Spring 2009 - St Antony's College

Was the end of Communism
economically determined?
(Photo: Rebecca
Phillipson)
By Professor Archie Brown, Emeritus Fellow
This year is the twentieth
anniversary of the demise
of Communist systems
in Europe. I would argue
that applies not only to the states
of east-central Europe but also to
the Soviet Union. With contested
elections for a new legislature, and
Soviet Communist Party members
of radically different views opposing
each other in a majority of the seats,
the sacred principle of ‘democratic
centralism’ was just one of the
major pillars of Communism to be
removed. And it was the pluralization
of Soviet domestic politics and the
transformation of Soviet foreign
policy which provided the facilitating
conditions for the more dramatic
East European overthrow of
Communism.
People who had long maintained
that Communist systems – the
Soviet state most of all – were
impervious to change from within
were among the first to declare, after
the transformation had occurred, that
the end of Communism had been
a foregone conclusion. Among the
many and varied explanations of this
‘inevitability’, I look briefly here at
only one – the idea that the collapse
of Communism was economically
determined. Economists, as the
current global financial crisis has
reminded us, have been better at
predicting the past than the future.
They saw years ahead of the events
of 1989 that it was a delusion to
believe that a ‘plan’ could eliminate
the need for a market. They did
not, however, before the end of the
1980s suggest that the collapse of
Communist systems would occur any
time soon.
There was, indeed, nothing
inevitable about Communism
coming to an end when it did. That
is notwithstanding the long-term
slowdown in the rate of economic
growth, of which there is no shortage
of evidence. To take the most
important case, Soviet economic
growth slowed from an average 2.7
per cent per capita annual increase
in the years 1964-1973 to 1.5 per
cent a year between 1973 and 1985.
Moreover, in spite of the countless
articles and books published in the
European Communist states about
the ‘scientific and technological
revolution’, these were not the
countries where that revolution was
occurring. The technological gap
between Communist Europe and
the advanced Western economies
was widening, rather than narrowing.
Newly-industrialising countries in
Asia were also making faster progress
than the Soviet Union. There were
significant partial exceptions to
that generalisation. In the especially
privileged sectors of the Soviet
command economy, world standards
were reached in military technology
and the space programme.
While a government in a
democracy will generally be punished
by the electorate if it presides over
prolonged economic failure, the
same does not apply to authoritarian
regimes. There is no shortage of
Third World dictatorships, with a
less sophisticated system of rewards
and sanctions than that operated by
Communist rulers in Europe, which
survive for far longer than they
deserve to. Yet neither the countries
of east-central Europe nor the Soviet
Union had economies that were such
basket cases as those of Mobutu’s
Zaire or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Nor were their populations so
impoverished.
Communist regimes could
suppress opposition and provide
a multitude of reasons for belttightening.
Highly authoritarian
regimes in general have ways
other than liberalising reform
of maintaining control and of
postponing the kind of crisis which
threatens the very existence of the
system. As de Tocqueville observed,
the social order immediately before
a revolution, and destroyed by it,
is almost invariably less oppressive
than what was there before. The
moment of greatest danger for
an authoritarian regime is when it
undertakes reform.
To the extent that a system is
liberalised and democratised, then
economic failure becomes a more
critical issue. That was clearly the
case in the Soviet Union at the end
of the 1980s, whereas the society
was quiescent in 1985. The welloiled
levers of propaganda and
coercion could have kept the Soviet
and other Communist systems going
for a few more decades, even in the
face of economic stagnation. There
was no crisis in 1985, when Mikhail
Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin
Chernenko, in the sense of popular
unrest or any challenge to the
regime’s control. Even in Poland, the
most obstreperous barracks in the
camp, Solidarity had been reduced to
a shadow of its former self, meeting
clandestinely in church halls. It was
less a case of crisis forcing reform
than of reform creating crisis.
In a stoutly economicdeterministic
interpretation of
perestroika policies, the former
Russian acting prime minister Yegor
Gaidar has argued that Gorbachev
gave up the whole of Eastern Europe
and made large unilateral reductions
of armaments purely for economic
reasons, and that this was also why
he did not use force to put a stop
to restive Soviet republics’ quest for
independence. These policies were
pursued, according to Gaidar, with
the aim of securing ‘large, long-term,
politically motivated credits that
would at least postpone the looming
state bankruptcy’.
If Gorbachev had pursued such
dangerous policies for economic
reasons, it would have been a
remarkably roundabout way to go
about it. To ‘lose’ East Europe was to
risk the extreme wrath of the Soviet
armed forces. To lose large parts of
the Soviet Union meant forfeiting the
support of almost all the party-state
organs. If Gorbachev had been as
obsessed with the economy as Gaidar