Introduction

The year 1991 will go down in history as one of the great turning points, on a par with 1917. The attempted coup in Moscow in August by conservative Communists, the official demise of the Communist Party, the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent parts and the resignation of its president on 25 December, added up to a transformation that one might well consider as revolutionary and as worldshaking as the events that led from the fall of Tsar Nicholas II to the establishment of the Bolshevik dictatorship. But the impact of these changes has not generally been matched by profundity in explaining them. Typically commentators both in Russia and in the West have hailed this great upheaval as the “failure” of a wrong-headed “experiment” that had been foisted upon the Russians and their associated minority nationalities by a bunch of Utopian fanatics, who only lost their grip and abandoned their global ambitions when their economic underpinnings rotted away. As President George Bush asserted at the United Nations in September 1991, “Communism held history captive for years.” ¹