ABSTRACT
The events of 1989-91 are generally regarded as a global and terminal crisis of Communism. A closer look at their background and outcome raises some doubts about this conventional diagnosis: it can be argued that the coincidence of major turning-points in Eastern and Western regions of the Communist world led to the artificial assimilation of crises that were in fact developing along different lines and at a different pace. This is not to deny that the optical illusion had some real and important consequences. The vision of a uniform crisis, affecting all versions of the Soviet model for the same reasons, became a de-legitimizing factor in its own right; it reinforced the disintegrative trends and undermined the power structures. Moreover, the initiatives and reactions of the main protagonists were partly determined by their perceptions of the international context. It seems likely that the protest movement in China was encouraged by the reform process in the Soviet Union; Eastern European leaders were probably more demoralized than comforted by the Chinese way of restoring order; and there can be no doubt about the impact of Eastern European precedents on developments inside the Soviet Union. But the underlying trends were more varied than overdramatized accounts of the collapse would suggest. The transformation of Chinese Communism had, as argued above, passed a critical point some time before the Soviet crisis turned into a decomposing process. On this view, the Chinese prelude to the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 was a turning-point in the prolonged conflict between the Soviet model and the Chinese environment, but neither the beginning nor the end of structural change. The pattern of the Chinese crisis, markedly different from the course of events in the Soviet bloc, reflected both its direct antecedents and its broader background. The ‘pro-democracy movement’ (as it is usually described, although its diverse components were neither equally committed to this goal nor in agreement about its meaning) demanded reforms, but it also represented a backlash against unbalanced reform policies and their uncontrollable consequences.
This constellation was unique to China. It led to a mass mobilization of urban society, but the passivity of the much larger rural population helped the regime to resist and mount a counter-offensive. In the much more urbanized societies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a lower (and sometimes very low) level of popular mobilization was enough to reinforce the self-destructive trends within the apparatus. Last but not least, the imperial factor as such played no role in the Chinese crisis: the main conflict took place in the metropolitan centres and had nothing to do with trouble on the periphery.
