But the more important types of long-term social changes leading to the breakdown of the Soviet system were characteristic of non-communist societies as well. They had to do with the political effects of the transition from an agricultural economy to a modern industrial one. In this respect, Soviet society developed much like other non-communist ones; totalitarianism delayed but did not derail the political development process in the  USSR. The imperatives of industrial maturity eventually forced a breakdown of the political system because truly modern technological societies cannot flourish except in an atmosphere permitting a certain degree of freedom.^[8]

The reasons for this are most evident in the economic sphere. Centrally planned socialism was a perfectly adequate engine of economic growth through the stage of industrialization represented by Europe or America in the year 1940, and characterized by heavy industries like steel, chemicals, and automobiles that populated the American Midwestern rust belt. But in the subsequent half century of economic development, modern economies have become vastly more complex, information- and communications-intensive, service oriented, dependent on constant technological innovation, and requiring increasingly high skill levels in the labor force. Under these circumstances economic decision-making has to become decentralized to be efficient. Goskomtsen, the former Soviet state committee on prices, reviewed some 200,000 prices per year, which represented 42 percent of all price decisions in the Soviet Union. This represents only a tiny fraction of the number of prices determined by markets in an advanced industrial economy like Japan or the United States, where a single airliner can consist of over a million different parts, each with its own price. The economic aspects of socialism clashed head-on, therefore, with the broad direction of modern industrial development.

Beyond economics, industrial maturity has a major impact on social and political attitudes as well. In Raymond Aron's phrase, "technological complexity will strengthen the managerial class at the expense of the ideologists and militants."^[9] It is very hard to keep the elites of modern industrial societies isolated from larger trends in the world given the rapid proliferation of communications technologies. The populations of complex, modern urban societies, increasingly well-educated and cosmopolitan, begin demanding more than simple security and food on the table. Above all, they begin to demand recognition of themselves and their social status, expressed as a demand for individual rights and political participation.^[10] While illiterate peasants in an agricultural society may defer to the authority of a landlord, warlord, or commissar, it is much less likely that a college-educated manager, scientist, or journalist will do so. In this respect, the Soviet Union was no different from Spain, Portugal, Taiwan, South Korea, or any other country that has made the transition from an agricultural to an urban-industrial society in the past couple of generations.

The view that technocrats would be the "gravediggers of communism" has been much ridiculed over the years, because the technological imperative could be violated by political authorities for so long. (One notorious example of this was the aircraft designer Tupolev, who did some of his most innovative work while a prisoner in Stalin's gulag.) But while the Party could delay the technological imperative, they could not put it off forever if they were to remain militarily and economically competitive with the West. The scientific elite had increasing contact with their Western counterparts over the years; the industrial/managerial elite had less, but promotion within it was nonetheless based on performance, not ideology. (A typical example of this generation was Gorbachev's second-to-last prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, a technocrat and former head of a giant manufacturing conglomerate, Uralmash, who complacently supported perestroika until some time in 1990, when it had already become too late to turn back the clock.)

Part of the reason that the political effects of economic modernization were slow to be felt had to do with its forced nature. Between 1926 and 1960, the Soviet population went from 18 percent urban to approximately 49 percent.^[11] Such figures overstate the real degree of modernization that took place, however: a Soviet factory worker in the late 1950s was still a displaced peasant working on a deliberately simplified assembly line. This population had a much lower level of literacy, much less formal education, than their counterparts in Western Europe or the United States. Moreover, as Moshe Lewin has pointed out, much of the statistical urbanization that took place in this period was in fact the simple transplanting of entire peasant villages into urban areas, where the mores and social relationships of the countryside still prevailed. But in the generation following Khrushchev, a broader and deeper social modernization process occurred. The urban population grew to 65 percent of the total by 1985. As late as 1959, 91 percent of workers and 98 percent of peasants had no more than a four year elementary school education, while by 1985 the figure for manual workers was only 18 percent. By Gorbachev's time, fifteen million Soviet citizens had received a higher education.^[12]

The importance of this kind of broad socio-economic modernization is evident if one looks at the role of the military. In China, Deng Xiaoping and his conservative allies were able to call in a peasant army from the provinces to put down the student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the former Soviet Union, by contrast, the military units called into Moscow by the State Committee for the State of Emergency on August 19, 1991, proved to be very unreliable counterrevolutionaries. The officers and soldiers were not peasant boys, unfamiliar with and distrustful of city ways; many appeared to be as politically aware as the Muscovite population they were intended to suppress. The Red Army of the 1950s, by contrast, would have consisted largely of politically inert peasants, who would not have felt any squeamishness about killing unruly civilians.

Out of the Ghetto

A number of Sovietologists noticed these broad trends in Soviet society, and argued that it would eventually be assimilable into the developmental model of the non-communist world.^[13] By the early 1980s, most mainstream Sovietologists accepted the fact that the totalitarian model was no longer adequate for describing Soviet reality. It was an unfortunate accident of academic history, however, that the scholar most closely associated with the "civil society" interpretation-Professor Jerry Hough of Duke University-overstated the case in such an extreme way that the entire argument was discredited in the eyes of any number of other Sovietologists. Hough in his study of Soviet prefects noticed back in the late 1960s that the Soviet political system was not behaving as it should according to the totalitarian model. Rather than making the case that totalitarianism was gradually eroding and might some day explode or collapse, Hough by the late 1970s began to assert that democratization had already happened in Brezhnev's  USSR: "the Soviet leadership almost seems to have made the Soviet Union closer to the spirit of the pluralist model of American political science than is the United States..."^[14] In the end, Hough's motivation could be explained by the Cold War: he wanted to show his fellow Americans that they had no grounds for feeling morally superior to the Soviets, and therefore had no reason for resisting detente, arms control, and the like. This in turn provoked more conservative scholars to assert that ideology had forced Soviet society to develop along a path utterly different from Western ones, and blinded them to evidence that Soviet society was indeed evolving independently of the Soviet state.

Now that everyone admits the Cold War is over, it is time for Sovietology to come out of its conceptual ghetto. Russia is today just another troubled state, trying to make a difficult simultaneous transition to both democracy and markets. If it relapses into authoritarianism of either a Russian nationalist or neo-Bolshevik form, it is unlikely that the new rulers would attempt to revive the totalitarian experiment, and even less likely that they would succeed even if they were to try. The skills that students of the Soviet successor states will have to bring to bear will not be different in essence from those of students of other regions: they will have to become familiar with problems of democratization and economic modernization in Asia and Latin America, and apply broader developmental models to their part of the world. And those seeking a retrospective account of the collapse of communist systems will have to open their eyes as well to the forms of proto-civil society that existed in the former communist world.

NOTES

[1]Frederick S. Starr, "Soviet Union: A Civil Society," Foreign Policy (Spring 1988), p. 27.

[2]See Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956 and 2nd ed., 1965). See also the original and revised editions of Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953 and 1965).

[3]The term "post-totalitarian" has been used both by Juan Linz and Vaclav Havel to describe communist societies after their Stalinist phases. See Vaclav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless (London: Hutchinson, 1985).