Nov. 9 marks two decades since the opening of East Germany to the West. Just a few days later, the Berlin Wall fell before euphoric crowds. Today, no one doubts the decisiveness of this moment in the story of communism’s collapse. But just as important as remembering the decisive moments is understanding how they came about, and here there is more than a little doubt and disagreement. The symbolic importance of communism’s downfall has only sharpened the tenor of historical debate. The debate’s byproducts, unfortunately, include some misleading accounts of the causes, and the significance, of the political transformation of the Soviet Union and its European satellites.
One such theory overly emphasizes the role of former President Reagan in facilitating the collapse. This view holds that the events of 1989 to 1991 represent the historic defeat of socialism by capitalism and not just any capitalism, but Milton Friedman-style libertarianism, the capitalism of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The story goes something like this: The Soviet Union was foredoomed, long before any mention of perestroika, by the structural defects of its economy. In the contest between Soviet socialism and American capitalism, the Soviet Union just could not compete. And once Reagan, keenly assessing this fatal weakness, converted U.S. economic advantage into military superiority, the pressure on Soviet leaders to step down the path of reform (leading straight to capitalism) became irresistible. Enter Mikhail Gorbachev, exit socialism. The acts of dissidence and resistance, the democratic movements and parties that emerged as communism crumbled, were all premised on the conscious acceptance of America’s winning formula: open markets plus liberal democracy.
Proclaiming the historic triumph of capitalism, 1989 makes for an inspiring myth. But it’s just a myth. On closer inspection, the account is fraught with contradictions. Admitting of no nuance or contingency and dismissive of facts that don’t neatly fit its teleological schema, the Reaganite myth misrepresents history.
Consider the role played by Reagan in bringing about the transformations of the pre-collapse era. Of course, Reagan’s novel geopolitical strategies were of decisive importance. But if anything, their effect was to harden the Soviet Union’s resolve. Reagan’s reversal of detente, for instance, almost certainly contributed to the general crackdown on anti-communist dissidence during the early ’80s. And Reagan had no master plan to force the emergence of a reformist Soviet leader. On the contrary, he was elected on a platform of aggressive containment, based on the belief that Soviet communism was a monolithic system that could be neither reformed nor pacified. Only after Gorbachev’s rise was Reagan converted to more conciliatory policies.
In general, the Reaganite narrative focuses almost exclusively on the interaction of the two superpowers, neglecting a multiplicity of internal and international forces. The open discussion of democratization under Gorbachev could not have taken place without the Soviet dissident movement the decade before. And the dissidents would not have survived without the cover of international human rights law, guaranteed for the first time by the Helsinki Accords which Reagan vocally opposed on the grounds that they legitimized Soviet control of Eastern Europe.
Contrary to myth, the dissident cause was not capitalism but human rights. It comes as no surprise that the Reaganite narrative neglects the central role of independent trade unions in organizing and protecting workers from state repression. Everyone has heard of “Solidarity,” but many scholars postulate that trade unions played a far larger role in 1989, and indeed the whole history of anti-communist resistance, than is generally acknowledged. In Czechoslovakia, too, reformists demanded the right of workers to organize freely. The unions and factory councils that organized spontaneously during the Prague Spring of 1968 proved among the most determined centers of resistance to Soviet-backed “normalization.”
I could cite more examples, but the point is the Reaganite narrative is flawed not just in its details, but in its central contention, that “socialism” died with the Soviet Union. The free market rhetoric of the new post-communist governments might seem to support this world-historical judgment. In hindsight, though, it was mostly just rhetoric, revealing more about the depth of loathing of the Soviet system than about capitalism’s beatitudes. The hope that post-communist states would become “little Americas,” free market oases in a desert of European social democracy, was always a false one.
The death of socialism, besides, is a trumpet that has been sounded many times before. In 1848, in the aftermath of an earlier revolutionary wave, the death of socialism was being proclaimed. If there is one sure lesson of 1989, it’s not that socialism is dead or that capitalism has triumphed; it’s that history is ill-suited to mythologizing. We can do better than the Reaganite narrative in understanding just what really happened in 1989.
Brendan McElroy is a sophomore in the College.
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