【中文标题】有关苏联解体，你所了解到的一切都是错误的！
【原文标题】Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong
【登载媒体】外交政策
【原文作者】LEON ARON
【原文链接】http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/20/everything_you_think_you_know_about_the_collapse_of_the_soviet_union_is_wrong
革命总是出人意料的，可是俄国革命算得上是最令人出其不意的事件了。时间回到1991年，没有任何一个西方专家、学者、官员和政客预见到即将发生的苏联解体。当时的苏联一党专政、经济国有，克里姆林宫全面控制着国内和东欧的庞大帝国。据当时苏联的异见者们的回忆录判断，他们从未盼望国家会发生自我革命。戈尔巴乔夫在1985年3月成为共产党总书记，他的同僚们也没有预见到革命的危机。尽管社会上存在着一些有关苏联体制问题、规模和深度的不同意见，但没有人想到这些是对国家致命的问题，危机至少不在眼前。
这种难以解释的广泛的短视现象究竟来自哪里呢？西方专家未能预料到苏联的解体，部分原因在于一种历史修正主义——所谓的反反共产主义，这种思想夸大了苏联政权的稳定性与合法性。而这种思想的逐渐消亡又让那些对共产主义持相当强硬态度的人迷惑不解。美国在冷战时期国家战略的策划者之一George Kennan写道，纵观整个“当今社会国际事务的历史”，他认为“再没有什么事情比俄罗斯帝国和苏联这两个超级势力……突然彻底解体并消失更加令人难以理解和瞠目结舌的事情了，乍看之下，这似乎是无法解释的。”美国最优秀的历史学家、罗纳德里根总统的顾问Richard Pipes说苏联的革命“突如其来”。保守的《国际利益》杂志在1993年的特刊中发表了一系列有关苏联消亡的文章，题目是“苏联共产主义的怪异死亡”。
如果用更容易理解的方式来描述，整个世界的误判行为应当和那些不可解释的自然现象和异想天开事件一起，存放到社会科学研究档案中，然后被抛之脑后。然而，即使在事件发生20年后的今天，认为苏联依然会延续它的状态，或者顶多将逐渐开始一个长期的衰退过程，似乎仍然是一个理性的分析结果。
实际上，1985年的苏联所拥有的自然资源和人力资源，与10年前相比大致相同。当然，人民的生活水平比东欧国家低很多，更无法与西方相比。生活资源短缺、粮食定额配给、商店前的长队和极度贫穷的现象随处可见。但是，苏联历史上曾经经历过更严峻的国家灾难，却从不肯放松一点点对社会和经济的控制，更不用说完全市场化了。
1985年以前的主要经济指标也并未显示出任何灾难即将来临的迹象。1981年到1985年的GDP增长尽管比60年代和70年代缓慢，但也达到了平均每年1.9％的水平。这种无精打采但绝算不上是悲惨的增长模式持续到了1989年。自从法国大革命发生之后，预算赤字就被作为兆示革命危机即将到来的重要参数，1985年苏联的预算赤字不到GDP的2％。尽管这个数字增长迅速，但是在1989年也不到9％——在大多数经济体看来，完全在可控范围内。
油价从1980年66美元一桶猛跌到1986年20美元一桶，这对苏联经济当然是一个沉重的打击。但是如果考虑到通货膨胀的因素，1985年世界市场上的油价还是比1972年贵一些。到70年代末，油价只下跌了三分之一。与此同时，苏联国民收入水平在1985年增长超过2％。直到1990年的5年中，收入水平在抵消通货膨胀因素的前提下，每年增长超过7％。
是的，局势的确不大景气、令人担忧。但就像卫斯理大学教授Peter Rutland指出的：“慢性病毕竟不一定是致命的疾病。”即使研究革命经济项目的优秀学生Anders Åslund也提到，1985年到1987年的局势“根本没有任何特殊的迹象”。
从政权角度来看，政治局势甚至更加稳定。经过了20年对政治敌人的无情镇压，几乎所有的重要不同政见者都已经被捕入狱、被流放（与Andrei Sakharov在1980年之后的遭遇类似）、被迫移民，或者在集中营和监狱中死去。
似乎再也没有任何革命危机即将发生的迹象了，甚至在传统上颠覆一个国家的因素——外来侵略也完全不存在。与此相反，就像美国历史学家和外交家Stephen Sestanovich写道的，前十年里苏联成功地“实现了军队的外交方面的主要目的”。当然，苏联与阿富汗的战争似乎会持久进行下去，但对于一个有500万强大军队的国家来说，战争的损失完全可以忽略不计。实际上，尽管在1987年之后，维持一个庞大的帝国给苏联带来了沉重的经济负担，但阿富汗战争的成本依然算不上压死骆驼的最后一根稻草。1985年的战争开销大约是40亿美元到50亿美元，是苏联整体GDP中的九牛一毛。
美国也并非苏联解体的罪魁祸首。旨在抵抗或在可能情况下扭转苏联在第三世界国家中优势地位的“里根主义”，的确在苏联帝国周边造成了巨大的压力，比如阿富汗、安哥拉、尼加拉瓜和埃塞俄比亚，但苏联在此方面遇到的麻烦远非致命。
里根所倡导的战略防御计划作为未来昂贵军事竞争的前身，的确相当关键，但它远远达不到从军事上征服对方的目的，因为克里姆林宫完全了解，有效部署太空防御计划至少需要数十年。同样，尽管波兰工人在1980年发起的反共产主义和平起义让苏联领导人发现，东欧的窘迫局势让他们手中的东欧帝国根基不甚稳固，但是到了1985年，团结工会（译者注：波兰由一次独立的商会运动发展成要求政治改革的群众运动，鼓动人们在东欧反对共产主义政权）似乎不再具有前进的动力了。苏联似乎每隔12年就会在东欧进行一次血腥的“安抚”——1956年的匈牙利、1968年的捷克斯洛伐克、1980年的波兰——而置国际社会舆论于不顾。
换句话说，这一切都代表了一个全球实力和影响力都处于顶峰的苏联，无论其自身还是整个世界都这样认为。历史学家Adam Ulam后来提到：“我们似乎忘记了，在1985年，没有一个政府的执政地位像苏联一样牢固，它的政策与国家的前进方向完美吻合。”
当然，苏联崩溃背后隐藏着很多结构方面的原因——经济、政治、社会等，但这些原因都无法全面地解释这为什么会发生；为什么在这个时候发生。在1985年到1989年期间，国内没有任何重大的经济、政治、人口和其它社会结构恶化现象，那么这个国家和它的经济制度为什么突然就被如此多的人视为可耻、非法和不可容忍的呢？
就像所有现代社会中的革命一样，俄罗斯革命的导火索是颇不情愿的、自上而下的自由化趋势，其缘由不仅仅限于纠正经济问题和软化国际环境所需要采取的行动。戈尔巴乔夫伟大事业的核心内容无疑是理想化的：他希望建立一个更有道德的苏联。
尽管他们祭出的是改善经济的旗帜，但毫无疑问，戈尔巴乔夫和他的支持者们着手改革的最先切入点不是经济问题，而是道德问题。他们在苏联改革初期公开讲话的内容，现在听来只不过是他们对斯大林时代所造成的精神沦丧和意志腐蚀所感受到的痛苦。于是，就像任何一个重要革命起初的状态，他们开始绝望地寻找一些伟大问题的答案：幸福、有尊严的生活是什么样的？社会秩序和经济秩序由什么构成？一个体面、合法的国家是什么样的？这个国家与民权社会的关系应当是什么样的？
戈尔巴乔夫在1987年1月的中央委员会会议上说：“新的道德风尚已经在我们国家内逐渐形成。”他宣称公开和民主是他的苏联社会改革的根基。他在后来说：“我们已经开始重新评判道德、展开创造性的思维。我们不能再这样下去了，我们必须彻底改变生活，完全摆脱以前的错误行为。”他称此为自己的“道德立场”。
在1989年采访“公开性改革之父”Aleksandr Yakovlev时，他刚刚卸任为期10年的驻加拿大大使，在1983年回到苏联。他回忆道，国家的大变革就要到来了，人们宣称：“够了！我们不能再这样生活下去了，所有的事情都必须采用新的方法。我们必须重新思考我们的理念、我们的方法、我们对历史和未来的态度……大家都了解，我们不能再用以前的方式生活下去了，那是无法忍受的、令人羞耻的。”
对戈尔巴乔夫的总理Nikolai Ryzhkov来说，1985年提出的“社会道德基石”蕴含着“恐怖”的内容：
国家内部偷盗成风、行贿受贿横行、报纸和报告中满篇谎言。我们在谎言中狂欢，把金牌挂在一个又一个人的脖子上。所有这些——国家从上到下、从下到上都是如此。
戈尔巴乔夫自由化小集团中的另一位成员，外交部长Eduard Shevardnadze也被猖獗的法制缺失和腐败现象深深刺痛。他在1984年到1985年冬天对戈尔巴乔夫说：“一切都糟透了，必须要做改变。”
回到50年代，戈尔巴乔夫的前任赫鲁晓夫亲眼见到，斯大林建立在恐怖和谎言基础上的上层建筑摇摇欲坠。但是他这一批苏联第五代领导人对政权的适应能力保持一定的信心，戈尔巴乔夫和他的集团似乎有明确的善恶观念，认为这些都是可以用政治手段来纠正的。戈尔巴乔夫宣称，民主“不是一句口号，而是苏联改革的核心。”多年以后，他在接受采访时说：
苏联模式不仅仅在经济和社会层面上失败，同时在文化层面上也是失败的。我们的社会、我们的人民、受教育人士和知识分子纷纷拒绝接受国家的文化模式，因为它不尊重人民，在精神上和政治上压迫人民。
苏联改革在1989年引起了革命，这其中还有另外一个重要的“理想主义”原因：戈尔巴乔夫从内心厌恶暴力，当国家变革的深度和广度超越了他最初的目的时，他顽固地拒绝使用大规模的强迫手段。斯大林式的镇压行动，甚至“保护社会制度”的必要举措都让他觉得背离了自己根深蒂固的信仰。一位目击者这样回忆戈尔巴乔夫在80年代的讲话：“曾经有人对我们说，用拳头解决问题是令人自豪的。”他晃了晃自己的拳头，接着说：“通常情况下的确是这样，但是人们不喜欢这样的方式。”
当我们回顾克里姆林宫外发生的事情时，促成俄国革命的思想和理想扮演了极为重要的角色。Aleksandr Bovin是一位著名的苏联记者，后来成为公开化的先驱。他在1988年写道，苏联改革的核心理念，在人们对腐败、盗窃、谎言和无法正直从事工作的“愤怒”中已经“成熟”。另一个目击者回忆，“对大变革的期望已经充满人心”，出现了大批坚定拥护彻底改革的人。实际上，对戈尔巴乔夫上台掌权的期望如此强烈，以至于支持者们扭曲了他的真实主张。突然之间，思想变成了引发革命的有形的、实质性的因素。
用Yakovlev的话来说，曾经像“钢箍”一样把苏联政治和经济制度紧密结合在一起的官方思想形态的可信度，很快地降低了。新的观点让人们对政权和“价值观转移”的态度发生了变化。渐渐地，人们开始质疑政权的合法性。用Robert K. Merton著名的“托马斯定理”——“如果人们相信某件事情会发生，它就真的会发生”——来描述，苏联经济的确出现了退化现象，正是因为人们对政权的看法和观点发生了根本性的变化。
一位俄罗斯读者在1987年写信给一家苏联杂志社，说围绕在他身边的是“天翻地覆的思想变化”。我们知道他说的没错，因为苏联正在进行的是历史上第一次从一开始就遵循民意测验方向的大革命。1989年末，第一次有代表性的民意测验结果显示，大多数人支持总统竞选，并合法化苏维埃共产党之外的党派——这之前的4代一党专政领导人都宣布独立党派非法。1990年中，半数以上接受民意测验的俄罗斯地区居民赞成，如果“政府不干涉个人行为”，“一个健康的经济体制”将会形成。6个月之后，全俄罗斯民意测验显示，56％的公众支持立即或逐渐向市场经济转化。又过了一年，支持市场经济的公众增加到64％。
这些向社会灌输“思想变化”的人，与那些点燃近代重大革命导火索的人是一样的：作家、记者、艺术家。就像Alexis de Tocqueville所说，这些人“引发了公众对不满的关注，引发了具体的公众态度……最终让革命变化成为迫切需求。”突然之间，国家的“政治教育”变成了“这些人手中的文字”。
苏联也是同样。报刊亭前有时在清晨6点就排起了长队，报纸在两个小时内就销售一空。那些思想解放的报纸和杂志编辑部收到了空前数量的订购申请，这证明了那些支持公开化的著名评论人士所具有的强大力量，用Samuel Johnson的话来说，这些人是“真理的导师”。其中有经济学家Nikolai Shmelyov；政治哲学家Igor Klyamkin、Alexander Tsypko；开明的专栏作家Vasily Selyunin、Yuri Chernichenko、Igor Vinogradov和Ales Adamovich、记者Yegor Yakovlev、Len Karpinsky、Fedor Burlatsky等等数十人。
在这些人看来，道德复兴是最首要的任务，它的意义不啻于对苏联的政治经济体制做彻底检修。不仅仅要颠覆社会道德观念，还要彻底唤醒个人意识——俄罗斯民族个性的变化。Mikhail Antonov 1987年在《Oktyabr》杂志上发表的一篇题为“我们身上发生了什么？”的文章，他呼吁：人们必须要得到“拯救”，不是被拯救于外部危机，而是“首先被拯救于他们自身，拯救于让高贵的人性品格逐渐消亡的过程。”怎样拯救呢？我们必须要让自由主义火焰永远燃烧下去，让它变得不可抗拒——不是赫鲁晓夫转瞬即逝的“暖春”，而是气候的彻底变化。那么怎样让自由主义不受侵蚀呢？首先，我们需要一个“对精神奴役免疫的”、自由的人。一份主要的公开化运动刊物《Ogoniok》在1989年2月发表文章称，只有“不会沦为警察告密者、拒绝变节、没有谎言的人，无论他/她以谁的名义，才能把我们从极权主义复兴的漩涡中拯救出来。”
让我们梳理一下这个逻辑：拯救人民必须先拯救苏联改革，而要拯救苏联改革，它就必须能够“从内部”改变人民。这似乎不难理解。那些想通了的人似乎在假设，苏联改革拯救国家和人们摆脱心灵泥潭是紧密交织在一起，甚至不可分割的两件事情。既然如此，就随它去吧。重要的是把人民从“农奴”和“奴隶”重新改造为公民。Boris Vasiliev是一部以二战为背景的畅销小说作者，他的作品被改编成同样受欢迎的电影。他高喊：“够了！谎言、奴态和胆怯已经够多了！我们要记得，我们是公民，是一个令人自豪的国度的自豪的公民。”
Tocqueville在仔细研究了法国大革命的历史之后，发表了著名的观点：革命后上台的新政权往往比被推翻的旧政权更加残暴。为什么是这样呢？Tocqueville猜测原因在于，事实或许的确“好了一些”，但是人们变得“更加敏感”了。
像往常一样，Tocqueville又在埋头研究重要的内容。从开国之父到雅各宾派再到布尔什维克，革命者们几乎是在同一面旗帜下战斗：人类尊严的进步。正是通过对自由和公民权利的探索，公开化运动的那些颠覆性思想才得以存活，而且有可能持续下去。《Ogoniok》杂志上有一张俄国革命的标志性照片，Moskovskie Novosti和Boris Yeltsin骄傲地站在坦克上。这就像现在互联网上的一些照片——革命的阿拉伯人站在开罗塔利尔广场上的抗议人群中、站在突尼斯的阿拉伯式宫殿旁、站在班加西的街道上、站在叙利亚被炸弹摧毁的城镇中。排除语言和政治文化因素，他们的形象所激发出的感情是完全一样的。
水果小贩Mohamed Bouazizi的自焚行为点燃了突尼斯革命的导火索，随后引发了2011年的阿拉伯之春。突尼斯的一位示威者对美国记者说，他这么做“不是因为失业而感到绝望”，而是“因为他……希望与地方当局交涉问题而被殴打——这是对政府的不满。”在班加西，利比亚起义者集结在一起高喊：“我们要铲除腐败！”在埃及，人们“挺身而出的动力是长久以来被压制的情绪让他们不想再生活在恐惧中，不想被剥夺自由，不想再被自己的领导人羞辱。”纽约时报专栏作家Thomas Friedman在2月从开罗报道了这一消息，1991年的时候他如果能在莫斯科那该多好。
“先尊严，后面包”是突尼斯革命的口号，突尼斯经济在过去二十年中保持每年2％到8％的增长比例。随着油价上涨，处于革命边缘的利比亚也有与此类似的经济现象。这两个例子说明，在现代社会中，经济增长不能代替公民的自豪感和自尊感。如果我们忘记这个事实，那么后苏联时代的“颜色革命”、阿拉伯之春，以及迟早不可避免的中国民主革命（就像苏联一样）会让我们继续手足无措。吉尔吉斯斯坦总统Roza Otunbayeva在三月份写道：“万能的神赐予我们伟大的尊严，我们不能容忍剥夺我们天赋权利和自由的行为，无论‘稳固的’独裁统治者允诺给我们什么利益。聚集在市中心广场上的是那些神奇的人们，无论男女老幼、宗教信仰、政治倾向，他们宣布，我们受够了。”
当然，巨大的道德力量和对真理、对至善的追求仅仅是成功推翻一个国家政权的必要条件，而非充分条件。这股力量或许可以让旧政体下台，但是仅凭一扫而过的旋风无法征服根深蒂固的独裁政治文化。建立在道德革命基础上的民主制度，或许无法在一个没有自我组织和自我约束的社会环境中演化出一个运作良好的民主社会。这也说明了为什么阿拉伯之春的承诺在实现过程中遭遇了巨大的障碍，就像俄罗斯的情况一样。70年的独裁统治造就了国家内部的分裂和不信任，俄罗斯的道德复兴因此而困难重重。尽管戈尔巴乔夫和叶利钦推翻了一个帝国，但是无数俄罗斯人思想中残留的帝王思维让他们更愿意接受一个新的独裁者——普京，他的宣传口号是“敌对势力的包围”和“俄罗斯人站起来了”。而且，斯大林主义给国家造成的悲剧（和负罪感）一直没有得到充分的正视，也没有被偿还。这种情绪腐蚀着道德观念，就像那些歌颂公开化运动者一心想看到的。
这就是为什么今天的俄罗斯再一次有发生苏联革命的迹象。尽管90年代的市场改革和当今的国际油价为数百万俄罗斯人带来了史无前例的经济繁荣景象，但是统治集团的腐败、新形式的监察制度和公开蔑视公众意见的行为导致了普遍的排外和仇世情绪，程度甚至超过了80年代。
你只需在莫斯科待上几天，与知识分子谈一谈，或者到俄罗斯最有名的网络论坛LiveJournal上看一看里边的帖子，或者到最独立的反对派网站去看一看，就会发现80年代的格言“我们不能再继续这样生活下去”又变成了热门的信仰文章。道德对自由的诉求已经自我发展起来，这次不仅限于亲民主的活动人士和知识分子的小圈子中。今年2月份，由梅德韦杰夫总统任主席的自由派智囊机构当代发展委员会，发表了一篇文章，看起来像是2012年总统竞选宣言：
过去，俄罗斯需要自由来生活（得更好），现在则需要自由来确保生存……我们这个时代的挑战是要对价值体系重新思考，并提炼出新的思想和观点。我们无法在旧思想基础上建立一个新的国家……（国家对个人的）最好投资是自由和法制，以及对个人尊严的尊重。
正是与此相同的对自尊和骄傲的道德诉求，从这个国家历史和现今无情的道德桎梏中脱身而出，在短短几年时间里掏空了强大的苏联帝国，让其丧失了合法性，把它烧成了一个空壳，最终在1991年8月轰然崩溃。这一探索才智和道德的旅程，绝对是20世纪最后一个伟大革命的核心内容。
原文：
Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin's control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system's problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon.
Whence such strangely universal shortsightedness? The failure of Western experts to anticipate the Soviet Union's collapse may in part be attributed to a sort of historical revisionism -- call it anti-anti-communism -- that tended to exaggerate the Soviet regime's stability and legitimacy. Yet others who could hardly be considered soft on communism were just as puzzled by its demise. One of the architects of the U.S. strategy in the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union." Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading American historian of Russia as well as an advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution "unexpected." A collection of essays about the Soviet Union's demise in a special 1993 issue of the conservative National Interest magazine was titled "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism."
Were it easier to understand, this collective lapse in judgment could have been safely consigned to a mental file containing other oddities and caprices of the social sciences, and then forgotten. Yet even today, at a 20-year remove, the assumption that the Soviet Union would continue in its current state, or at most that it would eventually begin a long, drawn-out decline, seems just as rational a conclusion.
Indeed, the Soviet Union in 1985 possessed much of the same natural and human resources that it had 10 years before. Certainly, the standard of living was much lower than in most of Eastern Europe, let alone the West. Shortages, food rationing, long lines in stores, and acute poverty were endemic. But the Soviet Union had known far greater calamities and coped without sacrificing an iota of the state's grip on society and economy, much less surrendering it.
Nor did any key parameter of economic performance prior to 1985 point to a rapidly advancing disaster. From 1981 to 1985 the growth of the country's GDP, though slowing down compared with the 1960s and 1970s, averaged 1.9 percent a year. The same lackadaisical but hardly catastrophic pattern continued through 1989. Budget deficits, which since the French Revolution have been considered among the prominent portents of a coming revolutionary crisis, equaled less than 2 percent of GDP in 1985. Although growing rapidly, the gap remained under 9 percent through 1989 -- a size most economists would find quite manageable.
The sharp drop in oil prices, from $66 a barrel in 1980 to $20 a barrel in 1986 (in 2000 prices) certainly was a heavy blow to Soviet finances. Still, adjusted for inflation, oil was more expensive in the world markets in 1985 than in 1972, and only one-third lower than throughout the 1970s. And at the same time, Soviet incomes increased more than 2 percent in 1985, and inflation-adjusted wages continued to rise in the next five years through 1990 at an average of over 7 percent.
Yes, the stagnation was obvious and worrisome. But as Wesleyan University professor Peter Rutland has pointed out, "Chronic ailments, after all, are not necessarily fatal." Even the leading student of the revolution's economic causes, Anders Åslund, notes that from 1985 to 1987, the situation "was not at all dramatic."
From the regime's point of view, the political circumstances were even less troublesome. After 20 years of relentless suppression of political opposition, virtually all the prominent dissidents had been imprisoned, exiled (as Andrei Sakharov had been since 1980), forced to emigrate, or had died in camps and jails.
There did not seem to be any other signs of a pre-revolutionary crisis either, including the other traditionally assigned cause of state failure -- external pressure. On the contrary, the previous decade was correctly judged to amount "to the realization of all major Soviet military and diplomatic desiderata," as American historian and diplomat Stephen Sestanovich has written. Of course, Afghanistan increasingly looked like a long war, but for a 5-million-strong Soviet military force the losses there were negligible. Indeed, though the enormous financial burden of maintaining an empire was to become a major issue in the post-1987 debates, the cost of the Afghan war itself was hardly crushing: Estimated at $4 billion to $5 billion in 1985, it was an insignificant portion of the Soviet GDP.
Nor was America the catalyzing force. The "Reagan Doctrine" of resisting and, if possible, reversing the Soviet Union's advances in the Third World did put considerable pressure on the perimeter of the empire, in places like Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia. Yet Soviet difficulties there, too, were far from fatal.
As a precursor to a potentially very costly competition, Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative indeed was crucial -- but it was far from heralding a military defeat, given that the Kremlin knew very well that effective deployment of space-based defenses was decades away. Similarly, though the 1980 peaceful anti-communist uprising of the Polish workers had been a very disturbing development for Soviet leaders, underscoring the precariousness of their European empire, by 1985 Solidarity looked exhausted. The Soviet Union seemed to have adjusted to undertaking bloody "pacifications" in Eastern Europe every 12 years -- Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980 -- without much regard for the world's opinion.
This, in other words, was a Soviet Union at the height of its global power and influence, both in its own view and in the view of the rest of the world. "We tend to forget," historian Adam Ulam would note later, "that in 1985, no government of a major state appeared to be as firmly in power, its policies as clearly set in their course, as that of the USSR."
Certainly, there were plenty of structural reasons -- economic, political, social -- why the Soviet Union should have collapsed as it did, yet they fail to explain fully how it happened when it happened. How, that is, between 1985 and 1989, in the absence of sharply worsening economic, political, demographic, and other structural conditions, did the state and its economic system suddenly begin to be seen as shameful, illegitimate, and intolerable by enough men and women to become doomed?
LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL modern revolutions, the latest Russian one was started by a hesitant liberalization "from above" -- and its rationale extended well beyond the necessity to correct the economy or make the international environment more benign. The core of Gorbachev's enterprise was undeniably idealistic: He wanted to build a more moral Soviet Union.
For though economic betterment was their banner, there is little doubt that Gorbachev and his supporters first set out to right moral, rather than economic, wrongs. Most of what they said publicly in the early days of perestroika now seems no more than an expression of their anguish over the spiritual decline and corrosive effects of the Stalinist past. It was the beginning of a desperate search for answers to the big questions with which every great revolution starts: What is a good, dignified life? What constitutes a just social and economic order? What is a decent and legitimate state? What should such a state's relationship with civil society be?
"A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country," Gorbachev told the Central Committee at the January 1987 meeting where he declared glasnost -- openness -- and democratization to be the foundation of his perestroika, or restructuring, of Soviet society. "A reappraisal of values and their creative rethinking is under way." Later, recalling his feeling that "we couldn't go on like that any longer, and we had to change life radically, break away from the past malpractices," he called it his "moral position."
In a 1989 interview, the "godfather of glasnost," Aleksandr Yakovlev, recalled that, returning to the Soviet Union in 1983 after 10 years as the ambassador to Canada, he felt the moment was at hand when people would declare, "Enough! We cannot live like this any longer. Everything must be done in a new way. We must reconsider our concepts, our approaches, our views of the past and our future.… There has come an understanding that it is simply impossible to live as we lived before -- intolerably, humiliatingly."
To Gorbachev's prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, the "moral [nravstennoe] state of the society" in 1985 was its "most terrifying" feature:
[We] stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another. And all of this -- from top to bottom and from bottom to top.
Another member of Gorbachev's very small original coterie of liberalizers, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, was just as pained by ubiquitous lawlessness and corruption. He recalls telling Gorbachev in the winter of 1984-1985: "Everything is rotten. It has to be changed."
Back in the 1950s, Gorbachev's predecessor Nikita Khrushchev had seen firsthand how precarious was the edifice of the house that Stalin built on terror and lies. But this fifth generation of Soviet leaders was more confident of the regime's resilience. Gorbachev and his group appeared to believe that what was right was also politically manageable. Democratization, Gorbachev declared, was "not a slogan but the essence of perestroika." Many years later he told interviewers:
The Soviet model was defeated not only on the economic and social levels; it was defeated on a cultural level. Our society, our people, the most educated, the most intellectual, rejected that model on the cultural level because it does not respect the man, oppresses him spiritually and politically.
That reforms gave rise to a revolution by 1989 was due largely to another "idealistic" cause: Gorbachev's deep and personal aversion to violence and, hence, his stubborn refusal to resort to mass coercion when the scale and depth of change began to outstrip his original intent. To deploy Stalinist repression even to "preserve the system" would have been a betrayal of his deepest convictions. A witness recalls Gorbachev saying in the late 1980s, "We are told that we should pound the fist on the table," and then clenching his hand in an illustrative fist. "Generally speaking," continued the general secretary, "it could be done. But one does not feel like it."
THE ROLE OF ideas and ideals in bringing about the Russian revolution comes into even sharper relief when we look at what was happening outside the Kremlin. A leading Soviet journalist and later a passionate herald of glasnost, Aleksandr Bovin, wrote in 1988 that the ideals of perestroika had "ripened" amid people's increasing "irritation" at corruption, brazen thievery, lies, and the obstacles in the way of honest work. Anticipations of "substantive changes were in the air," another witness recalled, and they forged an appreciable constituency for radical reforms. Indeed, the expectations that greeted the coming to power of Gorbachev were so strong, and growing, that they shaped his actual policy. Suddenly, ideas themselves became a material, structural factor in the unfolding revolution.
The credibility of official ideology, which in Yakovlev's words, held the entire Soviet political and economic system together "like hoops of steel," was quickly weakening. New perceptions contributed to a change in attitudes toward the regime and "a shift in values." Gradually, the legitimacy of the political arrangements began to be questioned. In an instance of Robert K. Merton's immortal "Thomas theorem" -- "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequence" -- the actual deterioration of the Soviet economy became consequential only after and because of a fundamental shift in how the regime's performance was perceived and evaluated.
Writing to a Soviet magazine in 1987, a Russian reader called what he saw around him a "radical break [perelom] in consciousness." We know that he was right because Russia's is the first great revolution whose course was charted in public opinion polls almost from the beginning. Already at the end of 1989, the first representative national public opinion survey found overwhelming support for competitive elections and the legalization of parties other than the Soviet Communist Party -- after four generations under a one-party dictatorship and with independent parties still illegal. By mid-1990, more than half those surveyed in a Russian region agreed that "a healthy economy" was more likely if "the government allows individuals to do as they wish." Six months later, an all-Russia poll found 56 percent supporting a rapid or gradual transition to a market economy. Another year passed, and the share of the pro-market respondents increased to 64 percent.
Those who instilled this remarkable "break in consciousness" were no different from those who touched off the other classic revolutions of modern times: writers, journalists, artists. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, such men and women "help to create that general awareness of dissatisfaction, that solidified public opinion, which … creates effective demand for revolutionary change." Suddenly, "the entire political education" of the nation becomes the "work of its men of letters."
And so it was in Soviet Russia. The lines to newspaper kiosks -- sometimes crowds around the block that formed at six in the morning, with each daily run often sold out in two hours -- and the skyrocketing subscriptions to the leading liberal newspapers and magazines testify to the devastating power of the most celebrated essayists of glasnost, or in Samuel Johnson's phrase, the "teachers of truth": the economist Nikolai Shmelyov; the political philosophers Igor Klyamkin and Alexander Tsypko; brilliant essayists like Vasily Selyunin, Yuri Chernichenko, Igor Vinogradov, and Ales Adamovich; the journalists Yegor Yakovlev, Len Karpinsky, Fedor Burlatsky, and at least two dozen more.
To them, a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject. As Mikhail Antonov declared in a seminal 1987 essay, "So What Is Happening to Us?" in the magazine Oktyabr, the people had to be "saved" -- not from external dangers but "most of all from themselves, from the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the noblest human qualities." Saved how? By making the nascent liberalization fateful, irreversible -- not Khrushchev's short-lived "thaw," but a climate change. And what would guarantee this irreversibility? Above all, the appearance of a free man who would be "immune to the recurrences of spiritual slavery." The weekly magazine Ogoniok, a key publication of glasnost, wrote in February 1989 that only "man incapable of being a police informer, of betraying, and of lies, no matter in whose or what name, can save us from the re-emergence of a totalitarian state."
The circuitous nature of this reasoning -- to save the people one had to save perestroika, but perestroika could be saved only if it was capable of changing man "from within" -- did not seem to trouble anyone. Those who thought out loud about these matters seemed to assume that the country's salvation through perestroika and the extrication of its people from the spiritual morass were tightly -- perhaps, inextricably -- interwoven, and left it at that. What mattered was reclaiming the people to citizenship from "serfdom" and "slavery." "Enough!" declared Boris Vasiliev, the author of a popular novella of the period about World War II, which was made into an equally well-received film. "Enough lies, enough servility, enough cowardice. Let's remember, finally, that we are all citizens. Proud citizens of a proud nation!"
DELVING INTO THE causes of the French Revolution, de Tocqueville famously noted that regimes overthrown in revolutions tend to be less repressive than the ones preceding them. Why? Because, de Tocqueville surmised, though people "may suffer less," their "sensibility is exACerbated."
As usual, Tocqueville was onto something hugely important. From the Founding Fathers to the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, revolutionaries have fought under essentially the same banner: advancement of human dignity. It is in the search for dignity through liberty and citizenship that glasnost's subversive sensibility lives -- and will continue to live. Just as the pages of Ogoniok and Moskovskie Novosti must take pride of place next to Boris Yeltsin on the tank as symbols of the latest Russian revolution, so should Internet pages in Arabic stand as emblems of the present revolution next to the images of rebellious multitudes in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the Casbah plaza in Tunis, the streets of Benghazi, and the blasted towns of Syria. Languages and political cultures aside, their messages and the feelings they inspired were remarkably similar.
The fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation set off the Tunisian uprising that began the Arab Spring of 2011, did so "not because he was jobless," a demonstrator in Tunis told an American reporter, but "because he … went to talk to the [local authorities] responsible for his problem and he was beaten -- it was about the government." In Benghazi, the Libyan revolt started with the crowd chanting, "The people want an end to corruption!" In Egypt, the crowds were "all about the self-empowerment of a long-repressed people no longer willing to be afraid, no longer willing to be deprived of their freedom, and no longer willing to be humiliated by their own leaders," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reported from Cairo this February. He could have been reporting from Moscow in 1991.
"Dignity Before Bread!" was the slogan of the Tunisian revolution. The Tunisian economy had grown between 2 and 8 percent a year in the two decades preceding the revolt. With high oil prices, Libya on the brink of uprising also enjoyed an economic boom of sorts. Both are reminders that in the modern world, economic progress is not a substitute for the pride and self-respect of citizenship. Unless we remember this well, we will continue to be surprised -- by the "color revolutions" in the post-Soviet world, the Arab Spring, and, sooner or later, an inevitable democratic upheaval in China -- just as we were in Soviet Russia. "The Almighty provided us with such a powerful sense of dignity that we cannot tolerate the denial of our inalienable rights and freedoms, no matter what real or supposed benefits are provided by 'stable' authoritarian regimes," the president of Kyrgyzstan, Roza Otunbayeva, wrote this March. "It is the magic of people, young and old, men and women of different religions and political beliefs, who come together in city squares and announce that enough is enough."
Of course, the magnificent moral impulse, the search for truth and goodness, is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the successful remaking of a country. It may be enough to bring down the ancien regime, but not to overcome, in one fell swoop, a deep-seated authoritarian national political culture. The roots of the democratic institutions spawned by morally charged revolutions may prove too shallow to sustain a functioning democracy in a society with precious little tradition of grassroots self-organization and self-rule. This is something that is likely to prove a huge obstacle to the carrying out of the promise of the Arab Spring -- as it has proved in Russia. The Russian moral renaissance was thwarted by the atomization and mistrust bred by 70 years of totalitarianism. And though Gorbachev and Yeltsin dismantled an empire, the legacy of imperial thinking for millions of Russians has since made them receptive to neo-authoritarian Putinism, with its propaganda leitmotifs of "hostile encirclement" and "Russia rising off its knees." Moreover, the enormous national tragedy (and national guilt) of Stalinism has never been fully explored and atoned for, corrupting the entire moral enterprise, just as the glasnost troubadours so passionately warned.
Which is why today's Russia appears once again to be inching toward another perestroika moment. Although the market reforms of the 1990s and today's oil prices have combined to produce historically unprecedented prosperity for millions, the brazen corruption of the ruling elite, new-style censorship, and open disdain for public opinion have spawned alienation and cynicism that are beginning to reach (if not indeed surpass) the level of the early 1980s.
One needs only to spend a few days in Moscow talking to the intelligentsia or, better yet, to take a quick look at the blogs on LiveJournal (Zhivoy Zhurnal), Russia's most popular Internet platform, or at the sites of the top independent and opposition groups to see that the motto of the 1980s -- "We cannot live like this any longer!" -- is becoming an article of faith again. The moral imperative of freedom is reasserting itself, and not just among the limited circles of pro-democracy activists and intellectuals. This February, the Institute of Contemporary Development, a liberal think tank chaired by President Dmitry Medvedev, published what looked like a platform for the 2012 Russian presidential election:
In the past Russia needed liberty to live [better]; it must now have it in order to survive.… The challenge of our times is an overhaul of the system of values, the forging of new consciousness. We cannot build a new country with the old thinking.… The best investment [the state can make in man] is Liberty and the Rule of Law. And respect for man's Dignity.
It was the same intellectual and moral quest for self-respect and pride that, beginning with a merciless moral scrutiny of the country's past and present, within a few short years hollowed out the mighty Soviet state, deprived it of legitimacy, and turned it into a burned-out shell that crumbled in August 1991. The tale of this intellectual and moral journey is an absolutely central story of the 20th century's last great revolution.
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发表于 2011-6-23 10:47
