ABSTRACT
That Mikhail Gorbachev would choose policies that would accelerate the Soviet Union's demise was unpredictable. Unpredictable too was the timing of the final collapse. The reasons are manifold, but most of them derive from a common illusion among Sovietologists that the Soviet regime was evolving toward a pluralist form. The majority of scholars clung to the illusion of a Soviet pluralist transformation for several reasons. First, some brought political and ideological baggage to their work that effectively ruled out a valid treatment of the evidence. Second, others made honest errors in their assumptions and analytic methods. Seduction by the pluralist promise–a liberal promise, insofar as it had ideological inspiration–required that one ignore the history of constitutionalism in Europe. Astoundingly, some scholars found the Soviet military a source of pluralist political development. Soviet manpower policy, social policy, and education policy all logically favored military priorities.
