr.
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