ABSTRACT
Radical domestic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and new patterns of East-West relations—in short, the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War—mark the end of an era and present an invitation to international theorizing. The perfectly consistent hard realist recommendation would be that the Western Alliance should take advantage of Soviet weaknesses while they last and maintain the policies that have brought the Soviet Union to this position. The most popular characterization of the recent events in the Soviet Union is that it represents an historic failure of state socialism, single-party politics, and illiberalism. The immediate consequence of Soviet democratization may be instability and mass authoritarianism. Industrial modernism provides the best explanation of the Soviet crisis because it connects a relatively specific characterization of the material forces of production with liberal political and economic outcomes.
