Commentary

BRADLEY R. GITZ: How soon we forget

The 25th anniversary of the most important event of our lifetimes--the collapse of the Soviet Union--slipped by a few weeks ago with hardly anyone noticing.

I only remembered it myself when I started to put together a syllabus for my "Modern Russia" course. That I would come close to forgetting was ironic because one of the more peculiar episodes in my teaching career concerned that collapse.

I had joined the faculty of Lafayette College in the summer of 1991 and was scheduled to teach upper-level courses in both "Soviet Foreign Policy" and "Soviet Politics." I also had a book about to come out which had already been made largely irrelevant by the disintegration of its subject matter, the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact (itself a consequence of the prior collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall).

The Soviet coup attempt, in which neo-Stalinist hard-liners attempted to oust Mikhail Gorbachev and roll back his reforms, began on Aug. 18, 1991; my classes on the USSR met for the first time the next day. In one of my few cases of successful prognostication, I told students that what we were going to be studying might be gone by the end of the semester.

And so it was: The failed coup attempt provided an instructive case of unintended consequences by actually accelerating the demise of what the coup plotters were trying to save. By the time final exams rolled around, the Commonwealth of Independent States had been established under the prodding of Boris Yeltsin, effectively dissolving the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned the always dubious office of the Soviet presidency and the hammer and sickle came down from over the Kremlin on Christmas Day.

Those events put a dramatic end to not just the Cold War but also the geographical integrity of the world's last multinational empire (Bolshevism being simply "Czarism in overalls") and the broader ideological struggle between communism and capitalism that began with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto way back in 1848.

Of more immediate relevance to my own career prospects, the once-hot field of Kremlinology was kaput; a rare case wherein an entire field of scholarship abruptly disappeared. While I was certainly happy to see the "evil empire" drop-kicked into "the dustbin of history," its departure was accompanied by some self-interested ambivalence.

The Soviet collapse, coming after six years of Gorbachev's chaotic reforms, reaffirmed Alexis de Tocqueville's claim that the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it tries to reform itself. It was also the most important event of a transformative era that included the Tiananmen Square movement in China, Operation Desert Storm, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, the unification of Germany within NATO, and the handshake on the White House lawn between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat before a beaming Bill Clinton.

George Herbert Walker Bush proclaimed the "New World Order" and British military historian Michael Howard called it "the springtime of nations."

The global democratic revolution was underway and acquiring apparently irresistible momentum, new information processing and communication technologies were creating a genuine global marketplace with tremendous potential to lift billions out of poverty, and scholars were predicting the eradication of war and the end of history itself.

To say that all that didn't work out as hoped in the years since would, of course, be an understatement; that in the wake of Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the dismal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it all proved a bit too optimistic.

The failure of any reprise of Tiananmen to emerge despite unprecedented economic growth in China, and the degeneration of the Arab spring into the Arab winter has dampened our convictions regarding the inevitability of democracy, while our nation-building failures in Afghanistan and Iraq have confirmed that exporting it to other lands is a great deal more difficult in practice than in theory.

In the 1990s, we assumed that the passage of NAFTA and the expansion of the European Union had set an irrevocable course toward a beneficial global free-trade system. But free trade has now become a dirty word and the EU's very existence has been jeopardized by Brexit. Nasty and self-defeating protectionist tendencies that we thought were discredited for good are now the order of the day, even in a Republican administration and a Republican Congress.

And then we have Russia itself, that poster child for what the late Samuel Huntington called "authoritarian relapse."

It is hard to believe that Vladimir Putin, architect of Russia's slide back into dictatorship, has been around now for 17 years; that he was an obscurity abruptly elevated to the Soviet presidency by Yeltsin in the closing hours of a century in which Russia was used as a laboratory for history's most ambitious and murderous effort to establish utopia on earth.

Alas, if the polls are correct, the ideology that was being tested by that failed experiment appears to be making a comeback, especially among the young and profoundly ignorant.

Apparently, there will always be "useful idiots" who take socialism at its word rather than by its bloody results.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 01/23/2017

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