The City University of New York

From Revolution to Krizis: The Transcending Revolutions of 1989-91 Author(s): Richard Sakwa Reviewed work(s): Source: Comparative Politics, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Jul., 2006), pp. 459-478 Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20434012 . Accessed: 06/12/2011 14:38
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York and The City University of New York are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Politics.

http://www.jstor.org

From Revolution ToKrizis

The Transcending Revolutions of 1989-91

Richard Sakwa

"Wars and revolutions...have century."' So Hannah Arendt determining, between Russia historical

thus far determined

the physiognomy of the twentieth begins her study of revolutions. Wars continue to be has changed, case wrote: as has the relationship of 1989-91 of power in in that the exemplary is the revolution

but the nature of revolutions

war and revolution. An cycle inaugurated

and eastern Europe. Vladimir

Tismaneanu

"it is now obvious seizure

by World War

I, the Bolshevik

Russia inOctober 1917 and the long European ideologicalwarfare that followed
nature of the "revolutions" "refolution" to indicate ha[s] come to an end."2 There has been a long, if unilluminating, discussion of these years. Timothy Garton Ash coined the combination of reformist political over the the term

style and the pro

foundly revolutionaryconsequences of the events.3 JiirgenHabermas dubbed the an process "the rectifying revolution," attempt to overcome the distortionsof "actu
ally existing socialism" while recognizing that the logic of capitalist accumulation described the way battered down the "Chinese walls" (as the Communist Manifesto that cheap commodities forced all nations to adopt the capitalist mode of production) of postcapitalist as well precapitalist societies.4 Leslie Holmes characterized them as "rejective" revolutions, and in the case of eastern Europe they are doubly rejective, repudiating not only Communism but also the Soviet domination with which itwas

associated.5
Communism, of the fall of will discuss some aspects of the "epochality" in particular, the repudiation at the social level of revolution as an is defined as the eschatology of endowing parochial emancipatory act. Epochality events with universal significance. The emergence during the eighteenth century of a discourse of progressive social change based on a universal model of rationality and This article development This ideology all) was applicable to all societies was clearly an event of epochal significance. thinkers (but certainly far from in the hands of some Enlightenment a revolutionary approach political to social change, that the act of effect. For want of a better above all by Karl

combined with

rupture itself had a liberating and progressive idea of political Marx, revolution was combined with

term, it can be called Enlightenment revolutionism. In the nineteenth century this

a social agenda, based on the idea that through an act of political rupture society could achieve

459

Comparative

Politics

July 2006

its emancipationnot only from oppression but also from subordinationto contin
gency in the very broadest in Russia sense. This ideology can be called emancipatory war developed revolu tionism, and itwas implement revolutionism 1989-91, but also the project that in one way or another Lenin and Stalin sought to and that after popular the second world resonance Communism in eastern

Europe. By the end of the twentiethcentury,however, the notion of emancipatory

lost whatever one tries that claimed when to be building eastern it once might have had in the coun on its basis. Thus, the events of after another shook off the

European

country

Communist incubus,representedthe overthrownot only of a specific power system

of emancipatory revolution on the repudiation of the social philosophy It was this repudiation, as much as the geopolitical rearrange ment of the international order, that rendered these events epochal. which it was based.

Three Circles of Revolution

Epochal thinking since the ancient world is characterized by a sense of the unfolding era it became allied to a progressive understanding of revolution was the first large-scale attempt to implement theory, the first attempt to build a society based on the rejec

of time, but in the modern social change. The Russian Marxist revolutionary

tion of western modernity while trying to fulfill it.This utopian project displaced
political discourse from pragmatic reason towards a political practice that generated closure and exclusivity.6 The pursuit of transcendent and universal (epochal) goals

Even when Soviet leaders underminedhuman specificity and nationalparticularism.

were most "national" in practice, the tension between universalism and particularism did not disappear. The pursuit of emancipatory revolutionism provoked a permanent crisis of the regime. In The End of the Communist Revolution, R. V Daniels details this process in a chapter entitled "The Long Agony of the Russian Revolution."7 Neil Harding also talks in terms of "the Marxist-Leninist detour."8 In the end, Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) between 1985 and 1991 and initiator at that time of what he called perestroika (restructuring), attempted to put an end to revolutionism while retaining the emanci patory core of Marxism, but this combination can be classified (which harked back as an experiment, to the Prague and the various

Springof 1968) ultimately failed.

The Communist ure.9 The permanent revolution "detours" and "agonies" associated with it suggested that the experiment was a fail

crisis of the regimes and their ultimate dissolution certainly betoken failure, but the roots of the collapse lie not only in specific inadequacies of performance and adaptivity to changing global circumstances, but also in a deeper revolutionism and the contradiction arising from the combination of Enlightenment it is necessary emancipatory agenda. To understand precisely what ended in 1989-91

460

RichardSakwa to disaggregate threeconceptionsof revolution,each of which representsa theoryof

politics and a concept of the epoch. Only by understanding the nature of emancipato ry revolutionism as a political practice can one begin to comprehend the reason for

its failure.
Naturalistic ineluctable: this vision Copernicus larmovement Medieval messianism's vision of the future was clear and Cyclicity the final judgment and the end of the world. In the seventeenth century as circularity, gave way to a general concept of revolution just as in his De revolutionibus orbium caelestium in 1543 had noted the circu of the planets and the stars. Astronomy, and its social manifestation in

the form of astrology, introduced the transhistorical concept of revolution into the popular mind, as an infinite turn of the wheel of fate in individual lives and the rise and fall of constitutions in public life.10 Revolution would give way to restoration, as Clarendon Charles noted in the case of the reestablishment cyclicity II in 1660. Naturalistic of the monarchy as a form of revolution in the person of (the turn of the

wheel) is passive, reactive, and contingent. The next two types of revolution sought to transcend precisely the tyranny of the past, inherited authority, and ascriptive

identities. Enlightenment Revolutionism Modernity is associatedwith a certain uniform

quality of time that develops towards an unknown but usually improved version of the future. The naturalistic cycles of the rise and fall of empires, states, and constitu tions gave way to a new concept of revolution as an instrument of progressive social change. The concept thus gained a new meaning. As Koselleck notes: "The concept of 'revolution' is itself a linguistic summarizes the shift as follows.
Enlightenment vision was unknown ment. fulfilment, of the French These rationalism transformed and unknowable utopias laying the basis

product of modernity."Il

Koselleck's

translator

raised the prospect

of unending utopia was was

progress

and human

improvement, in the political

and this program toward an fulfil

into a future, realizable future, but within embodied

through

its articulation

and, later, European and the hopes

revolutions...society which

now perceived potential

as accelerating guarantees

contained

a hope of the desired into civil war.12

utopian

in them in turn became of modern conflict

of their own

for the transformation

The logic of revolution

as civil war was precisely

the one repudiated by Gorbachev

during perestroika, and he thereby repudiated the modern notion of revolution itself. He did not, however, repudiate the notion of a humane and democratic socialism; it was revolutionary socialism based on civil war that he sought to transcend. The pas sage of time retained a progressive element, and thus he sought to prevent a return to

the contingencyof naturalisticcyclicity. The French revolution is the first trulygreatmodern revolution.13 What made it
great was the appearance of Enlightenment revolutionism.14 Its exemplary exponent

461

Comparative

Politics

July 2006 "by appeal to reason and faculties; that the per from

was

theMarquis

de Condorcet.15 He sought to demonstrate is truly indefinite;

fact that nature has set no term to the perfection fectability of man now onwards all historical was

of human

and that the progress of this perfectability,

independent of any power that might wish civilizations and the standardization

to halt it, has no other limit according to the pat

Condorcet's project called for "the destructionof than the durationof the globe."16
of mankind tern of the Paris intellectual."17 As he put it in Progress than the acid corroding revolutions whose be subordinated order. 19 There was still some way metaphor macy sistible for the cyclical to go before the traditional concept of a revolution to the idea of revolution but amajor as a "ups and downs of human destiny," without law and legiti as an irre all obstacles to modernization, of the Human Spirit, custom was

to be replaced by reason, and the task of the intellectual was

to act as no more

to which modernity

can reduced.ForCondorcet,moreover: "Theword 'revolutionary' be applied only to

aim is freedom."18 Although to the attempt violence was not eschewed, itwould to sweep away the old and to create a new world

but based on character and fate, gave way instrument of human reason and progress,

step had been taken. 20 view that philosophi

modern history and, perhapsmore importantly, The French revolution inaugurated

the modem concept of history, above all formulated by Hegel's cal absolutes were now revealed in the realm of human affairs. It is odd in this con

text that Kojeve should have taken Hegel's arguments to suggest the end of history; it the view that history is both knowable and was, in fact, the beginning. Historicism, controllable, was born.21 While repudiating the historicism implicit inMarxian revo lutionary socialism, Francis Fukuyama only succumbs to the more profound histori

cism embedded inEnlightenmentnotions of progress andhuman development.22 Emancipatory Revolutionism

that provoked the permanent of Marxian ry revolutionism If Enlightenment lowers it became epiphenomenon The whole more

Enlightenment revolutionhad provided the charge

the emancipato social content. and his fol than an that provided itwith specific

civil war of utopian change, but itwas socialism

revolution was highly political, "socialized," with "the political" of social processes

in the hands of Marx itself becoming

little more

act itself.23 and the logic of the emancipatory superstructure of law, individual freedom, and the state was reduced to no revolution and emanci in part from the coincidence the political of the Enlightenment

than an exploitative mode of production.24 The power of the Russian inwhich and the social were to differentiate

in 1917 was derived patory revolutions

fused. It proved difficult between what was politi

throughout the rest of the Soviet experience cal and what was social. Marxian revolutionary revolutionism, but deepened

socialism was a variety of a broader species, Enlightenment to encompass all aspects of the social. Revolutionary

462

RichardSakwa socialist ideologydrew liberallyfrom theEnlightenment of perspective progress,decul

turation, and denationalization but added to it an emancipatory agenda that sought to liberate the individual from the tyranny of time itself.25 Both Raymond Aron and Robert C. Tucker note the way thatMarxism sought to provide a secular and materialist idiom

for traditional millenarian aspirations.26 History transcendsthe naturalisticcycle of

hubris and nemesis and moves towards its denouement in a moment of transformation. As John Gray puts it: "Marxian communism is a secular version of Christian eschatol

ogy, inwhich the promise of universal salvation is translated into a programme of uni versal human emancipation."27 Lenin added a distinctive political style thatArfon Rees

The has called "revolutionary Machiavellism."28 paradoxof Leninismwas ultimately

that it failed to sustain the emancipatory elements of Marxism while ruthlessly imple

and menting thepolitical aspectsof Enlightenmentrevolutionism the social aspectsof revolutionism. emancipatory
The destructive storm launched by Lenin after October 1917 failed even to reach the level of "the Paris intellectual" but was patterned after the standards of a deraci

with a severebehaviorialdisorder.29 nated "Russian"intellectual Walicki has recent

ly demonstrated vision, how close the Bolshevik revolution remained recognizably to the basic Marxist and firmly within and Bolshevism also above all the destruction tradition, stressing of commodity in particular production and all that it entailed.30

Similarly, Erik van Ree argues that Stalin remained the Marxist were stresses it would "important branches" the Enlightenment be mistaken of the Enlightenment

that both Jacobinism

tradition.31 David Hoffman

rational and harmonious

features of Stalinism, notably the attempt to achieve a social order.32 Of course, Daniels is quite right to argue that of the revolution.. .to the wrong

to attribute "all the misery

headed ideas of revolutionaries whose thinking supposedly traces back to the

Enlightenment Revolutions intervention in the affairs of society."33 complex than that, reflecting complex patterns of his torical development and attempts to overcome specific social and political crises and at the same time evolve in response to changing circumstances. and the hubris of rational are indeed more

Because of its ideological roots,Koselleck considered the revolution,defined as

"civil war," as "endemic, ered endless ing" socialist endemic rise of emancipatory for the simple revolutions, self-generating and, in principle, endless."34 Itwas consid reason that the social contradictions that provoked the had not only not been resolved the dissolution had been of Communist in the "actually exist of power in the Soviet but in principle could not be resolved. This condition

socialism

civil war ended with

Union, not because social developments cycles were

the solution

and found, but because technological (above all in the sphere of information and communications) during perestroika. The putative restoration of naturalistic

rendered emancipatory revolutionism structurallyobsolete. These twomodernist

transcended

cyclicity, however,provokedproblemsof its own. 463

ComparativePolitics

July2006

The Transcendence of Revolutionism Enlightenment revolutionism and its emancipatory socialist offspring appeared to have exhausted themselves intellectually even before they expired as a political
movement. From Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre to Max Weber, Eduard

Bernstein,Karl Popper,andmany others, theEnlightenmentnotion of revolutionand its emancipatoryversionwere accompaniedby a sophisticatedand explicitly antirev olutionary ideology.Bernstein's revisionism repudiatedapocalypticconceptions that capitalismwould collapse because of its inherenteconomic contradictions,while
reasserting the centrality of democracy in the socialist project and the unity of ends criticized the limitations of the "intellectual strategy of modernization of bureaucratic pater and means, which meant tools" of Marxism, determinations giving up on the idea of a "final goal."35 In The Protestant the political

Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber

and above all condemned

it advanced.36Inmethodological terms, Weber rejected theMarxist hierarchy of

in history, and his analysis of the development

nalism, "a social order inwhich maximum regulation, instrumental reason and impersonality had triumphed the expense of individualresponsibility,"led him to at
believe mode that socialism "was poised to intensify inWeber's this system view, rather than to abolish revolutionism as a archaic and it."37 Rather than representing the cutting discourse, edge of modernity,

of action and political

itself became

representedthegreatestobstacle to social self-regeneration.

critiques of the ideology of emancipatory revolutionism had devel of the Vekhi even before the revolution. The epochal significance 1909 was that for the first time in such a formal (Landmarks) collection of essays of manner a group of the Russian intelligentsia, many of whom had been sympathetic Fundamental oped in Russia to socialist aspirations, repudiated both the concept political and the content of revolution.38 A century of Russian thinking was dramatically reversed, but only for a small group.39 For most socialists, as F. Stepun put it, the revolution was idealized "as a kind of dazzling archangel, whose sudden appearance had brought happiness to in a later book, Iz glubiny thirst for revolution.41 at the height values against (De Profundis-From the Depths) of 1918, of the the for the revolu

Russia."40 The critiqueof revolutionary philosophy and thephilosophy of revolution

was developed in which Rubble), tionism.42 drank deeply at the fountain of critiques of revolution practices.43 Perhaps most surprising is not that they came to repu diate revolutionary practices, but that it took them so long. The politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, the intellectual force behind Gorbachev's reforms, has outlined The avatars of perestroika ism and its moral intelligentsia's reassertion some of the same authors published of moral reflected on the terrible consequences Brezhnev's stagnation, called

In that tradition Iz pod glyb the incompetent cynicism

(From under

of Leonid

of a decayed

464

RichardSakwa
his views sion of in numerous works the two hundredth that together represent perhaps the most sustained and

In intelligentcritiqueofMarxist-Bolshevik revolutionism.44 his addresson the occa

1989,Yakovlev of the French Revolution in July anniversary not only argued that the USSR should adopt the separation of powers judiciary, but he also condemned the Bolsheviks' romanticiza

and an independent insisted

tionof revolutionary violence as opening thedoor to Stalin's terror.45 Throughout,he

that above all perestroika had been a "revolution of conscience."46 Many and other leaders of the period noted the gulf between their public pronouncements their inner beliefs. A deep gulf had opened up between the system's core and operat

ing ideologies.
Gorbachev political was one of the first to realize that the choice was indeed between and thus instru

most profound sense of political philosophy,ethics, and reformand revolution,in the

practice. He sought to overcome sought to "remoralize" the gulf between ends and means

was integrative. to overcome the double consciousness.Gorbachev's antirevolution

Gorbachev Gorbachev politics, and thus he repudiated Lenin's

mental class-centered view of morality and Stalin's organicist view of society.

in its Kantian ver sought to return to the agenda of the Enlightenment sion, to strip the revolution of some of its social content to allow the language of

individualrights to be relegitimatedinSoviet discourse.He tried to purge emancipa of while drawingon theuniversalprogressivismof tory revolutionism its distortions was cleansing, to remove the Enlightenment revolutionism. Gorbachev's revolution
deformations agenda, and accretions of the operating ideology to allow a return to the core

with his integrative ideas.However, the cleansing process came into contradiction
since integration in the event turned out to be something much larger than simply a return to core principles. His attempt to put an end to the permanent civil war inherent in emancipatory revolutionism transcended the language of class poli tics but failed to find an adequate revalidated nation or people, or indeed individual social subject, on which to base his integrative postrevolutionary politics. Itwas his as a political order was accompanied by tragedy that the dissolution of Communism the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a state. This coincidence was in part an out come of a long-term economic crisis, but itwas farmore than this.47 Gorbachev questioned "Marx's formula that revolutions are the locomotives of history" and proclaimed that "I renounce revolution as a means of solving prob lems."48 In its place he adopted a policy of evolutionary reform, although couched in in the rhetoric of revolutionism. He insisted, for exam the early days of perestroika is a revolution."49 By the time of the twenty was describing itself as "the party of party congress in 1990 the CPSU

ple, in his 1987 book that "perestroika eighth

national consensus."50 Although still defending the "socialist choice," the concept of
as civil war had been decisively repudiated. Unlike his Czech colleague and long-time friend, Zdenek Mlynar, who after the crushing of the Prague Spring understood that it would be impossible to devise a democratic variant of Leninism, revolution

465

Comparative

Politics

July 2006

Gorbachev Leninism.5' socialist

remained Gorbachev

loyal

to within-system

envisaged perestroika trying to remain

reform and the modernization of as the repudiation of the logic of the true to the spirit of democratic was committed social to dismantling revolution the outside

revolution while

ism.52 By the summer of 1988 at the latest Gorbachev small group of supporters ary changes-both in the Soviet

the Communist system.53 Gorbachev's translatorputs it, "Gorbachev and his As

leadership had set out to achieve with in the country itself and in its relationship

world-by using evolutionary methods."54 Gorbachev's adviser, Anatolii Chernyaev,

however, goes too far when he argues: All epochal changes in the history of humanity are prefigured by powerful ideological currents, mass movements, influentialorganizationsor political parties....Nothing like thiswas at Gorbachev's dis posal. He alone did it.And he alone decided on it, placing himself at great risk, putting in doubt the successful political andmaterial prospects thatawaitedhim.55 The revolution as an ideology and set of political practices had been thoroughly refuted long before, but it lived on in a social order that oscillated between conser vatism and reform, both elements of which only confirmed the crisis in which it found itself. 56Gorbachev's and he had the moral ever, in a manner of the depth of this crisis, to act on this knowledge. He did so, how courage that caused maximum confusion because of his continued adher genius and political lay in the recognition

ence to Enlightenment revolutionism and neo-Leninist principles and his cleansing strategy, which came ever more into contradiction with the real transcendence of these ideas that had taken place among large sections of society, above all the intelli gentsia.57 Only sections of the bureaucracy remained loyal to a residual Leninism, and thus objective pressures drove Gorbachev into alliance with parts of the nomen klatura elite at the very time that he was repudiating the principles on which the rul hensible ing status of that elite was based. Out of this situation emerged confusion of the winter of discontent of 1990-9 1. the almost incompre

The Antirevolutions as Transcending Revolutions

From this argument theoretical it can be suggested that the end of the Communist era entailed a

shift affecting not only former Communist countries but also the wider world.58 It represented a turning point no less profound than 1789 or 1917. The sig nificance of the new epoch and the role of eastern Europe in establishing it has, however, Habermas last book been denigrated by almost every major commentator argued that not a single theoretical innovation came stressed the untheoretical on the issue. out of eastern

Europe.59 Claus Offe

the historian of the French revolution,

nature of these revolutions.60 In his Francois Furet, asserted that "noth

466

RichardSakwa
ing else of is visible in the ruins of the communist societies other than the familiar of or the of

These commentators miss the largersignificance repertoire liberaldemocracy."61 of

the onset Communism familiar brought The final phase of the transcendence of postcommunism. into play a rich tradition that was anything but untheoretical logic of the "antirevolution" of politics have been has launched an era in which away. The transcendence swept

bereft of ideas. The landmarks opened Communism

that is anything but derivative up the era of postcommunism and retrograde. The new period ismarked by a return to naturalistic cyclicity, but it opens the door to a fourth phase in our understanding of historical time.

The transcending revolutions were part of the logic of what may at the end of the whole period of modern development. Alain Touraine has argued (echoing Condorcet) that "the idea of revolution is at the Antirevolutions be called antirevolutions

of heartof the Western representation modernization,"based on the affirmation that

"modernity had to be produced solely by the force of reason, and that nothing should

which would destroy all social and cultural traditions, resist thatuniversal inspiration This rationalcapitalistic andwestern-cen all beliefs, privileges and communities."62
tered view of modernization envisage an alternative, even became dominant, and even today it is difficult to less with the failure of the Communist and most

modernizationprocesses. nationalisticallyinspired In the past thosewho opposed revolutions were called counterrevolutionaries, a
term coined by Condorcet within and applied by the Bolsheviks to define their opponents in

The revolutionwas everything, and everythingwas conducted their own terms.63

its frame of reference. The concept of revolution, in the French and Russian revolutions, was one of the main forms in which the tyranny was sustained. The events of 1989-91, however, moved beyond the discourse of revolutionary thinking that kept the people in thrall and precisely in this sought freedom. To borrow Joseph de Maistre's distinction, the rejection of revolutionary socialism was not "a contrary

narrowlydefined), but "thecontraryof revolution" revolution"(a counterrevolution,

(opposed to the revolutionary process in its entirety).64 The former found few takers while the latter triumphed. Arendt was quite wrong to comment that de Maistre's statement "has remained what itwas when he pronounced it in 1796, an empty witti cism."65 In fact, that so-called empty witticism contains one of the most profound insights of our times. Opponents of the transcending revolutions were not labeled

counterrevolutionaries because that would have legitimatedtheiropposition and con

ceded precisely the intellectual terrain that the antirevolutionists sought to free. It would have meant adopting the language of the system that they sought to transcend. lexicon of revolutions also made obvious The avoidance of the traditional militarized tactical sense, since if it came to shooting, The exhaustion of revolutionary very few defenders the regimes were clearly at an advantage. was apparent in the fact that to talk in terms of defending discourse, moreover,

of the old regime had the courage

467

Comparative

Politics

July 2006

the gains of the revolution. The order on which Horvath and Szakolczai even before dissolution

revolutionary

socialism was based, as of internal

point out, had already undergone

a long process

the events of 1989-91.66 The Soviet regime sapped the via bility of its own ideology by suppressing all sources of internal renewal.67

The revolutionsof 1989-91 generatedamiserablyweak countermovementfor the obvious reason that the historical conjuncture that the original socialist revolutions The concept of an emancipatoryrevolutionhad reflectedhad long since disappeared.
itself become an irrelevance, and in the absence of a new universal transformatory

ideology thewhole concept of revolutionfell intodesuetude.The Japaneseoption of without revolutionappears to have triumphed.68 transformation
Features of the Transcending Revolutions There was regimes, a profound but also logic not only in

in the mere coming

fact of the fall of the Communist

in the manner

were transcending, only over not which theywere disposed of.69These revolutions
the Communist systems of power, but also repudiating based.70 The argument human destiny would the political practices that the and logic on which naturalistic cyclicity, they were where so far has suggested

would leadback to of transcendence Enlightenmentand emancipatoryrevolutionism

be contingent and once again transcending antirevolution would transcend transcendence itself. This argument would suggest a historical dead end. However, in the antirevolutions of 1989-91 does not neces the transcendence of Communism sarily mean two steps backwards to naturalistic cyclicity, but perhaps has opened the way to a fourth circle whose outline is as yet indistinct but which draws on the prac devoid of transcendent purpose. The

ticesof the transcending revolutionsthemselves.

On the theoretical level, Adam Michnik detailed the strategy whereby the insur regime not only made redundant the classical antino gency against the Communist my between revolution and reform but also rejected classical revolutionary strate of 1976, Michnik concluded that gies. In his seminal article "A New Evolutionism" the systems were unreformable and thus proposed a third strategy in which civil society itself, rather than the state, became both the subject and the object of the changes.71 Much of the writing on the fall of the Soviet system incorporates ele that the thinking. More broadly, Jeffrey Isaac has suggested ments of Michnik's issues raised by 1989 are far more profound than usually suggested.72 philosophical He argues that the essays of Vaclav Havel, for example, "reveal serious reflections on the banality of mass society and the ill effects of technology and instrumental ratio nality on modern life," while publicistic works contained "numerous arguments about the ethical and strategic prospects of different forms of resistance, the nature of democratic citizenship, and the importance of civil society."73 Isaac concludes by insisting that "the most dramatic development of contemporary history has been the recent defeat of the Jacobin revolutionary model that has been heralded by the revo lutions of 1989." 74Barbara Falk took up the challenge to assess the contribution of

468

Richard Sakwa
East European modes dissident thinking, and she concurs with Isaac in dismissing the view

that theyhad nothing new to offer intellectually. The rejectionof Jacobin-Bolshevik

of thinking, the assertion of a civic and nonviolent mode of political change, and the "resubjectification" of civil society as a political actor on a global scale rep resent in her view an epochal shift in civilizational development.75

The subjectof the transcending revolution was no longeran elite bandof intellec tual-revolutionaries nor the desperatemass of exploited peasants or immiserated workers of classical revolutionarydiscourse, but society itself, reflecting not the
amorphous the positive classlessness goals of the universal of earlier debates about the end of ideology but expanding class of modernity. The role of intellectuals the expansive dynamic

remains a matter of debate, but the Polish case demonstrates of its antirevolution.

As Alain Touraine puts it, "Solidarity was at the same time a social movement and an action for the liberation of society."76 The antipolitical style of the struggle of civil society against the Communist state marginalized the role of

institutionalized political leadership. While the absence of organized leadership in

the popular revolutions of the late 1980s was not a new phenomenon, (against, in particular, Lenin's the explicit less by con nature of the politics of the self-organization theories of spontaneity of civil society can be explained idea of revolutionary

normative characterof these antirevolutions. sciousness) thanby the inherently The natureof these revolutionsreflectedobvious tacticalconsiderations.77 "self-limiting"
But their "gentleness" was more transformation to which than incidental; itwas intrinsic to the very model of they aspired.78 Itwas both their strength and weakness. in the transcending revolutions is used in at least three specific sens

Civil society es. First, it is an act of historical reconstitution, returning to Europe in the philosoph ical sense of reconnecting with traditional liberal discourses of the West from to Locke, Mill, and beyond. Second, it is a form of resistance, whereby Hobbes oppositionists sought to create spaces in civil society where the logic of action did not so much directly challenge the party-state as ignore it, a policy of circumvention that proved extremely effective in delegitimating the Communist regimes in eastern Europe and eroding their base in society.79 Third, it is a form of emancipation. In the latter sense the concept assumed and capitalism notion of antipolitics ismost of the new politics communism the outlines of a positive program to transcend both politics for the social body itself. The closely associated with George Konrad, but the features remain at best vague.80 The self-limiting of a understanding by recovering

sphere of politics separate from the state, however, did not deny a legitimate role for the state, and thus differed from Marx's view on its ultimate transcendence or the anarchist denial of a valid role for itwhatsoever. While Havel's critique condemned modernity and technology in general, thinking on antipolitics contained a critique of liberal capitalism as well as the general discontents of modern times. The classic lib eral distinction between state and society was maintained in repudiation of the spirit of 1917 and indeed of 1789.81 The "carnival of revolution" in 1989 prefigured the

469

Comparative

Politics

July 2006

development of antiglobalizing social forums and other forms of popular political

intervention.82 The notion Michnik, theWeberian delegitimated of antipolitics that can be constructed from the works of Havel, beyond is resis in and Konrad focuses on a notion of power and politics elevated that moves heroic

idea of the state as the monopoly and social struggle

of legitimate violence.

State power

to the status of the classic on December 10, 1989,

tance movements against oppression.Havel stressed the element of moral recupera

tion in the revolutions Prague of 1989, declaring a revolution to a crowd that they had achieved "against violence, occupation dirt, intrigue, lawless except for us to occu

ness, mafia, privilege and persecution."83 Konrad noted that "I know of no way for
Eastern Europe to free itself from Russian military py them with our ideas."84 And compatriots. As the idea, of course, was the notion of living in truth, society triumphed; as a

thepolitics of parrhesia (truth-telling)thatSolzhenitsyn had for so longurged on his

a form of reconstitution it played the idea of civil form of resistance towards 1989-91; was nism The it was a crucial part in the transcending the antipolitical revolution that led

but as a form of emancipation its necessary

school of thought that

itself transcended by the fall of Communism. liberalism, with society.

In the harsh light of postcommu on the scope of politics, practices,

limitations

soon eclipsed hopes for a self-managing transcending revolutions were

rich in political

too. One of them

was the repudiation of violence and the practice of the mass peaceful popular demonstration. This practice has been much noted in the case of eastern Europe (with the singular exception of Romania), but is perhaps even more impressive in Russia, Ukraine, extended, Russia lasting and the Baltic some republics, where popular mobilization was far more two years rather than ten days as in Czechoslovakia. In was witnessed in demonstrations of hundreds of thou

popular mobilization

sands of people between 1989 and 1991, in the explosion of social activism, and in the electoral politics inwhich official candidates were defeated throughout Russia in the March scending 1990 parliamentary revolutions elections. In their refusal to take up arms, the tran that had for so long been a beginning with and culminating the various in the for struck a direct blow at the violence the prevalence of forum politics,

systemic featureof Communist despotism.

A second feature was roundtables mation that negotiated their way out of Communism

of antipolitical bodies like Civic Forum in the Czech lands and Citizens in Slovakia in November 1989. If Michnik against Violence sought to subvert the Communist regime by ignoring it, in the USSR such a strategy, where the opening for overt political activism was measured not in decades but by little more than sev eral dozen months, civil society activism was instead directed towards the state.85 in Because of the lack of a tradition of an autonomous sphere of civil association Russia, the regime had a point when it argued that it had no one with whom it could

470

Richard Sakwa

negotiate. Instead,the system itself sought to sponsorparties and other civic associa
tions.86

The thirdpoint follows from the second: the negotiated (and electoral)natureof
the exit attempts from Communism in a number of countries, in particular Poland to believe and in

Hungary.Nowhere in easternEuropewere thereorganized counterelitesor serious

to sustain a counterideology. Nomenklatura elites had ceased a mental the viability of the old ways and had already achieved solution. The weakness which of the attempted putsch liberation from revo

lutionary socialism, an inner transcendence that preempted a Tiananmen Square

inAugust 1991 reveals the extent to revo even in the heartland of the Soviet system the ideology of emancipatory

lutionism had been transcended. Gorbachev's policies had deep social roots and shouldnot be considered a voluntaristicact divorced from the context.Gorbachev's
personal decisions were scended the premises important, but they emerged out of a long tradition that tran and emancipatory revolutions. This tradi Kantian ethics of both progressivist

tion repudiatedthe political bases on which the revolutionaryemancipatoryproject

was based and sought instead to ground politics in at least a minimal

of personal responsibility.

From Revolution toKrizis: The Fourth Circle?

The decline in the pursuit of transcendental revolutionary goals opened the way for

with temporal matters of policy thehistorically locatedpursuitof politics, concerned

rather than the achievement of suprapolitical goals. The heresies that the Soviet

regime called dissent, grounded in the religionof Communism, shifted to problems

of achieving coherence within the constitutional state. The emancipatory revolution had fulfilled whatever historical potential it may have had, and the culmination of one era made possible the antirevolutionary integration of social existence on a new basis. As Bauman notes, the disappearance of emancipation from the historical hori zon, and with it plans for the wholesale reordering of human affairs, has profound effects on social theory and political practice. Contemporary humanity has to get used to "living without an alternative."87 of 1989-91 The revolutions put an end Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the age inaugurated by Marx's

of 1844, which

tied the idea of revolution thus inalienably

to the notion of the liberation of a class. The Marxist

revolution was

associated with civil war, not necessarily taking a violent form but dominated by the logic of a society riven by conflict and characterized by a shifting war of position between two great forces in which politics was no more than instrumental. The domestic roots of the cold war should thus be stressed, a cold war in which the pro tagonists were allegedly locked in battle until the end of history. All this was swept away in 1989-91 together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant cold

471

Comparative

Politics

July 2006

war played out on the larger stage. Emancipatory revolutionism had exhausted itself and with it, almost as an afterthought, the Leninist party. The end of Soviet Communism put an end to all talk of revolutionary socialism.88 Of course, revolu

tions as liberationfromoppression,poverty,and elitemanipulationwill continue, as

evidenced by the rose revolution in Georgia in November 2003, the Orange revolu tion in Ukraine in fall 2004, the tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan in spring 2005, and discourses and practices revolutions at the global and local levels may well return to the idea of a re-volution as a turn

possibly any number of other revolutionsof the colors.Mobilized forms of resis

tance to capitalist of the wheel whereas come to the fore.89 Liberatory

to restore legitimate authority and are rooted in naturalistic cyclicity, the concept of time in Enlightenment and emancipatory revolutions is linear and the ultimate goal chiliastic.

Enlightenmentand emancipatoryrevolutionismsustainedcritiques that sought to

transcend the brute reality of the given. With the crash of the future-oriented

Enlightenment and emancipatory revolutionarycycles, the naturalistic appears to

revolt typical of the epoch of natu ralistic cyclicity. History has lost its goal and, as Jean Bodin always stressed, politics is once again concerned with chance and probability. The revival of the medical metaphor of crisis in public affairs, one that was prevalent in the premodern era, the historiosophical reality that the practice and conduct of politics has indeed revolved back to an earlier period when class struggle existed but lacked the dimension of social emancipation and when revolutions were liberating rather than reflects have been restored, leaving only the traditionalist

emancipatory.
The very language used to describe politics, the language of political analysis and the terms applied to describe political concepts, buckle under the pressures generat ed by the end of the revolution. The price to be paid for the end of the revolution has been noted by the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. "In France, politics has always If the Revolution been defined by the Revolution. ceases to be desirable, then so does politics. Perhaps what we are witnessing now is the death of politics."90 The revolution has ended, but a disenchanted order takes its place in which the unpre dictable and multiple political mobilization. of political intervention paralyze conscious consequences The bases for political intervention are not clear. The absence of utopia and the possibility (however illusory) of a total and revolutionary change in social existence afflicts art and culture in the broadest sense. Another place of the

imagination longerexists. no Moreover, the transcending antirevolution enormousconsequencesfor the con has
duct of politics in the postrevolutionary era. The new politics is torn between a return to naturalistic cyclicity and the development of a fourth circle of political activism ground ed in the practices of the transcending revolution itself.With the end of the idea of revo lution as a way of overcoming contingency in human affairs, the notion of crisis needs to be elaborated more. For the Greeks krizis was amoment of reflection in the life of the

472

Richard Sakwa
community, while the Chinese character for the concept ismade up of symbols for dan inter

ger and opportunity. The language of crisis in part reflects a return to naturalistic revolution, but there is still crisis, but a crisis born no longer out of a belief but by its absence. Contemporary dency towards the passive.91 At lives on inmovements politics and popular political the same time the positive

pretations of human destiny, but it also poses a new challenge. Today, there is no longer in progress subjectivity have a ten

spirit of the antirevolution of naturalistic cyclici

such as theWorld Social Forum. to the passivity

The politics of krizis is a form of resistance arise from the realities of society. There and indeed the relativization

ty and provides an opportunity to devise nonepochal solutions to the problems that

is a renewed emphasis on Tocquevillian toMarx (in Ash's

modalities of political action themes, theprimacyof cultureover socially determined

of directed political action. Contrary

words), "consciousnessultimatelydeterminesbeing...the key to the future lies not in the external,objective conditionof states-political, military, economic, technologi Ethics andmorality, cal but in the internalsubjectivecondition of individuals."92
living by truth and rejecting doubt, contains political Only subject the lie, worked in particular as potent weapons against the party no emerging to treat the the than state, and they now act as the basis of a new moral its own dangers, culture. The new culturalism, an opportunity

the neglect of the inequalities of sovereignty.94

out of new patterns of stratification.93 But it also provides as amoment of history. to examine hierarchies

a critique of naturalism can allow human development In the countries of the antirevolution Russia and other postcommunist

itself to become it remains

latent.

Contemporary

countries have done little more

to objectify social processes inways reminiscentof Enlightenmentand emancipato

ry revolutionism, but now without a social subject other than the state itself acting in the name of objectified processes like globalization and marketization. The antirevo lution has not yet fulfilled its potential by provoking a politics of krizis.

Conclusion: The End of Epochality?

Historical time, according world to Koselleck, is defined by differentiating terms, experience experience between past and In the is heavily histori the at a

future or, as he puts it, in anthropological postcommunist weighted manent demands modernist the balance

and expectation.95

between

and expectation

to the former as a result of the failure of utopian aspirations vested in the per civil war of emancipatory to the mean revolutionism. Transcendental increased emancipatory localized historicism of the Fukuyama fulfill these expectations is decreased. type. Although Societies where to modernity

cism has given way expectation

on the future are structurally that the future will progressivism

(given the failure of the past),

reached its apogee are being reintroduced

473

Comparative

Politics

July 2006

time when weight ones.96 The

social optimism

is on the wane. The future is no longer justice but a thin consciousness has decreased, compensated gave way by the to spatial

rationalistic technocratism; price of thepursuitof justiceproved toohigh.Today the the

of the future in social enhanced value of foreign role models consequence with as temporal utopianism

fundamental

of the end of the revolution revolutionary that change

is that the epochal to

thinking associated

the modem metanoia, the regimes,

tradition has now given way of heart on which a new

the possibility of a groundedpolitics. The Enlightenment revolutions were not fol

lowed by the anticipated could be built. Rather, millennium, revolutions fundamentally adapted society after the delay and native in the arrival of the anticipated tradititions.97 For emancipatory that endowed them with a into the political is subsumed

to the environment

itwas precisely

the impossibility

of adaptation

tenuous quality. For this reason, where

the social revolution,thepostcommunist restorationismore complex than those fol lowing theEnlightenment revolutions. Only with the fall of the revolutionaryregime
can a politics grounded tions of 1989-1991 in the political concerns of society emerge. The antirevolu mark not only the point at which the revolution ended but the resolution remains to be found.

inauguration of a new type of politics of crisis whose

NOTES
Iwould 1. like to thank Yitzhak Brudny, Robert V Daniels, and Andreas Umland for their support and help

ful comments. Arendt, On Revolution 1973), p. 11. Some of the ideas in this (London: Penguin Books, are drawn from Richard Revolutions of Sakwa, "The Age of Paradox: The Anti-revolutionary in Twentieth-Century inMoira Donald Revolution and Tim Rees, eds., Reinterpreting 1989-91," Europe Hannah in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989

chapter

(London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 159-76. 2. Vladimir Tismaneanu, "Introduction," (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 1.

in Hungary and Poland," The New York Review of Books, Aug. 3. Timothy Garton Ash, "Refolution The New York Review of Books, 17, 1989, pp. 9-15; also, Timothy Garton Ash, "Reform or Revolution?," Oct. 27, 1988, pp. 47-55. Revolution "What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying and the Need 4. J?rgen Habermas, for New Thinking on the Left," New Left Review, 183 (September-October 1990), 3-21. Leslie Holmes, also, of Communist Power (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993), p. xi md passim; An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). i 6. See Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Philip Allan, 1990); Jerzy Szacki, Utopia see Jerome M. Gilison, to the USSR, The Soviet 1990). For application traditsiya (Moscow: Progress, Press, 1975). For an interesting Soviet analy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Image of Utopia 5. Leslie The End Holmes, Post-Communism:

i budushchee sotsializma sis, see M. P. Kapustin, Konets Utopii? Proshloe 1990). (Moscow: Novosti, 7. Robert V Daniels, The End of the Communist Revolution (London: Routledge, 1993). 8. Neil Harding, in John Dunn, "The Marxist-Leninist The Unfinished Detour," ed., Democracy: Press, 1993), pp 155-88. Journey, 508 BC toAD 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University

474

Richard Sakwa
For a useful the USSR, Russia, empirical analysis, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: is the concept of experiment States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). However,

9.

and the Successor

not developed theoretically. 10. Fred Halliday, Revolution Duke University Italy, it signified 11. Press, 12. 13. was

and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Durham: Press, 1999), p. 31, notes that, when the concept of revoluzione emerged in late medieval radical change that returned to an earlier era. Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Futures Past: On the Semantics Reinhart Koselleck, of Historical p. 40. 1985), inKoselleck, Futures Past, p. xv. Keith Tribe, "Translator's Introduction," The American revolution from 1776 might in defense of what

have been epochal in its consequences, but in form it they claimed to be ancient liberties and rights. It was on the "C'est une exclaimed, night of July 14, 1789, that Louis XVI, on hearing news of the fall of the Bastille, r?volte," to which his informant, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, gave his famous correction: "Non, Sire, c'est une r?volution." Arendt, On Revolution, p. 47. The word "revolution" was here used for a revolt of colonists the last time in its old sense of the restoration an irresistible colonists 14. movement to the future. of legitimacy, but also for the first time in its new sense of revolution of the type pursued by the American Liberatory type of universal revolutionism. the late Enlightenment thought, human sacrifices. This view was con

in 1776 now gave way to a new stresses of Enlightenment paper only one aspect outcomes would be worth that suggested benevolent philosophisme This demned, Michael

For a recent study, see Roy Tseng, The Sceptical for example, by Michael Oakeshott. Idealist: as a Critic of the Enlightenment Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003). The sacrificial came out against revolution. for example, See Reinhart Rousseau, approach was far from universal. and the Pathogenesis Koselleck, (Oxford: Oxford Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment of Modern Society Press, 1988), p. 161, n7. University 15. de Caritat, Marquis is A Sketch for a Historical Picture The main work by Antoine de Condorcet, in 1794, the year that he poisoned in prison. As a himself of the Progress of the Human Mind, written Girondin deputy, he had been incarcerated by the Jacobins. 16. Marquis (London: 1955), A Sketch for a Historical Picture de Condorcet, of the Progress of the Human Mind Social Theory: A Historical Introduction p. 4, cited in Alex Callinicos, (Cambridge: 1999), p. 25. From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham: Duke

is by Eric Voegelin, Press, 1975), p. 167. University 18. Cited inArendt, On Revolution, p. 29. 19. For a recent study, see David Williams, Press, 2004). University 20. Arendt, On Revolution, 21. For a brilliant

Polity Press, 17. The characterization

Condorcet

and Modernity

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

p. 42. of this theme, see Guy Debord, exposition Zone Books, 1995), esp. ch. 5, "Time and History." 22. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History," The National

The Society

of the Spectacle

(New York:

Interest (Summer 1989), 3-17; Francis and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Fukuyama, The End of History on Marx's weakness as a theorist of politics, For comments 23. see, for example, Gianfranco Poggi, The Development State: A Sociological Introduction (London: Hutchinson, of theModern 1978), p. ix and Critical of Marxian and Jean L. Cohen, and the Design

passim. 24.

See Jean L. Cohen, Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Massachusetts Press, 1982); also, Andrew Arato University Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 25. Cf. Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism (Chapel Hill: University 26. Aron, Raymond of North Democracy Carolina Press, 1997). and Totalitarianism

Theory (Amherst: Civil Society and Institutions

of Soviet

(London: Weidenfeld

and Nicolson,

1968);

475

Comparative
Robert 27. 28.

Politics

July 2006

Idea (London: Allen & Unwin, C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary 1970). John Gray, "Fanatical Unbelief," Prospect (November 2004), 68. to Stalin: E. A. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli Revolutionary

Machiavellism

(Basingstoke: 2004). Palgrave Macmillan, to a collection In his introduction 29. disregard revealed From for human

of hitherto unpublished documents, Pipes notes Lenin's "utter "Lenin is life, except where his own family and closest associates were concerned." as a thoroughgoing in these documents Richard Pipes ed., The Unknown Lenin: misanthrope." the Secret Archive (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 8, 11.

and the Leap to the Kingdom The Rise and Fall of the 30. Andrzej Walicki, Marxism of Freedom: Communist Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin (London: Routledge, 31. 2002). 32. Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, David L. Hoffman, 1917-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 33. Robert V Daniels, Canadian 34. 35. Slavonic Modernization and the Paradox of Twentieth-Century "Revolution, Canadienne des Slavistes, 42 (September 2000), 250. Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (New York: Russia,"

Papers/Revue

Tribe, p. xv. Eduard Bernstein,

Evolutionary Ethic

Schocken

Books, 1961). 36. Max Weber, 37. Max Weber,

The Protestant The Russian

Revolutions

38. See, in particular, S. M. Frank, 1909, reprinted Frankfurt a.M., Posev, 1967), pp. 175-210. (Moscow: the threat posed to the achievements 39. David Anin noted that in 1917 the inability to understand of "was not an accidental the February revolution feature but a 'psychological by left-wing maximalism state' that pervaded all parties or, rather, the whole The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd," Soviet Studies, 40. Ibid., p. 34. 41. 42. 43. Russian 20, (1968-69), intelligentsia." 22. Cited by John Keep, "1917:

(London: Routledge, 1992). Polity Press, 1995), pp. 23-24. "Etika nigilizma," in Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii (Oxford:

and the Spirit of Capitalism

'Iz glubin', Iz glubiny: Sbornik statei o russkoi revolyutsii (Moscow: 1989). A. Solzhenitsyn et al., From under the Rubble (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974). the role of westernized elites is important, as argued by Robert D. English, Although of the West:

Russia

and

Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia Gorbachev, were no less significant. Press, 2000), native sources of antirevolutionism University see Alexander Yakovlov, The Fate of Marxism In English, in Russia 44. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Alexander Yakovlov, Striving for Law in a Lawless Land: Memoirs of a Russian Reformer A Century in Soviet Russia Yakovlov, (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995); Alexander (New of Violence the Idea Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 45. kultura, July 15, 1989, p. 3. Sovetskaya 46. See Philip Conscience, Boobbyer, RoutledgeCurzon, 47. Vladimir

Dissent

and

Reform

in Soviet

Russia

(London:

2005). The Challenge Russia in Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya, of Revolution: Contemporary theHistory Press, 2001). (Oxford: Oxford University of Revolutions inM. S. Gorbachev, On My Country and the World (New York: Columbia 48. Quoted retrospectively New Thinking for Our Country sotsializmu: Programmnoe and the World (London: Collins,

Press, 2000), p. 11. University 49. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: 1987), p. 49. 50. K gumannomy, demokraticheskomu

zayavlenie

XXVIII

s 'ezda KPSS the

(Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), p. 7. 51. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zden?k Prague Spring, and the Crossroads

on Perestroika, with Gorbachev Conversations Mlyn?fi, Press, 2002). (New York: Columbia University of Socialism

476

Richard Sakwa
Brown argues that Gorbachev was "an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary by convic Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 308. 53. Ibid., p. 309 andpassim. 54. and Shevardnadze: Pavel Palazchenko, The Memoir My Years with Gorbachev of a Soviet Park: Pennsylvania State University 370. Press, 1997), p. Interpreter (University 52. Archie tion." Archie 55. A. S. Chernyaev, Shest' let s Gorbachevym: Po dnevnikovym zapisyam (Moscow: in the Oxford 1993), p. 519. Progress-Kultura, 56. See Stephen F. Cohen, "The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in Rethinking Soviet Union," the Soviet Experience: Politics since 1917 (Oxford: and History Press, 1986), ch. 5. University 57. Gorbachev's continued declarations is sensitively portrayed by Leszek Kolakowski, 58. of Krishan Kumar, "The Revolutions Society, Political 59. 21

Studies,

(June 1992), 309-56; 40 (September 1992), 439-61.

to Communism of allegiance up to and beyond the 1991 coup "Amidst Moving Ruins," in Tismaneanu, ed., p. 56. 1989: Socialism, and Democracy," Capitalism Theory and Krishan Kumar, "The 1989 Revolutions and the Idea of Europe,"

"What Does Socialism Mean Today?," p. 5. in Claus Offe, "Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition East Central Europe," Social Research, 58 (Winter 1991), 865-902. au XXe si?cle (Paris: Robert 61. Fran?ois Furet, Le Pass? d'une illusion: Essai sur l'id?e communiste 1995), p. 13. Laffont/Calmann-L?vy, Habermas, 60. 62. 63. Alain Touraine, Krishan Kumar "The Idea of Revolution," Theory, Culture and Society, 1 (June 1990), 121. in Krishan Kumar, ed., Revolution: The Theory and Practice "Introduction," and Nicolson, (London: Weidenfeld 1971), p. 2. "Supposed Dangers of a

European Idea 64. Joseph de Maistre,

Press, (Cambridge: Cambridge University "La contre-r?volution 18, reads as follows. r?volution." 65. 66. Arendt, Agnes On Revolution, p. 18. Horv?th and Arp?d Szakolczai,

on France of Counter-Revolution," in Considerations 1994), p. 105. The original, cited inArendt, On Revolution, p. ne sera point une r?volution contraire, mais la contraire de la

The Dissolution

of Communist

Power:

The Case

of Hungary

1992). (London: Routledge, 67. Dmitrii Furman, "Revolyutsionnye S. N. Eisenstadt 68. and Eyal Ben-Ari, Paul,

tsikly Rossii," eds., Japanese Revolution and

1990). See also S. N. Eisenstadt, (New York: Free Press, 1978). Study of Civilizations see Agnes Heller For an illuminating discussion 69. of the question, and Twilight Universalism Transaction (New Brunswick: of Radical

1 (1994), 9. Svobodnaya mysl', Models of Conflict Resolution the Transformation of Societies: and Ferenc

(London: Kegan A Comparative

"The Breakdown in Tismaneanu, of Communist Eisenstadt, Regimes," 70. David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). "A New Evolutionism," 71. Adam Michnik, of California Press, 1985), pp. 135-48. University inDark Times 72. Jeffrey C Isaac, Democracy ter "The Meanings of 1989." 73. 640. 74. 75. Ibid., p. 648. Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas Kings (Budapest: Central Jeffrey C Isaac, "The Strange Silence in Letters from (Ithaca: Cornell Prison

Books, 1991). ed., pp. 89-107. and Reform and Other

Feh?r, The Grandeur See also S. N. in Poland since

Essays

(Berkeley:

University

Press,

1998), esp. the chap 23 (November

of Political

Theory," Political

Theory,

1995),

of Dissidence European

in East-Central Press, 2003).

Europe:

Citizen

Intellectuals

and

Philosopher

University

477

Comparative
76. Alain

Politics
Touraine

July 2006
Poland 1980-81

et al., Solidarity: Poland's

(Cambridge:

Cambridge Princeton

University

Press, Press,

1983), p. 135. 77. Cf. Jadwiga

Staniszkis,

Self Limiting

Revolution

(Princeton:

University

1984). 78. Arato, "Interpreting 1989," p. 613. 79. The landmark western formulation State: Poland State: New 1980-81," Telos, 47 (1981), Perspectives

European

of the strategy is Andrew Arato, "Civil Society against the See, in particular, John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the and Civil (London: Verso, ed., Democracy 1988); and John Keane, 23-47. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984). Towards a Dynamic Theory of Real Socialism Princeton

Society (London: Verso, 1988). 80. An Essay George Konr?d, Antipolitics: L. Nowak, Power and Civil Society: 81. Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 57. 82. 2002),

(Westport:

Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe (Princeton: stresses the long-term, eclectic, and popular nature of the movement peace

Press, University that swept the Communist pop musicians, Jonathan

environmentalists, feminists, systems away in 1989, encompassing and even professors of sociology. 83. David Selbourne, Death of the Dark Hero: Eastern Europe, 1990), p. 236. 84. 85. Konr?d, See M. Antipolitics, Stephen

campaigners, (London:

1987-90

Cape,

p. 129. in the New Russian and Regime Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition Revolution Press, 1995). (Princeton: Princeton University 86. One of the founders of the Russian Christian Democratic Movement, the former priest Vyacheslav in 1990 he "refused the honour of being Polosin, notes how at the time of the RCDM's founding congress Vladimir version of Zhirinovsky." i ikh realizatsiya," 12, 2000, p. 4. "Zamysly Apr. NG-Religii, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Zhirinovsky, Party, was accused of being a KGB stooge in the democratic movement. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), chs. 7 and 8. of course, is still prone to crises, but the immediate prospects of an ideology based on Capitalism, the abolition of private property and the market would appear to be slim. For an excellent debate on the on the Fate of Ideological Shtromas ed., The End of "isms "? Reflections Politics subject, see Alexsandras 88. after Communism's (Oxford: Blackwell, Collapse 1994). 89. See, for example, Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution 90. The Observer, May 7, 1995, p. 16. 91. 92. Andrew (London: Continuum, 2003). 87. the clerical

Gamble, Politics and Fate (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). and N. Wood, Timothy Garton Ash, "Does Central Europe Exist?," in G. Schopflin eds., In Search of Central Europe (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 200-1. A point argued, 93. for example, Social Revolutions in the Modern World by Theda Skocpol, Press, 1994), p. 203. (Cambridge: Cambridge University 94. Return One author who has most systematically tried to deal with of the Political (London: Verso, and other works. Bo 1993); Chantai Mouffe, this question is Chantal Mouffe, The The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso,

2000); 95. Koselleck, p. xxiii. 96. See, for example,

Petersson,

National

Self-images

and Regional p. 252.

Identities

in Russia

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), esp. pp. 107-12. An argument made by Voegelin, From Enlightenment 97.

to Revolution,

478