http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1433369,00.html
Comment
The last of the utopian projects
Perestroika plunged Russia into social ruin - and the world into an
unprecedented superpower bid for global domination
Eric Hobsbawm
Wednesday March 9, 2005
The Guardian
I have a lasting admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev. It is an admiration
shared by all who know that, but for his initiatives, the world might still
be living under the shadow of the catastrophe of a nuclear war - and that
the transition from the communist to the post-communist era in eastern
Europe, and in most non-Caucasian parts of the former USSR, has proceeded
without significant bloodshed. His place in history is secure.
But did perestroika bring about a second Russian revolution? No. It brought
the collapse of the system built on the 1917 revolution, followed by a
period of social, economic and cultural ruin, from which the peoples of
Russia have by no means yet fully emerged. Recovery from this catastrophe is
already taking much longer than it took Russia to recover from the world
wars.
Whatever will emerge from this era of post-Soviet catastrophe was not
envisaged, let alone prepared, by perestroika, not even after the supporters
of perestroika had realised that their project of a reformed communism, or
even a social-democratised USSR, was unrealisable. It was not even envisaged
by those who came to believe that the aim should be a fully capitalist
system of the liberal western - more precisely, the American - model.
The end of perestroika precipitated Russia into a space void of any real
policy, except the unrestricted free market recommendations of western
economists who were even more ignorant of how the Soviet economy functioned
than their Russian followers were of how western capitalism operated. On
neither side was there serious consideration of the necessarily lengthy and
complex problems of transition. Nor, when the collapse came, given its
speed, could there have been.
I do not want to blame perestroika for this. Almost certainly the Soviet
economy was unreformable by the 1980s. If there were real chances of
reforming it in the 1960s they were sabotaged by the self-interests of a
nomenklatura that was by this time firmly entrenched and uncontrollable.
Possibly the last real chance of reform was in the years after Stalin's
death.
On the other hand, the sudden collapse of the USSR was neither probable nor
expected before the late 1980s. A prominent CIA figure interviewed by
Professor Fred Halliday of the LSE thought that, supposing Andropov had
survived in good health, there would still have been a USSR in the 1990s -
clumsy, inefficient, in slow and perhaps accelerating economic decline, but
still in being. The international situation would have been, and remained,
very different. International disorder followed the collapse of the single
Russian state that had been a great world power since the 18th century - as
it had the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires after the
first world war. For a few years even the existence of Russia itself as an
effective state was in question. It is so no longer, but the necessary
restoration of state power in Russia in recent years has been at heavy risk
to the political and juridical liberalisation which was the major - I am
tempted to say the only real - achievement of perestroika.
Did perestroika herald "the end of history"? The collapse of the experiment
initiated by the October Revolution is certainly the end of a history. That
experiment will not be repeated, although the hope it represented, at least
initially, will remain a permanent part of human aspirations. And the
enormous social injustice which gave communism its historic force in the
last century is not diminishing in this one. But was it "the end of history"
as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in 1989, in a phrase that he no doubt
regrets?
He was doubly wrong. In the literal sense of history as something that makes
headlines in newspapers and TV news bulletins, history has continued since
1989, if anything in a more dramatic mode than before. The cold war has been
followed neither by a new world order, nor by a period of peace, nor by the
prospect of a predictable global progress in civilisation such as
intelligent western observers had in the mid-19th century, the last period
when liberal capitalism - under British auspices in those days - had no
doubts about the future of the world.
What we have today is a superpower unrealistically aspiring to a permanent
world supremacy for which there is no historical precedent, nor probability,
given the limitation of its own resources - especially as today all state
power is weakened by the impact of non-state economic agents in a global
economy beyond the control of any state, and given the visible tendency of
the global centre of gravity to shift from the North Atlantic to the zone of
south and east Asia.
Even more questionable is the wider - almost quasi-Hegelian - sense of
Fukuyama's phrase. It implies that history has an end, namely a world
capitalist economy developing without limits, married to societies ruled by
liberal-democratic institutions. There is no historic justification for
teleology, whether non-Marxist or Marxist, and certainly none for believing
in unilinear and uniform worldwide development.
Both evolutionary science and the experiences of the 20th century have
taught us that evolution has no direction that allows us concrete
predictions about its future social, cultural and political consequences.
The belief that the US or the European Union, in their various forms, have
achieved a mode of government which, however desirable, is destined to
conquer the world, and is not subject to historic transformation and
impermanence, is the last of the utopian projects so characteristic of the
last century. What the 21st needs is both social hope and historical
realism.
Eric Hobsbawm is author of The Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century
1914-1991; this is an edited version of an address to the world political
forum on perestroika 20 years on, held last weekend in Turin by the
Gorbachev Foundation
[log in to unmask]
|