ABSTRACT
As almost everyone now knows, in 1989 in Eastern Europe and 1991 in the Soviet Union, Communism collapsed as an official ideology and form of economic and political organization. Yugoslavia broke apart into a number of warring states; Czechoslovakia divided into Slovakia and the Czech Republic; and, perhaps most significantly of all, the Soviet Union became fragmented into a whole series of sovereign or semisovereign states, the largest and most politically significant of which is Russia. These changes seemed to come very suddenly, and almost no one anticipated them. There has been no dearth of interpretations as to why Communism collapsed. The interpretations have differed widely, but many seem to rest on the assumption that popular pressure, the “will of the people,” was a major determining factor. In this insightful article, the British sociologist Krishan Kumar argues against such a view. Of course there was popular pressure, he says, and the people did want to see the transformations that occurred. However, the same popular pressure existed in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and yet those attempts to liberalize the respective Communist regimes were forcibly crushed. As Kumar notes, discontent with established political regimes is a fairly constant feature of world history, but it seldom leads to major political changes. What was different about 1989 and 1991, Kumar argues, is that significant portions of the Communist elites were intent on change. The old Communist system was already in the throes of significant decay, even though much of the decline remained under the surface and was therefore hidden from most people’s observations. The exact reasons for the decay of the old system are not completely clear, but whatever the explanations, it seems unwarranted to ascribe the downfall of Communism simply to popular protest. That by itself is seldom, if ever, capable of toppling vast systems of entrenched power, especially those on the scale of modern Communist regimes.
