Vol. 13 No. 18 · 26 September 1991
pages 5-8 | 6082 words
Perry Anderson reflects on his experience of the Moscow coup, and of its failure, and considers Gorbachev’s failure and success
‘The people are exulting’ – narod likuyet. The phrase was spoken with impassive distance – perhaps even irony – by a heavily-armed commando in the White House, as we looked down at the first, still rather scattered and tentative outbursts of revelry among the crowds camped in the night below round the Russian Parliament. There was still no hard news of what had happened in the Crimea, but by the evening of 21 August the rumour outside was already of victory. Inside, there was the traditional mêlée associated with a revolution – corridors flowing with confused eddies of soldiers, activists, politicians, journalists, militia, interlopers of every kind; real tank crews rubbing shoulders with stage Cossacks; a balcony priest moving alertly through it all. An Australian could be overheard saying it reminded him of Managua. Hispanic echoes were, as it happened, everywhere in Moscow in those days. Resistance broadsheets read No pasaran; graffiti denounced the khunta; citizens demanded of armoured units if they were prepared to re-enact Chile. Popular celebrations and revolutionary images were in place. But the nature of the overturn in August is only partly suggested by them.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 19 · 10 October 1991
From Nicolas Walter
If we must have long history lessons from Marxist academics about the final collapse of the Marxist empires, they might at least be accurate. Perry Anderson (LRB, 26 September) attributes the ethnic diversity of Eastern Europe to ‘two opposite historical movements – successive waves of nomadic incursions from Asia, and colonial settlements from Germany’. He thus overlooks two other historical movements of equal and indeed continuing importance: the survival of various indigenous peoples in many places, and the expansion of Slav peoples over the whole area.
Nicolas Walter
London N1
Vol. 13 No. 20 · 24 October 1991
From Michael Rustin
Perry Anderson’s difficulties in assessing the ‘enigmatic’ role of Mikhail Gorbachev (LRB, 26 September) perhaps reflect some disappointment that Gorbachev did not after all achieve the modernisation of the Soviet Communist Party and its transformation into a democratic, ‘mobilising’ institution. But his actual achievement has been on a large canvas, much greater than the specific act of introducing competitive elections that Anderson mentions.
Gorbachev’s great achievement was to have introduced some fundamental truthfulness into political debate in the East, and to have insisted on the resolution of problems by means other than force. (It was his public renunciation of armed intervention that precipitated the changes in Eastern Europe.) It is surely amazing that the climate of fear and paranoia that prevailed between East and West for over forty years has been dispelled, largely by Gorbachev’s initiatives. It is virtually without precedent that a monopoly of power on the scale of the Soviet empire’s has been given up almost without the use of force. Nothing is more to the credit of the Communist Parties of most of Eastern Europe and the USSR than the fact that they have ultimately accepted the expressed will of their peoples.
Gorbachev’s continuing commitment to some version of socialism was vital to this peaceful transition since it identified him as at least not an enemy of the old regime, and therefore as someone with whom dialogue remained possible. For all his misjudgments in the economic sphere, he remained remarkably consistent in his dedication to political methods of problem-solving in a society in which politics has had virtually to be reinvented. The modernisation of the political sphere is, whatever some people may now think, as important as the state of the economy. It was the normalisation of these new political forms which seems, fortunately, to have sapped the will of the plotters. Most Western governing classes would be less inhibited, faced with serious threats to their interests, as we need look no further than ruined Kuwait to see.
Michael Rustin
London NW2
