ABSTRACT
In the spring of the year 546 B.c., King Croesus of Lydia was encamped with his army on the banks of the river Halys in Asia Minor. Yakovlev is alluding to the great convulsive reversals of Soviet history: Stalin's "second revolution" and the ensuing terror reversed New Economic Policy (NEP) and discredited the earlier "prophets and apostles," the Old Bolsheviks. One of the elements that produced the collapse of communism in the eighties was the return, in Gorbachev, of the enduring revolutionary desire to restructure society. It is impossible to understand the collapse of Soviet communism without appreciating the role of ideas and convictions in history. Most significant is the radical decline of the elite impulse to reshape society. The nature of Bolshevik political culture–in particular, the fact that the Soviet tradition was one of periodic revolution from above–goes a long way toward explaining why the Soviet elite was willing to gamble on perestroika.
