Predictions of Soviet collapse

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There were people who predicted the December 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

Authors often credited with having predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union include Andrei Amalrik in Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1970), French academic Emmanuel Todd in La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: An essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere) (1976), and French historian Helene Carrere d'Encausse.^[1] Additionally, Walter Laqueur notes that "Various articles that appeared in professional journals such as Problems of Communism and Survey dealt with the decay and the possible downfall of the Soviet regime."^[2]

In the United States, especially among conservatives,^{[3] [4]} the politician most credited with predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union is President Ronald Reagan.

Many of the predictions made before 1980 about the fall of the Soviet Union were considered by those who uttered them as a somewhat remote possibility rather than a probability. However, for some (such as Amalrik and Todd) the idea was much more than a passing thought.^[2]

[edit] Conventional wisdom discounted a collapse

[edit] U.S. analysts

Predictions of the Soviet Union's impending demise were discounted by many, if not most, Western academic specialists,^[5] and had little impact on mainstream Sovietology.^[6] For example, Amalrik's book "was welcomed as a piece of brilliant literature in the West" but "virtually no one tended to take it at face value as a piece of political prediction." Up to about 1980 the strength of the Soviet Union was widely overrated by critics and revisionists alike. ^[2]

In 1983, Princeton University professor Stephen Cohen described the Soviet system as remarkably stable.

In a symposium launched to review Michel Garder's French book: L'Agonie du Regime en Russie Sovietique (The Death Struggle of the Regime in Soviet Russia), which also predicted the collapse of the USSR, Yale Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn dismissed Garders book as "the latest in a long line of apocalyptic predictions of the collapse of communism." He warns that "great revolutions are most infrequent and that successful political systems are tenacious and adaptive." In addition, the reviewer of the book, Michael Tatu, disapproved of the "apocalyptic character" of such a forecast and is almost apologetic for treating it seriously.^[7]

Even as late as 1991, a leading American Sovietologist, Professor Jerry F. Hough, wrote that "the belief that the Soviet Union may disintegrate as a country contradicts all we know about revolution and national integration throughout the world". ^[5]

CIA studies showed that the Soviet gross national product was at 55 percent to 60 percent of that of the United States and growing; Soviet defense spending was put at 6 percent to 15 percent of GNP.^[6]

Later analysis were less optimistic. In the 1980s and early 1990s the old inflated figures about Soviet economic performance continued to be used by most Soviet analysts.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a 1993 issue of The Economist quoted GNP figures that were significantly lower than World Bank Atlas figures a year before. But if the figures were accurate, the Russian gross domestic product would have been about as big as South Africa's, the Ukrainian not larger than Kenya's. If correct, the figures would indicate that the Russian and Ukrainian economies had shrunk to less than 10 percent of what they had been the year before, which is impossible^{[citation needed]}. Russia's GDP had shrunk from 50% of the U.S. GDP to around 5% GDP. This showed that the U.S. government (as most other countries) had enormously overrated Soviet economic performance.^[2]

[edit] Soviet analysts

From the onset of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin and most of his party believed that the fate of the Soviet state hinged on the success of communism in Western Europe, specifically Germany. Otherwise, according to Lenin, Russia was destined to be full of "red flags everywhere, but no real socialism." This is because Marxism was the ideology of an "industrial republic" (that phrase is the literal translation of "communism" in several languages), and Russia was too agricultural and backwards to support a socialist economy by itself. Ironically, this internationalist view was even shared by Joseph Stalin, who would later reject it in favor of "socialism in one country," and claim that socialism had been successfully established in Russia without the help of an advanced country. Long after Stalin had proscribed it, many communists subscribed to the illegal view held by Leon Trotsky that the USSR was stuck in transition between socialism and capitalism. Trotsky neither accepted Stalin's revisions nor forsook the USSR, but repeatedly argued the existence of two possibilities: either a worldwide communist revolution would end Stalinism in Russia, or the isolated Soviet state would be unable to challenge the entire capitalist world and itself revert to capitalism.

Later Soviet reaction to the western predictions of the collapse of the Soviet Union was skeptical. Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky explained that "in 1984 KGB officials, on coming to me in prison" when Amalrik's prediction was mentioned "laughed at this prediction. Amalrik is long dead, they said, but we are still very much present."^[8]

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[edit] Predictions of Soviet collapse

Other analysts, organizations and politicians who predicted the Soviet Union's collapse included:

[edit] Post World War I

Several economists reacted to the rise of Bolshevism with predictions that it must fail. In the 1920s, Nikolaas G. Pierson, Georg Halm, and Ludwig von Mises each arrived at the conclusion that the Soviet system of central planning could not match the performance of Western Capitalism. Pierson, Halm, and Mises each explained why central planning is too slow to adapt to the pace of change in modern industrialized economies. Mises focused specifically on the Soviet Union and Marxism in his 1922 book "Socialism, an Economic and Sociological Analysis". In the 1930s two economists at the London School of Economics (Lionel Robbins and Friedrich Hayek) advanced and extended the aforementioned critique of socialism against pro-Soviet economists like Maurice Dobb and Otto Neurath.

[edit] World War II

In June 1941 the German armies invaded Soviet controlled territories and the Red Army surrendered and retreated. On signing the order to commence Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler reportedly said to his generals, "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."^[9] Military observers around the world watched closely. It appears that most of them expected Nazi Germany would win and destroy the Soviet system and establish its New Order in Europe. ^[9] Very few American experts thought the Soviets would survive.^[10] British analysts also shared this view. Negative predictions had an important impact on Franklin D. Roosevelt, who decided to supply munitions to the Soviets through Lend-Lease, and also to pressure Japan not to attack while the USSR was so vulnerable. The Red Army held the line at the outskirts of Moscow and predictions changed to "uncertain." ^[10]

[edit] Early Cold War

[edit] George Orwell

Author of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" George Orwell wrote in 1946 that "the Russian regime will either democratize itself or it will perish". He was regarded by US historian Robert Conquest as one of first people who made such prediction. According to a Conquest article published in 1969, "In time, the Communist world is faced with a fundamental crisis. We can not say for certain that it will democratize itself. But every indication is that it will, as Orwell said, either democratize itself or perish... We must also, though, be prepared to cope with cataclysmic changes, for the death throes of the more backward apparatus may be destructive and dangerous" ^[11]

[edit] George Kennan

American diplomat George F. Kennan proposed his famous containment theory in 1946-47, arguing that, if the USSR were not allowed to expand, it would soon collapse. In the "X" telegram he wrote:

[T]he main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world

George F. Kennan

is something that can be constrained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy.^[12]

The United States would have to undertake this containment alone and unilaterally, but if it could do so without undermining its own economic health and political stability, the Soviet party structure would undergo a period of immense strain eventually resulting in "either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."^[12]

Kennan later regretted the manner in which his theory was received and implemented, but it nevertheless became a core element of American strategy, which consisted of building a series of military alliances around the USSR.^[13]

[edit] Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union on several occasions. In a 2006 interview, Brzezinski stated that in his 1950 master's thesis (which has not been published) he argued that "the Soviet Union was pretending to be a single state but in fact it was a multinational empire in the age of nationalism. So the Soviet Union would break up."^[14]

As an academic at Columbia University, Brzezinski wrote numerous books and articles that "took seriously the option of Collapse", including Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (1969) and Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (1970).^[15]

Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics contained fourteen articles dealing with the future of the Soviet Union. Six of them, by Brzezinski himself, Robert Conquest, Merle Fainsod, Eugene Lyons, Giorgio Galli, and Isaac Don Levine, considered "collapse as a serious possibility although not immediately." ^[16]

On the other hand, in 1976 Brzezinski predicted that the politics of the Soviet Union would be practically unchanged for several more generations to come:

"A central question, however, is whether such social change [modernization] is capable of altering, or has in fact already altered in a significant fashion, the underlying character of Soviet politics. That character, as I have argued, has been shaped largely by political traditions derived from the specifics of Russian / Soviet history, and it is deeply embedded in the operational style and institutions of the existing Soviet system. The ability of that system to resist de-Stalinization seems to indicate a considerable degree of resilience on the part of the dominant mode of politics in the Soviet context. It suggests, at the very least, that political changes are produced very slowly through social change, and that one must wait for at least several generations before social change begins to be significantly reflected in the political sphere."^[17]

In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet power throughout Eastern Europe, Brzezinski published The Grand Failure: The Birth and Decay of Communism in the Twentieth Century. In that work he wrote:

"Marxism-Leninism is an alien doctrine imposed on the region by an imperial power whose rule is culturally repugnant to the dominated peoples. As a result, a process of organic rejection of communism by Eastern European societies – a phenomenon similar to the human body's rejection of a transplanted organ – is underway."^[18]

Brzezinski went on to explain that communism "failed to take into account the basic human craving for individual freedom." He argued there were five possibilities for USSR:

1. Successful pluralization,
2. Protracted crisis,
3. Renewed stagnation,
4. Coup (KGB, Military), and
5. The explicit collapse of the Communist regime.

Option #5 in fact took place three years later, but at the time he wrote that collapse was "at this stage a much more remote possibility" than alternative #3: renewed stagnation. He also predicted chances of some form of communism existing in Soviet in 2017 was a little more than 50%. Finally when the end does come in a few more decades, Brzezinski wrote, it would be "most likely turbulent."^[18]

[edit] Charles de Gaulle

"Only a handful of thinkers, ranging from Charles de Gaulle to the Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik, foretold the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, and even they saw it as likely to happen as a result of disastrous wars with China or pressures from the Islamic Soviet states of Central Asia."^[19]

On 23 November 1959, in a speech in Strasbourg, de Gaulle announced his vision for Europe: Oui, c'est l'Europe, depuis l'Atlantique jusqu'à l'Oural, c'est tout l'Europe, qui décidera du destin du monde. ("Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world.")^[20] This phrase has been interpreted in various ways—on the one hand, as offering détente to the USSR,^[21] on the other, as predicting the collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe.^[22][23]

[edit] Konrad Adenauer

Konrad Adenauer has been cited predicting the reunification of Germany^[2] as early as the 1950s,^[24] but according to Hans-Peter Schwarz, in the last few years of Adenauer's life he repeatedly said that Soviet power would last a long time.^[25]

In 1966, at the Christian Democrats' party conference, Adenauer stated his hopes that some day the Soviets might allow the reunification of Germany. Some analysts say it might be considered a prediction:

"I have not given up hope. One day Soviet Russia will recognize that the division of Germany, and with it the division of Europe, is not to its advantage. We must be watchful for when the moment comes... we must not let it go unexploited."^[24]

[edit] Whittaker Chambers

In a posthumously published 1964 book entitled Cold Friday, Communist defector Whittaker Chambers predicted an eventual Soviet collapse beginning with a "satellite revolution" in Eastern Europe. This revolution would then result in the transformation of the Soviet dictatorship.^[26]

[edit] Michel Garder

Michel Garder was a French author who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union in the book L'Agonie du Regime en Russie Sovietique (The Death Struggle of the Regime in Soviet Russia) (1965). He set the date of the collapse for 1970.^[7]

[edit] Détente

[edit] RAND corporation

In 1968 Egon Neuberger, of the RAND Corporation, predicted that "[t]he centrally planned economy eventually would meet its demise, because of its demonstrably growing ineffectiveness as a system for managing a modernizing economy in a rapidly changing world."^[27]

[edit] Robert Conquest

In the book Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics, which was a collection of authors edited by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Conquest in his section, "Immobilism and decay", saw "the USSR as a country where the political system is radically and dangerously inappropriate to its social and economic dynamics. This is a formula for change - change which may be sudden and catastrophic."^[16]

Conquest also predicted the fall in his book, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970).^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Andrei Amalrik

Prominent dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote in his book Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?:

There is another powerful factor which works against the chance of any kind of peaceful reconstruction and which is equally negative for all levels of society: this is the extreme isolation in which the regime has placed both society and itself. This isolation has not only separated the regime from society, and all sectors of society from each other, but also put the country in extreme isolation from the rest of the world. This isolation has created for all—from the bureaucratic elite to the lowest social levels—an almost surrealistic picture of the world and of their place in it. Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.

Amalrik predicted the collapse of the regime would occur between 1980 and 1985.^[28] The year in the title was after the novel of the same name.

[edit] Marian Kamil Dziewanowski

Historian Marian Kamil Dziewanowski "gave a lecture titled 'Death of the Soviet Regime' at the Russian Research Center at Harvard University. The same lecture was delivered at Cambridge University in England in 1971 and 1979. The text of the lecture (titled 'Death of the Soviet Regime: a Study in American Sovietology, by a Historian') was published in Studies in Soviet Thought. In 1980, he "updated this study and delivered it as a paper at the International Slavic Congress at Garmish; titled 'The Future of Soviet Russia,' it was published in Coexistence: An International Journal (Glasgow 1982)."^[29]

[edit] Emmanuel Todd

Emmanuel Todd attracted attention in 1976 when he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, based on indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates: La chute final: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: an Essay on the Disintegration of the Soviet Sphere).

[edit] Bernard Levin

Bernard Levin drew attention in 1992 to his prophetic article originally published in The Times in September 1977, in which an uncannily accurate prediction of the appearance of new faces in the Politburo was made, resulting in radical but peaceful political change.^{[2] [30]}

[edit] Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a series of articles and interviews from 1975 onward discussed the possibility, indeed likelihood, of the breakup of the Soviet Empire. But Moynihan also expressed the view that liberal democracy, too, faced an uncertain future. ^[2] He argued in January 1975 that the Soviet Union was so weak economically, and so divided ethnically, that it could not long survive. However he said it "might have considerable time left before ethnicity breaks it up." By 1984 he argued "the Soviet idea is spent. History is moving away from it at astounding speed."^[31] Some of his essays were published as Secrecy: The American Experience in 1999.

[edit] Samizdat

Various essays published in samizdat in the early 1970s were on similar lines, some quite specifically predicting the end of the Soviet Union. ^[2][32]

Polish samizdat papers

[edit] Late Cold War

[edit] Raymond Aron

David Fromkin wrote of Raymond Aron's prediction,

"I know of only one person who came close to getting it right: Raymond Aron, the French philosopher and liberal anti-Communist. In a talk on the Soviet threat that I heard him give in the 1980s at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, he reminded the audience of Machiavelli's observation in The Prince that 'all armed prophets have conquered and all unarmed ones failed.'

[edit] Ravi Batra

The economist Ravi Batra predicted the collapse of the USSR.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Ronald Reagan

On March 3, 1983, United States President Ronald Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida: "I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last — last pages even now are being written."^[33]

Ronald Reagan

Reagan's fullest analysis came in his June 1982 address to the British Parliament, which received worldwide attention.

It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has been steadily declining since the fifties and is less than half of what it was then. The dimensions of this failure are astounding: A country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people. Were it not for the private sector, the tiny private sector tolerated in Soviet agriculture, the country might be on the brink of famine. …Overcentralized, with little or no incentives, year after year the Soviet system pours its best resource into the making of instruments of destruction. The constant shrinkage of economic growth combined with the growth of military production is putting a heavy strain on the Soviet people. What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forces are hampered by political ones. …In the Communist world as well, man's instinctive desire for freedom and self-determination surfaces again and again. To be sure, there are grim reminders of how brutally the police state attempts to snuff out this quest for self-rule – 1953 in East Germany, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1981 in Poland. But the struggle continues in Poland. And we know that there are even those who strive and suffer for freedom within the confines of the Soviet Union itself. …What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term – the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. And that's why we must continue our efforts to strengthen NATO even as we move forward with our Zero-Option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate-range forces and our proposal for a one-third reduction in strategic ballistic missile warheads."^[34]

Analyst Jeffrey W. Knopf has explained why Reagan went beyond everyone else:

"Reagan stands out in part because he believed the Soviet Union could be defeated. For most of the Cold War, Republican and Democratic administrations alike had assumed the Soviet Union would prove durable for the foreseeable future. The bipartisan policy of containment aimed to keep the Soviet Union in check while trying to avoid nuclear war; it did not seek to force the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Ronald Reagan, in contrast, believed that the Soviet economy was so weak that increased pressure could bring the Soviet Union to the brink of failure. He therefore periodically expressed confidence that the forces of democracy 'will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history'."^[3]

[edit] Why were Sovietologists wrong?

According to Kevin Brennan:

"Sovietology failed because it operated in an environment that encouraged failure. Sovietologists of all political stripes were given strong incentives to ignore certain facts and focus their interest in other areas. I don't mean to suggest that there was a giant conspiracy at work; there wasn't. It was just that there were no careers to be had in questioning the conventional wisdom...

..There were other kinds of institutional biases as well, such as those that led to the..."Team B" Report."^[35]

Seymour Martin Lipset and György Bence write:

"Given these judgments of the Soviet future made by political leaders and journalists, the question is why were they right and so many of our Sovietological colleagues wrong. The answer again in part must be ideological. Reagan and Levin came from rightist backgrounds, and Moynihan, much like the leaders of the AFL-CIO, from a leftist anti-Stalinist social-democratic milieu, environments that disposed participants to believe the worst. Most of the Sovietologists, on the other hand, were left-liberal in their politics, an orientation that undermined their capacity to accept the view that economic statism, planning, socialist incentives, would not work. They were also for the most part ignorant of, or ignored, the basic Marxist formulation that it is impossible to build socialism in impoverished societies."

Brzezinski's 1969 collection, Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics demonstrates this point, of "the fourteen contributors...Two-thirds (four out of six) of those who foresaw a serious possibility of breakdown were, like Levin, Moynihan, and Reagan, nonacademics. Three quarters (six out of eight) of those who could not look beyond system continuity were scholars. ^[16]

[edit] See also

• History of the Soviet Union (1985–1991)
• Economy of the Soviet Union

[edit] Further reading

• Dziewanowski, M. K. (December 1972). "Death of the Soviet regime: A study in American sovietology by a historian". Studies in East European Thought 12 (4): 367–379. ISSN 0925-9392 (Paper) 1573-0948 (Online).  Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Lanqueur, Walter. The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510282-7. 
• Lipset, Seymour Martin; Gyorgy Bence (April 1994). "Anticipations of the failure of communism". Theory and Society 23 (2): 169–210. doi:10.1007/BF00993814. ISSN 0304-2421 (Paper) 1573-7853 (Online). 
• Rutland, Peter (1993 Spring). "Sovietology: Notes for a Post-Morterm". The National Interest (31): 109+. 
• Orlov, Dmitry (June 1 2005). "Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century". www.fromthewilderness.com. 

[edit] Notes