Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism (review)

Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism. By Paul Hollander. Yale University Press, 1999. 356 pp. Cloth, $35.00.

This book's intended contribution to the literature of the fall of the Soviet Union and, more broadly, state or regime breakdown, is clear. The momentus collapse of the Soviet Union happened primarily because individuals in elite circles began doubting the legitimacy and inevitability of the existing system. Contextual weaknesses in the economic, technological, military, and societal spheres, Hollander argues, certainly played an important, but secondary role. The book excels at presenting evidence for the profound ideological changes of key individuals; it is weaker, however, in its demonstration that such changes caused the demise of the Soviet empire.

Most of the book consists of twenty-two remarkable portraits of various characters and their eroding convictions. Hollander identifies five distinct groups: early defectors and exiles, leading Soviet reformers, high-level functionaries, East European leaders, and members of the political police. Exploring the members of the first group allows us to understand the roots of disillusionment and trace its lengthy evolution up to the late 1980s. Among them we find intellectuals, such as Victor Serge and Jan Sejna, and senior officials, such as Arkady Shevchenko, who early on found Brezhnev and Gromyko, among others, to be "personally, politically, and morally repugnant, hypocritical, corrupt, resistant to new ideas, and completely isolated from ordinary people." Among the reformers we find Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, while Geori Arbatov and Yegor Ligachev appear among the high-level functionaries. We learn about Czech leaders Alexander Dubcek and Zdenek Mlynar in the chapter on East European leaders, and about Pavel Sudoplatov and Vladimir Farkas in the chapter on the political police. All these characters, Hollander masterfully shows us, experienced profound philosophical reversals while in key positions of power.

Hollander analyzes the minds of these important people by courageously departing form the dominant rational choice theory approaches and focusing on what he calls "the human factor." Character traits explain behavior more often than rational calculations. Hence, Yeltsin pushed for more systematic changes than Gorbachev, because "personality clearly played a part"; Yeltsin was, he continues, "a far more rebellious, combative human being and had shown signs of this from an early age." This is a welcome call to focus on the complexity of human beings rather than simply their ability to pursue set preferences.

But such profiles do not, by themselves, convince us that the Soviet Union fell because of the described shifts in the minds of leading individuals. Hollander insists that changes in the minds of leaders "started a chain reaction that spread across the globe, leading to the momentous political changes" in the Soviet Union and beyond, and that "the leader's loss of political, intertwined with their eroding sense of legitimacy, appears to be the crucial factor in the unraveling of the communist system." Yet, he does not truly specify the mechanisms linking such mental changes and practical effects. One notable exception, far too briefly explored, is an unprecedented resistance, on the part of leaders, to use powerful repressive activities in times of crises. Nor does Hollander specify with precision why other variables, such as financial deficits, should in the last analysis hold less explanatory power.

Second, Hollander does not address in a satisfactory manner why individuals changed their minds in the first instance. In his portraits he certainly discusses at length how different characters came to change their minds; yet, he offers plenty of opportunities to supporters of structural and institutional theories to suggest that context is the ultimate independent variable. He spends pages, for instance, describing the impact of weakening technological, military, and other spheres on the minds of leaders. "Whereas in the past," he notes, "the Soviet system could rely on legitimation by technological accomplishments . . . by the 1980s no such achievements were available to bolster the self-confidence...