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226 Derluguian precedent was, in fact, southern Europe after the end of fascist dictatorships . The crucial difference was that both the Soviet bloc and its prospective capitalist partners in western Europe were deeply enmeshed in Cold War geopolitics centered on post-1945 American hegemony. But in the seventies and early eighties, American control over its allies seemed in decline, giving Moscow, along with Bonn and Paris (and Tokyo, too), the hope of convincing Washington to support their bargain. Instead, the obsession with grand diplomacy proved to be the undoing of the last Soviet leader and his superpower itself. By 1989, Gorbachev obviously dropped the ball in his internal game while desperately hoping for miraculous rescue from the West. At the same time, a drastic reduction in world oil prices after 1985, allegedly engineered by the Americans and Saudis, suddenly reduced the Soviet export earnings to which Moscow had become accustomed in its politics of internal bargaining and taming subsidies. Some of the more farsighted policy experts in Moscow insisted at the time on the centrality of reforming the enormous military-industrial complex, which contained the bulk of the best Soviet assets. Their alternative plan envisioned a dramatic decrease in the state’s orders for armaments, in the hope of inducing the military -industrial enterprises to seek instead civilian consumers among the population who had accumulated a significant mass of personal savings during the previous period of rising wages and chronic consumer shortages .The conversion of swordsmiths into the makers of ploughshares (or for that matter, Teflon pans) required, however, credits and subsidies, a judicious protectionist policy for the duration of such a transition, and not least, effective planning and political will. It also required time, of which Gorbachev had none. He demobilized the state’s repressive apparatus; allowed the disintegration of the state’s fiscal and redistributive capacities; invited the escalating political demands of the intelligentsia counterelite, now capable of mobilizing large public protests; and induced panic among the ruling elite. Mistakes evidently play a big role in history. In effect, perestroika ended in a chaotic bank run on the state which was started by the elites populating the upper tiers in that very state. Here two ideological factors come into play that are commonly praised/blamed for the end of the USSR: nationalism and neoliberalism. But what and who exactly gave force to these ideological abstractions? A more attentive sociological analysis discovers among the contemporary The Post-Soviet Recoil to Periphery 227 market advocates and ethnic separatists essentially the same personages. From the one side were the aspiring intelligentsia politicians who sought to convert their professional skills, mainly in public speech and discursive manipulation, into political and economic capital in the emergent national polities and markets. And from the other side were the former members of the nomenklatura who discovered opportunities to convert their administrative prerogatives and connections into the political and economic capital for which they would owe nothing to their erstwhile superiors in Moscow.These strategies of conversion and personal aggrandizement blatantly violated two fundamental taboos which until 1989 secured the integrity of the Soviet state—the interdiction on private property and the unofficial varieties of nationalism. Both political strategies , however, now enjoyed ideological recognition, sanctioned by the hegemonic opinion of the West. Instead of the expected gradual accommodation with the capitalist world, the opening up of the Soviet bloc to the international flow of ideas provided inspiration and legitimacy to the domestic counterelites. Moscow, whose own ideological vigor had been long exhausted, was powerless to offer any credible alternatives to the ideologies of freedom perceived in terms of markets and national selfdetermination . What gave mass following to these ideological imports in the former socialist countries was, ironically enough, the creatively forgotten legacy of the 1968 New Left, with its pronounced aversion to bureaucrats and coercive centralism. A still greater irony is that privatizations and nationalism provided escape to many Communist officials, who reemerged as private owners of fabulous wealth or rulers of whole newly independent nations. The divergent outcomes of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc clearly demonstrate a geographic gradient. The westernmost former members of the bloc, located in what became called central Europe, could rapidly switch their dependence on Moscow to the capitals of the European Union. Here the socioeconomic consequences might be mixed, with some sectors and groups eventually doing better than under state socialism, and others less so. The now canonical accounts of democratizations in the group of countries which were in...

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