A Negentropic Society?: Wartime and Postwar Soviet History

In April 1975, in one of his first public statements after being blacklisted in the aftermath of the Soviet-led invasion, Vaclav Havel wrote a lengthy open letter to Gustav Husák, the general secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party. In "Dear Dr. Husák," as the letter became known, Havel broached several themes that would characterize his later writings: the alleged moral and spiritual crisis that beset Czechoslovakia after 1968; the role of culture as a means of individual and societal self-awareness; the dangers of "consumer bliss"; and the question, why so many Czechoslovakians acquiesced to the formation of an "impressive image of a totally united society." Yet "Dear Dr. Husák" is atypical among Havel's early writings for its premonitory character or, depending on one's vantage point, its wishful thinking. Whereas Havel famously prescribed in "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) how Czechoslovakians might act to end communist rule by "living in truth," he argued in "Dear Dr. Husák" that the system was doomed by its internal logic. "The entire political practice of the present regime," Havel wrote, "... confirms that those concepts which were always crucial for its program—order, calm, consolidation, 'guiding the nation out of its crisis,' 'halting disruption,' 'assuaging hot tempers' and so on—have finally acquired the same lethal meaning that they have for every regime committed to entropy... . True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?"¹

In Havel's view, the rhetorical power of a "regime committed to entropy" lay in an implied teleology that gave critics of Czechoslovakian socialism cause for hope.² A function of the second law of thermodynamics, entropy describes the universal propensity of matter to decay. It presupposes movement from a higher to a lower order or from differentiation to randomness. Although Havel did not elaborate on the other entropic regimes whose demise he invoked as a warning for Husák, his belief in the latent, inexorable decay of Czechoslovakian socialism anticipated a common mode of thinking about Soviet history in its final, postwar decades. This mode of thinking is characterized by the assumption that behind its seemingly immutable façade, Soviet rule was mortally compromised by flaws inherent to it. Martin Malia was a case in point when he asserted that the causes of the Soviet collapse stretched back to the moment Stalin's heirs naively undertook the impossible task of fissioning Soviet socialism from Stalinism. In Malia's formulation, the latter was the "peak towards which Soviet history had been building since October"; everything that followed was on the downward slope.³ Perceptions of decay can also be found in a growing number of studies that emphasize the limits or failures of reform in the...