In the six-year-long decline of communism, euphemistically referred to as "restructuring" (the meaning, ultimately, of perestroika), the Russian elections on June 12 will certainly count as a revolutionary turning point. In the presidential and municipal elections, the homeland of Leninism chose three anti-Leninist leaders—Boris Yeltsin, Gavriil Popov, and Anatoly Sobchak—with between 60 and 65 percent of the votes, compared to less than 25 percent for the combined three presidential candidates who were pro-communist. This happened, incidentally, in a contest explicitly pitting "democrats" against entrenched "communists," with the stated goal of the democrats being the final dismantling of the country's crumbling "totalitarian" structures in favor of the rule of law, private property, and the market. And the citizens of Leningrad voted by 55 percent to change their city's name back to St. Petersburg, symbolically rejecting the entire Soviet experience.
It would be mistaken to see this epochal turn of events merely as a matter of rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, real though that rivalry is. It would be just as superficial to continue to view Soviet events as a process of "reform" in which Yeltsin and Gorbachev must ultimately work together for a tidied-up "transition to democracy," as if that is what perestroika has been about all along. For we are not dealing here with either a personal feud or mere reform, but with the collapse of the system as a whole. Nor are we dealing with some mild transition, but with a revolution occurring through implosion. In short, the process unfolding is analogous to what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989.
The events of 1991 can be seen as the second Soviet phase of the anticommunist revolution that swept through Eastern Europe in 1989; and the Russian elections on June 12 are roughly the equivalent of the Polish elections of June 4 two years before, when Solidarity unexpectedly won a semi-manipulated vote, thereby becoming the first post-communist government in Europe, a breakthrough that soon led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Czech velvet revolution, and the end of Ceausescu.
With the specific events of the perestroika experiment now behind us, it is possible to gain a better understanding of the historical process of the end of communism, its structure, and stages. Solidarity in Poland was the pioneer in setting the pattern in the 1980s. The democratic movement in Russia led by Yeltsin is now trying, and quite consciously so, to follow the same path. But how did Russia manage to catch up with Eastern Europe so quickly? And what are democratic Russia's chances for success?
Nothing makes sense in this process unless it is first recognized that Gorbachev's perestroika was never anything other than reform communism. Following the precedents set by Khrushchev, Dubček, Kádár, and Jaruzelski, Gorbachev attempted to revitalize a Stalinist system in deep crisis through what he hoped would be controlled liberalization. The model for such a program, for Gorbachev as for his predecessors, always entailed expanded but still limited rights to tell the truth about the past and to criticize...
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