The Gorbachev-era earthquake that led to the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet state was due in significant part to autonomous changes in Soviet civil society, changes that were in some respects no different from the type of social evolution going on in other regions and countries with no experience of totalitarianism. The failure of a large section of the Sovietological community to perceive these underlying changes accounts in some measure for their blindness in not being able to anticipate the coming revolution.

Before making the case that changes occurring in civil society were important factors both in the collapse and in our blindness about the collapse, let me state at the beginning a number of caveats and qualifications. It should be absolutely clear that the Gorbachev-era earthquake had fundamentally political causes, which were its sine qua non. Perestroika was in no way a revolution from below. Frederick Starr's assertion that Gorbachev merely uncorked change rather than created it goes too far,[1]and those like Jerry Hough who argue that the  USSR had become a pluralistic, participatory society prior to the late 1980s understand neither pluralism nor participation. It is perfectly possible to imagine substantially different and quite plausible outcomes to the events of the 1980s, given changes in the personalities involved. If Andropov or Chernenko had been younger and/or healthier men, perestroika most likely would never have happened. If Grishin had won the subsequent power struggle, if Gorbachev's personality had been different, if he had been less adroit in political maneuvering or Yegor Ligachev more so, the entire sequence of events leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union would have been derailed and might never have happened. Moreover, to say that civil society was a factor is not to deny the myriad of other causes that contributed to the collapse, including pressures from the international system, and the United States in particular. One can argue that a healthy Andropov would have put off the collapse only for a decade or so, but the importance of such purely political factors is undeniable, and perhaps even central in explaining these events.

On the other hand, political factors do not tell the whole story. For while the major mileposts of Soviet reform may have been initiated from above, they received crucial support, or at least acquiescence, from below. The Soviet intelligentsia did not react suspiciously to glasnost, but rather embraced it enthusiastically and proceeded to push the boundaries of the permissible in journalism and the arts. Soviet voters, when given a chance to express a preference, did not elect the old apparatus or neo-fascist Russian nationalists; they voted in 1990-91 for candidates from Democratic Russia and for Boris Yeltsin. Elites in the different Union republics organized themselves quickly into nationalist groups once given the chance, despite the fact that many Western Sovietologists believed they had been successfully assimilated as "new Soviet men." And finally, perhaps the most important factor was not what happened in civil society, but what did not happen: the old system's entrenched interests, particularly the Party, the army, and the police, did not act decisively to end the reform process, as they were designed to do. Clearly, something had happened "from below" to make all this possible.

To say that civil society played a significant role is to challenge one of the fundamental premises of classical Sovietology: namely, that the very uniqueness of communist totalitarianism as a political system lay in the fact that civil society had been all but abolished. It was politics, ideology, and the state that were supposed to shape the course of social life, and not the reverse. The sharp differences between communist societies and all others made the study of the former unique as well: the disciplines of Sovietology and, to a comparable degree, Sinology, were segregated in a separate ghetto from the rest of the field of comparative politics. The chief social science paradigm governing studies of comparative politics for the first two postwar decades, modernization theory, was held to apply to virtually all human societies except for communist ones, where the "normal" processes of political development had been arrested by an all-powerful state.

Sovietologists, therefore, did not study issues like political participation, party formation, or the development of civic culture, as did specialists in the politics of Europe, non-communist Asia, or Latin America; rather, they developed their own methodologies, like Kremlinology, to interpret the actions of the relatively small group of leaders-members of the Politburo, the Secretariat, or at most the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party-whose actions were deemed decisive in shaping Soviet politics and society. Communist societies were compared only to one another, not to non-communist societies.

In the final analysis, then, it was the totalitarian model that was responsible for the failure of many observers of the Soviet Union to foresee its collapse. This model was severely criticized by Sovietologists well before the end of the Brezhnev era, but the critique was often done in so polemical and clumsy a way that it was not taken seriously by many. In retrospect, this was a great misfortune for both sides of that debate, and it prevented everyone from anticipating the end of Soviet communism as clearly as they might otherwise have done.

The Totalitarian Model

The underestimation of the importance of civil society in the former  USSR is thus simply the reverse side of the overestimation of the "totalitarian model." That model, in its original formulation by Friedrich and Brzezinski,^[2] was meant to describe both Nazi Germany and Stalin's  USSR, which were held to be qualitatively different from, say, the right-wing dictatorships that characterized contemporary Latin America. Most traditional authoritarian regimes prior to the twentieth century maintained a monopoly of political power and could act in cruel and capricious ways, but they generally left a substantial segment of civil society free of state control. Totalitarian regimes, by contrast, sought a complete monopoly of power throughout society, and the history of their rise to power was the history of their systematic conquest of all conceivable rival sources of power.

Other critical aspects of the totalitarian model as defined by Friedrich and Brzezinski included domination of society by a vanguard party, that is, by a small, elite, highly centralized Leninist-style organization; the existence of an official ideology; and technologically-conditioned monopolies of control over mass communications, the military, and the economy. The active manipulation of consciousness was critical in distinguishing totalitarianism from other types of authoritarian regimes: Soviet communism sought not just to enslave society, but to make the victims love their chains and affirm the legitimacy of their servitude.

In institutional terms, it was believed that the Soviet Communist Party maintained itself through the "circular flow of power." Within the confines of an elite Leninist party, a Central Committee appointed a general secretary and Politburo, which in turn appointed the members of the Central Committee. This relationship of mutual dependence, while not guaranteeing freedom from internal conflict, supposedly gave everyone an incentive not to diffuse power outwards beyond the 250 or so officials who made up the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission.

The totalitarian model was an "ideal type," and like all ideal types, it never fully described Soviet reality. But for all the criticism that the model came under in later years, it was a reasonably good description of the Soviet regime from the late 1920s up through Khrushchev's secret speech. That is to say, all institutions in Soviet society bearing names like labor union, church, newspaper, university, professional society, enterprise, peace committee, and the like, were emanations of the state, bearing very little resemblance to their counterparts in the non-communist world. And on the level of consciousness, there is copious testimony from those who lived through that period that a large number of Party members in those years, and an even larger number of those who staffed its apparatus, believed fervently in the ideology. They cried when Stalin died and listened in shocked disbelief when Khrushchev accused him of crimes against the Party.

Moreover, even after the totalitarian model had ceased to be an accurate description of Soviet reality by the late 1950s, the "post-totalitarian" state remained a distinct category of regime, different in crucial respects from a Latin American military dictatorship or an "oriental despotism."^[3] For while the iron grip of police terror and ideological fervor had been lifted, the damage done to the normal institutions of civil society remained. This difference is quite evident if one considers that even under the most severe right-wing dictatorships-like those of Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, South Korea under Park or Chun, or Chile's Pinochet-the church remained independent, a strong private business sector prospered intact, and labor unions and political parties survived either underground or in exile, ready to reconstitute themselves. While there were important differences among post-totalitarian regimes (Poland, for example, had a large private agricultural sector and an independent church), the revival of the institutions of Soviet civil society for the most part postdated rather than predated the coming of Gorbachev and reform.

The usefulness of "post-totalitarian" as a distinct category of regime suggests that we will not find evidence of an autonomous Soviet civil society in the usual places, that is, embodied in concrete civil institutions. We should not expect to look back and see that Soviet newspapers, labor unions, churches, and the like were in fact much stronger and more independent than we thought. The weakness of Russian civil society today, more than a year after the formal dissolution of the  USSR, is evident for everyone to see: there have been elections, but no political parties to speak of; privatization, but no strong private sector. Labor unions and churches are only now gaining an independent voice.

A Proto-Civil Society

What we must look for, then, are not concrete civil institutions prior to Gorbachev, but a "proto-civil society" that laid the groundwork for what was to follow. This proto-civil society is evident in two respects. The first were changes in Soviet institutions that reduced their functionality as guardians of Soviet power, and became the basis for the emergence of a new, non-Soviet civil society after perestroika. The second were changes in consciousness-that is, in the way that elites and the population more broadly thought about their own system and its legitimacy, which in turn influenced how they would respond to revolutionary change when it was initiated from above.

In the first category, there was a clear diffusion of power within the Soviet Communist Party from the center to the periphery, on a republic, an oblast (regional government), and even a local party level. It was a truism of the classical model of totalitarianism that while the party rules called for democracy from below, the reality was always strictly dictatorship from above. But by the early 1970s there was growing evidence that the lower reaches of the party were acquiring a substantial degree of bargaining leverage against the center.^[4] This was evident in economic affairs, where powerful oblast first secretaries were in a position to stymie reforms and initiatives coming from Moscow, just as enterprise directors were in a position to resist orders from central and republican ministries. The various economic and political institutes of the  USSR Academy of Sciences, many designed as propaganda instruments, quickly became sources of intellectual opposition to the old Soviet state. The decentralization of Soviet institutions was most clearly evident in certain of the Union republics, where the local party organization in effect became entities independent of the central committee apparatus back in Moscow. While Leonid Brezhnev played a critical role in placing his friend Sharaf Rashidov as first secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, it was Rashidov and not the Central Committee personnel department who thereafter controlled most appointments in the Uzbek Party apparatus. Moscow may have tolerated the vast, corrupt cotton empire off which Rashidov got rich, but it did not create or control it.^[5]

The growth of official "mafias" within the Communist Party was paralleled by the growth of mafias outside it. To this day we do not have reliable statistics on the size of the informal economy during the Brezhnev period, but estimates for the size of its overall contribution to Soviet gnp range as high as 25 percent. Much of this economic activity outside the official plan was either the work of private entrepreneurs-mostly kolkhozniks raising fruits and vegetables in their garden plots-or was carried out by informal groups who performed arbitrage, middleman, and even manufacturing functions. Though these sorts of activities flourished most in the non-Slavic republics, even in Russia they constituted an important source of flexibility in the otherwise rigidly controlled economy.

The importance of this "proto-civil society" is evident from subsequent events. In many cases, it was the local party organization, like Brazauskas's Lithuanian Communist Party, that took up nationalist themes and propelled the republics toward independence. In other cases, rather than form independent political parties, reformers were able to hijack parts of the old cpsu and government structures, and use them to advance reformist aims. This is essentially what Yeltsin did with the Russian Federation's structures in 1990-91. Indeed, without the concept of a proto-civil society, it would be impossible to account for the great differences in post-communist political development in Eastern Europe. Those countries with more developed proto-civil societies, like Poland and Hungary, were much better able to make a transition to genuine democratic structures later.

The decay of the classical "circular flow of power" model or any other institutional aspect of classical totalitarianism would not have been very consequential were it not for the second category of changes, those in the realm of consciousness. The almost universally held Western belief in the rock-solid stability of the Soviet system was based, ultimately, on certain assumptions about the nature of normative beliefs in the former  USSR. The first was the belief that over the years, the "system" had legitimated itself, if not in the eyes of the people, then at least in the eyes of the Soviet elite that ran it.^[6] The "system" was not simply coterminous with Marxist-Leninist ideology; rather, what was legitimate was what in the Brezhnev period was called the "real socialism" that had industrialized the country, beaten Hitler, risen to global superpower status, and achieved a significant degree of economic growth (at least up through the late 1970s). While Western observers recognized that there was a considerable amount of cynicism within the Soviet elite over ideology, most assumed that the administrators of the system had a very powerful self-interest in its perpetuation, and would not accept change that seriously threatened to undermine it.

It went beyond this, however. There was a widely held assumption among Sovietologists that the broad mass of the Soviet population as well as the elites had also come to view the system as "legitimate." Unlike some Eastern European populations, the Soviet people-and particularly Russians-were seen as atomized, dependent and authority-craving. This was held to be a characteristic of Russian society from pre-Bolshevik days that had only been reinforced by Stalinist terror. In the words of the nineteenth-century French traveler, the Marquis de Custine, the Russians were a race "broken to slavery." Soviet society was not, therefore, a tinderbox of revolutionary passions held down only by the brute force of police terror; rather, it was a functional society, organized according to different normative standards than the democracies of the West.

Ironically, the view that both elites and the broader population accepted the legitimacy of the Soviet system was held by Sovietologists on both the right and left. On the right, many wanted to emphasize the deeply rooted character of Soviet expansionism and dictatorship, while on the left there was a desire to see the old Soviet Union as a real if imperfect alternative to Western capitalist democracy. Fewer scholars on the right thought communism had achieved a broad legitimacy, but they for the most part believed that legitimacy counted for much less than power in that system.

It was in the realm of consciousness, however, that totalitarianism failed most completely. Gorbachev did not force the Soviet intelligentsia to take up the cause of reform. Brezhnev-era academic institutes were staffed with several echelons of economists who were familiar with "bourgeois" Western economic theory and ready to implement it. From the late Brezhnev period on, the Soviet intelligentsia had almost complete access to contemporary Western materials, regardless of ideological content. Within the party itself the corrective mechanisms that were supposed to keep the totalitarian machine on course failed, largely because critical people in its apparatus came quickly to see the old system as illegitimate. Not only could Gorbachev tap the Yakovlevs, Shevardnadzes, and Yeltsins for top posts, but custodians of the old system throughout the party, army, and police of the kind who in 1964 conspired to remove Khrushchev from power did not have the competence or the drive to do so in the late 1980s. (Yegor Ligachev has told Western audiences that no one in the Politburo even considered the possibility of intervention during the emigration crisis in East Germany in mid-1989.)

As a measure of the broader Soviet population's ability to think for itself, the various elections that were held beginning in 1990 could serve as a limited but revealing measure. In the local elections held in the spring of 1990, candidates from the liberal Democratic Russia movement won fifty-seven of sixty-five seats in Moscow; while seventy "patriotic" nationalist or neo-Bolshevik candidates ran, only two were elected.^[7] The percentages of votes for "democrats" were lower in provincial cities and in the countryside, but this kind of voting pattern is absolutely typical for non-communist democratizing countries at a comparable level of social development. The Party apparatus put its weight behind electing Ryzhkov in the election for Russian president in June 1991, and there were plenty of other unsavory authoritarian candidates who could have been elected. But it was for Boris Yeltsin that Russians voted.

An Ordinary Country

If we want to explain why the political system began to diffuse power, and why there emerged a broad crisis in the Soviet belief system, we can look to two sorts of explanations, one particular to totalitarian systems, the other a more general one applicable to all societies. The first concerned the inability of totalitarianism to perpetuate itself in a pure form. The crucial event in this respect was the ending of the terror. For once it became clear that the state would not kill or incarcerate large numbers of people to enforce its rule, the balance of power between the state and society began to shift. From now on, failure of a ministry, region, or enterprise to meet its plan targets would not be punishable by death or imprisonment. Coercion took many other forms than outright terror, of course, and kept the nature of autonomous social action within strict limits. Still, the cessation of terror meant that the state-Party apparatus would increasingly have to bribe or cajole economic actors to get them to do its bidding.

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).

[4]The first major effort to document this was Jerry Hough's The Soviet Prefects (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969).

[5]There were, of course, individual Muscovites who prospered under this scheme, like Brezhnev's own daughter Galina and her husband Churbanov.

[6]For one of the standard works on the subject of legitimacy in the former ussr, see T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher, eds., Political Legitimation in Communist Systems (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982).

[7]See Julia Wishnevsky, "Patriots Urge Annulment of rsfsr Elections," Radio Liberty Research Bulletin (April 6, 1990), pp. 18-21.

[8]Obviously, this freedom does not have to be as extensive as in Europe or America; the rapidly developing Asian nics were economically free but authoritarian politically.

[9]Aron quoted in Jeremy Azrael, Managerial Power and Soviet Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p.4.

[10]On this broader point, see my article, "Capitalism and Democracy: The Missing Link," Journal of Democracy (July 1992): pp. 100-110.

[11]See Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation, expanded edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 30-31.

[12]Ibid., p. 45.

[13]One of the most sensible of these was Richard Lowenthal; see his "The Ruling Party in a Mature Society" in Mark G. Field, Social Consequences of Modernization in Communist Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

[14]Jerry Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 8.