Dealing with Discredited Beliefs

Let us not talk about what happened in 1989—91. The story is well known, and at least in retrospect, it is easily understandable and not at all surprising. Paradoxically, it is a Marxist analysis that is most helpful. The base, that is the means of production, had evolved, changed, and it could no longer support the mode of production, namely the economic and political system. ¹ To put it differently, a centrally controlled economy, which is inevitably tied to a single party-state, could produce a great deal of steel and even tanks and airplanes at a certain historical moment. That very system, however, proved to be hopelessly poor in producing first-rate software. Methods that may have made sense in the 1930s made no sense at the end of the century; no political order, no political principles are forever. Of course, that is not all that there was to it and no simple one-dimensional explanation will do. The economic problems of the Soviet Union in the 1980s simply gave the impetus for some of the more intelligent and intellectually honest leaders to contemplate what was wrong. Much then followed from this questioning, from this undermining of self-confidence in the superiority and strength of the system.

Let us instead discuss a more interesting question: how did people, who in one way or another had a vested interest in the system, respond to a set of changes that ended first the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union itself? Clearly these changes had the force of a political A-bomb. The first issue that emerged almost immediately was "why did not the 'experts' predict what was going to happen"? There are two very good answers. First of all, the collapse of the Soviet Union was not predicted because no great historical discontinuities have ever been predicted. Lenin, a clever man, a close observer of the Russian scene, in possession of that priceless weapon, Marxism, which enables one to map the working of history, famously said in January 1917 that he would not live to see the great revolution. ² Carl Friedrich, the eminent Harvard scholar of politics, wrote in January 1933, that the danger of a Nazi takeover had passed. The future is unpredictable because seemingly small events can have far-reaching consequences. Let us suppose for the moment that it was not Andropov, but Gorbachev who had suffered from kidney disease. Surely, the course of history would have been different in a long-lasting Andropov regime. Gorbachev mattered. There is also another reason. A prediction becomes a historical fact. Had the collapse of the Soviet Union been predictable, the intelligent Gorbachev, committed to some form of state socialism, presumably would have acted differently from the way he did act. The very unpredictability made the collapse possible. This is not to absolve the CIA of responsibility for overestimating the strength of the Soviet Union, and underestimating the actual burden of military expenditures on the Soviet economy. The present can always be evaluated better or worse, more or less precisely, depending on the availability of evidence and the intelligence of the observers. It is only the future that cannot be predicted.

What interests me above all is a psychological question: how do people respond to changes that undermine or should undermine their system of beliefs? I have two groups in mind: 1) the Anglo-American experts, the political scientists and historians, who had been professional Soviet watchers, and 2) people who had lived under a communist system in general and politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and artists in particular. There were people who to a smaller or larger extent accepted the regimes as legitimate. The two groups of course had very different experiences, very different goals and responsibilities, but also had something in common: namely, something happened in the world that compelled them, or should have compelled them, to reexamine old and sometimes cherished beliefs in the light...