Soviet disunion

Why did the Communist regime collapse in the Soviet Union? Why has it survived in China? The answers might surprise you. Explanations for the sudden end of the USSR after seven decades, and the simultaneous dissolution of the country after centuries, are numerous. They are also lacking. 

Many observers credit the advent of the first Polish pope, John Paul II, in 1978. His moral authority gave the Polish authorities fits, and helped inspire the formation of Solidarity, a societal-wide opposition group, in 1980. Starting in late 1981, however, the Polish regime declared martial law and drove Solidarity underground, where it remained until Gorbachev opened space for it to return. Nationalism is the favored explanation among academics, but little possibility for nationalist mobilization existed until Gorbachev permitted it in a desperate quest for social support of his reform program known as perestroika. Boris Yeltsin, the Russian nationalist, was an obscure provincial apparatchik until Gorbachev had him transferred to Moscow and empowered him and comparable figures in the fifteen republics by introducing competitive elections.

Nor can Soviet dissidents explain what transpired. Not numerous, they were mostly in prison, exile, or house arrest, as Lyudmila Alexeyeva, courageous cofounder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, lamented in her first-rate history Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights. It was Gorbachev who released  Andrei Sakharov, enabling him and others to participate in public life. Economic collapse, too, did not precede but followed reforms. The global oil price plunge in 1985 unsettled long-standing macroeconomic stability, but the Soviet economy formally descended into recession only in 1990, as Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich showed in The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insider's History.

Afghanistan constitutes another deceptive explanation. Whereas America deployed 550,000 troops at peak to Vietnam, the USSR never massed more than about 120,000 in a country almost four times South Vietnam’s size. Afghanistan’s decade-long budgetary cost amounted to a single year of subsidies for Soviet agriculture. Fewer soldiers died in the Afghan campaign than at home in suicides and hazing incidents. Public revelations of the campaign’s failures took place only thanks to Gorbachev’s glasnost. The Soviet military-industrial complex is blamed for placing a crushing burden on the country, but the civilian sector was far more wasteful, and a significant portion of production in the military complex consisted of consumer goods. Finally, some cite the peace-through-strength buildup of President Ronald Reagan between 1981 and 1988. Reagan made a deep impression in Moscow, especially after he demonstrated the resolve to fire illegally striking civilian air traffic controllers in 1981, but he also negotiated arms control agreements that helped ease any arms-race pressure on Moscow.

If the pope, nationalism, dissidents, economic collapse, Afghanistan, the military-industrial complex, or Reagan were not decisive, what was? The Soviet Union, paradoxically, was destroyed by the one thing that almost everyone thought was itself dead: Communist ideology. Political reform constituted a choice, not a necessity. True, whether in terms of living standards and technology or freedom and attractiveness, the Soviet Union had lost the competition with the United States. But Soviet leaders could have muddled on, as they had been doing, living off the revenues from Siberian oil and gas (as Russia is still doing half a century later). Instead, Communist leaders chose to reenergize their system, animated by a particular, and fatal, vision.

A quest for a more humane ‘socialism with a human face’ kept arising from deep within the system, and each time it unintentionally shook the system to its core – Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Gorbachev in the 1980s. Relaxing censorship, permitting debate, and holding competitive elections inside the party again and again galvanized more than a few people to use the opening to demand the formation of alternative parties. Communists have never found a way to limit political liberalization to the confines of the party’s monopoly.

The discovery that Communism had no political reform equilibrium induced panic and calls for a crackdown against the party’s own initiative. The Soviets dispatched tanks to crush the Communist political liberalizations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But if no crackdown ensues, the monopoly unravels all the way. The Soviet crackdown against its own reforms famously failed in 1991. One key reason was that Lenin had compelled a reluctant Stalin to implement a federal state structure, a Union of republics, rather than a unitary state, and once Gorbachev unwittingly set in motion the system’s suicide, elites discovered they did not have to pull out all the stops to save themselves. They could remain in power in the ethno-territorial republics – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and so on.

Another key reason was that in the bargain, elites got to transform their de facto control over state assets into de jure private ownership of them, a further powerful incentive to go along with the unexpected collapse. As for China, observers rightly note that its Communist party has proven far more adaptable and skilled at incentivizing local officials’ performance, more strategically attuned to the modern world’s new dimensions of power, and more dexterous in manipulating American governments and private business than Moscow ever was. But fundamentally, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has survived because it absorbed the profound history lesson taught by Soviet political liberalization: no Gorbachev!

The CCP, too, had produced influential voices calling for party liberalization. It even briefly toyed with competitive elections at very local levels. But it quickly purged potential reformers and shelved the limited experiment as an existential threat. Communist regimes can liberalize economically and survive, provided they do not pursue simultaneous political reform, as the Soviet Union did in the 1920s, Deng Xiaoping did in the 1980s, and Xi Jinping understands well. 

But here, too, the CCP diverges. Its bosses have been able to transform many state-owned assets into their private property under Communist rule, making them stakeholders in the system’s preservation. (Ironically, Xi’s perpetual purges undermine those loyalties.) Economic liberalization in China has limits – it cannot threaten the party’s rule – but it has gone further than in the Soviet Union, with positive implications for regime preservation. No less important, Mao refused to allow China’s ethnic minorities to have Soviet-style republics. China’s Communist elites, therefore, have no emergency-escape landings if the party loses its monopoly, a further reason not to risk the system’s destabilization. Although the Soviet collapse helped enable China’s noncollapse, the fateful flaw of a Leninist system remains: it must stay a monopoly to survive, but the party’s rule is profoundly out of sync with the dynamism and aspirations in Chinese society. This will ensure continued jeopardy.

Here’s a concluding thought experiment. If a Communist reformer were to come to power in Beijing in response to pent up frustrations, and as a result Communism were to lose its grip via political liberalization, and if the system were to be succeeded by something approaching a consent-of-the-governed polity rather than a rightwing dictatorship, as in Russia, then the West should look out. Communist rule is a drag on the rest of society. It is the party’s prioritization of the survival of its monopoly at all costs that helps make America’s competition with China more manageable.