ABSTRACT
Count Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace, once remarked that war and politics seem to have been contrived to maximize the uncertainty of their outcomes. Since human history has—so far and at least as historians have written it—been largely composed of wars and politics, or at least been given its major shapes by the largely adventitious outcomes of such adventures, it is not surprising that the unfolding of human events continues to surprise us. Who could have predicted in 1985, for example, that in 1991 all the countries of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe would be independent of the Soviet Union, and would be starting to “democratize”? Who could have predicted that the Soviet Union itself would undergo, in that same six-year period, two major developments known as glasnost and perestroika, and then would vote itself peacefully out of existence? Such events defy our power to understand them even after they have happened—much less predict them before they occur.
