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hello again welcoming crosstalk i'm peter lavelle the party is finally over at least it was twenty years ago the end of the communist party of the soviet union was the final step before the collapse of the us this all right so what are the parties positive and negative legacies could have it reformed itself and changed the course of history. and. crossed at the end of the communist party of the soviet union i'm joined by ronald suny and i'm ann arbor is a professor of social and political history at the university of michigan in princeton we have mark bystander he is professor of politics at princeton university all right gentlemen this is cross-eyed that mean you can jump in anytime you want mark if i go to you first in princeton the primary reason why i'm doing

this not only is it the twentieth anniversary of the end of the communist party of the soviet union but to remind people of the events of nine hundred ninety one and how much it really changed the world and how we how the world is. moved on from one great current epic conflict to maybe another epic conflict and we can throw in the economic crisis here what is the most important legacy of what happened twenty years ago in a country that i'm living in right now russia well i think for there's a global legacy obviously the end of the cold war the end of the division of the planet within russia or russia had been ruled soviet union had been ruled by a party state essentially and by the communist party ended in essence and as it unraveled and essence that control over the state unravelled and also its control over the public sphere also and so there was a whole rush of of movements and of tendencies that just took over the pa. you

know couldn't make itself felt under the calm under communist rule right on the fine go to you do you think it's underestimated the day when we think about the the all powerful communist party the soviet union and it was pointed out just a second ago it's global ramifications because it just wasn't the soviet union itself it was an entire of what people would call an empire some people even called an evil empire this epic conflict between the west and the communist world came to an end when the communist party finally collapsed and peacefully a. right maybe that's one of the latest is that there wasn't a civil war there wasn't a great deal of bloodletting there were some ethnic conflicts in different places like when i got in the car barking georgian project but it was a relatively smooth deflating of the system i would say that one of the legacies of soviet party rule two to emphasize what mark just said

is that the party was so much a monopoly of communication of political activity that there was no room for alternatives to appear so that when the party sort of disintegrated when gorbachev loosen things up there was really nothing there to take its place and so the weak civil society allowed again for eventually the state to rebuild and to become more authoritarian marc when i studied under martin malian he used to always tell me that when totalitarian societies and states collapse they collapse totally if you agree with that statement because again we were all looking at the the how powerful the soviet union the communist party the soviet union was but once it collapsed everything else went with it i mean it was that coastal collapse. well you know actually the state didn't collapse in many ways the state actually fragmented so they're little pieces of the state in fact and in some places the you

know members of the politburo are actually still in power such as in kazakhstan so i think. you know exaggerated. plus you know i think they were all various ways in which the institutions that were there under communism played a major role in the whole transition process that didn't totally disappear in fact ironically the communists were in the forefront of the movements that that did the soviet union so if you look at the leadership of the estonian popular front if you look at the at the leadership of the alternative movements communists actually were very prominently represented within the well it's interesting well if i go back to you but you know if we look at the i've always limited to the communist party of russia the russian federation is that it never took the it failed to take the path of european socialism i mean they still talk about plan in here they talk about marx they did the stuff they do the vast majority of the people in this country are not interested anymore the way you do point out that it does still do well in

elections and we can talk about why that is but it's certainly not a huge amount of power and it will never be that again i mean it's interesting that is that we have earlier in the in the early and late eighty's and early one nine hundred ninety one it was the communist party that unraveled itself but then once it's finally collapsed once it was banned it didn't want to really reform itself any further is now i think very rigid. it's not quite the same party but it is part of that gorbachev rule over this great big soviet communist party was made up of all kinds of different factions there were conservatives he coached all types there were more reformers there were quite radicals. you know it so there was gorbachev was sort of in the center he moved gradually rather steadily however towards social democracy and by all august one thousand nine hundred ninety one you can say that he was like a european social democrat he then failed in the coup the coup which then led to

the olsen's rise and what was left of the communist party what became the new russian federation communist party was basically the right wing of the old party so they they are i'm some ways a kind of semi fascist party they are very nationalistic they're very authoritarian and they don't have much in common with the kind of european social democracy or i would say with the regional rather democratic radically democratic aims of karl marx and marshall do you think that. if it provocateur did glasnost and perestroika destroy the communist party of the soviet union. i'd have to say of the two glasnost destroyed the communist party of the soviet union the communist party of the soviet union was built as an instrument basically to control the state and to control the public sphere and once you open up the public sphere that the communist party really couldn't control it that the the debates that tore the communist party apart were essentially over the impact of glasnost now

a lot of people talk about the economy and how the economy and economic competition destroyed the communist party. there is some truth in that in that but i think that that really wasn't the central element of what happened in fact i think the soviet union could have survived for a long time and had no no pressing economic crisis what it had was a legitimacy crisis and. that's where. you know glasnost came in. you know i'm sure noble occurred for instance it just highlighted the the gulf between the party and and the truth and so it was basically already you know six or seven months after glasnost started they were very difficult to bates' taking place within the politburo there were splits that already occurred and all of the subsequent debates kind of flowed out of what were the consequences of glasnost could it be controlled and so on and so the party

died because they couldn't make this transition from the problem into a competitive. i would say a marketplace of ideas well it's actually i mean let's look at the legitimacy issue because i think a lot of people agree with mark there what was the major for point of legitimacy for the party because it looks like it went from communist ideals of lenin marx and engels and all that to you it legitimized its rule because it won the second world war but decades later you can still keep saying well it's because we won the war that's why we want to have exclusive power i mean at a certain point you just can't keep playing that card over and over again right there it's true that even with there was a kind of we go go ahead go ahead round go ahead. there was a there was a kind of we were in a way of the ideology there was a kind of disillusionment that sort of started at the top among some party

officials like gorbachev and shevardnadze like and also among the intelligentsia more progressive or liberal intelligentsia within the party so that that actually happened but it's something that's important to remember the soviet system disintegrated always was reformed radically by gorbachev and successfully before the soviet union itself collapsed in other words the system has to be separated from the state itself by nine hundred ninety already you have a multi-party system operating you have you do have a marketplace of ideas very rough glasses allowing of course all kinds of opinions quite radical opinions to flourish you have the beginnings of a market economy you have the end of censorship you have the end of the monopoly of the communist party that then eventually and that that that could have survived it is there would have been hard but of course the soviet union had suffered and survived other great disintegrating events like world war two this was not as

radical and destructive a moment as that and then came this other moment that is the failure to achieve the union treaty in one thousand nine hundred one yeltsin's move after the coup and then the ultimate conspiracy the kind of coup that yeltsin and others carried out to destroy the soviet union as a state mark what do you think about that i mean the the loss of of legitimacy because you had. yeah i was going to say i don't agree with ron on that i think by by the time that i nine hundred ninety i think events had already gained a momentum that they were pushing not only to the disintegration of the soviet union but also i think they were pushing towards the the breakup of the of the communist party so by nine hundred ninety it's true that the party had had legalized its had legalized opposition activity. of course it's still

a centrally monopolized power in moscow although in various republics other movements had essentially or were about to come to power. but it in fact i think that i thought that point in time the party was right on the edge of splitting into into pieces so there was this debate between the democratic platform which represented the reformist wing of the party and then there was the right wing of the party the conservatives and gorbachev was left having to make a choice between the two now he could have chosen a democratic platform but if he chose the democratic platform i think you would have found that the right wing would have proper broken off of the party. and in fact the russian communist party in the creation of the russian communist party as an entity was not necessarily favored by gorbachev but it was something that the political right really wanted to have happen so it was it was kind of a break off so i think the party was factionalized thing by one thousand nine hundred. and after the break we'll continue our discussion on the dissolution of

the soviet communist party state with our. wealthy british scientists are. tied to the tightly packed. markets why not. come to find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report on. the same canada and the us that it is

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the k.k.k. sisters. if you want to be. welcoming to cross talk about peter lavelle to mind you were talking about the end of the communist party of the soviet union. in the book and you can see. and now we're joined by donald jensen in washington he's a resident fellow at the center for transatlantic relations ok let's let's break it out a little bit here for a lot of people in this country in russia the russian federation is that the end of the soviet communist part of the soviet union and the soviet union itself all in very close proximity is really about personal ambition about you know between yeltsin and between got a bunch of and it didn't matter not be provocative here it didn't matter the damage they both left behind it was a power grab and it was for prestige and and legacy essentially and they didn't

care if the promised party fell apart or the soviet union if they it was their place in history and how they would rule in the future obviously mr yeltsin won. yes very much. a couple points i agree peter that i was it was a power grab between those two leaders but i think it's more deep as well and two elements i don't think we may have touched upon and sufficient one would be the role of nationalism not only russian nationalism which yeltsin managed to put himself ahead of and also in the various ethnic republics i think it's no coincidence that the leaders of several central several central asian republics today were or have been former communist party bosses and i think the second point i would add would be the struggle over resources as a legitimacy i wrote in one of your guest mentions erosion which i had happened steadily yes but accelerated early so when the eighties i think even a lot of the elite lost lost confidence in the system and thus became

a scramble for resources i think if you look at most of the early oligarchs and see some of those still around a lot of them got got their start of the komsomol in the eighty's mr court of course who for example and i think that reflects the massive loss of faith in the system by even the elites it's interesting because i go back to you in princeton to me it was a system that lost belief in itself as i remember living in poland in the one nine hundred eighty s. and i could remember even commies people who were members officially members of the communist party used to joke with me and say there are more communists in berkeley than in poland decay system that last belief in its own ideology it was probably true to a vote for italy go ahead. and that i think that's right. yeah there was a gradual erosion you know i think it's easy to dismiss communism now and say well no one believed that by the time you know glasnost emerged or by the time that that's developed for its demise but i think there were some people who did believe

in it. and believe in the ideology of the state the ideology of the state as we were talking about before was not the ideology of work or revolution it was the i. ideology of actually soviet nationalism in some ways. but i think that in the beginning in the in the late seventy's and early eighty's there was this take line in or or i should say stagnation in in living standards that occurred. and there's this sense there's a society was not moving forward social problems were multiplying. and the system was not dealing with them that was the issue so the system was being ruled by people who were in their late seventy's and eighty's i did a ministry the minister of the. minister and the minister of. media machine building which i think ran the. the atomic industry was something

like eighty six at one point in time which you know you can understand why chernobyl happened so so there was this huge gap this huge gap between they who was this old generation of people who didn't seem to care much for society and the rest of society us and. you know the us was imagined differently once was not them urge but. that gap was definitely real and really was i think the major reason why classes to merge ok ronald i mean again i mean i could just rephrase what we just heard here the social contract that the soviet the communist party. claim to provide to society was collapse because i mean you'll still see people in there not i wouldn't say they were mainstream here but due to state should be responsible for certain things here and i've always found very interesting is that even the middle class of russia today they still like to is free those free to use it to communist regime would give you like electricity water things that in the west people pay

enormous amounts of money for but that's another some topic here but the social contract collapsed. well there's probably more their lives like ronald that come to ronald that are after after after gorbachev comes to power then then before the system was relatively stable and there's a very good book about how everything seemed to be permanent until after they change and then people read back that it had to happen you know in the west the major interpretation of the fall of the soviet union both the system and the state is there was inevitable it was in the genetic code of the revolution the system was failing there were serious problems there was no mass uprising there was no determine from the bottom the man for change until gorbachev actually started this whole thing so my own view is that it was certainly not inevitable that it was largely a contingent event and it was something that happened because the reform was very

radical was badly carried out and gorbachev ultimately was unwilling to use the power of the state including the army and the police to preserve his state i would put it this way gorbachev was no abraham lincoln leader was ready to use power to save the united states when the divided gorbachev kept hesitating allowing something to go forward if you go back to the very beginning you know with these nationalist revolts you go back to the nagorno-karabakh in one nine hundred eighty eight he didn't use force and he was very hesitant about employing the power he had eventually as mark shows in his own book a cascade of ethnic mobilizations took place at a certain point then it was like there's a soviet when far apart things had to be done early it couldn't be done later donald if i go back to you i like this point about the end of it inevitably because that plays into the cold war dynamic because again all of us were brought up was that this is to me is the logical it's unnatural it will ultimately collapse which

is part of the the narrative of western democratic capitalism one of the term we want to use today so that plays into that dynamic here but what about the inevitability and earlier mark mentioned in the program which is very provocative point a noncommunist soviet union could have not survived. minus the baltic i think it is the baltic republics i think that i think that's very very possible the problem however would be the extent to which there is a legitimate in factor and that allows the system to continue and i don't think there necessarily was and i think it's that absence plays russian politics today so i you know i think it could have survived it probably could have survived for maybe a generation but i do think it would ultimately break up in one form or another and i would take issue with two things have been in the discussion however one is that i don't like to use and i will be provocative peter the term collapse of the soviet union because i think there are many continuity is far less very alone because some caught many can't know what it is and second i think we have to go back to that

critical year of ninety ninety one we're going to talk in fact was not and circling around always in the democratic direction but in fact neither allowed or could not stop some of the forces of reaction from moving and i think what he lost was is his place in the middle of the political spectrum not that he became i think is one of your but i said kind of a radical social democrat i don't think he was he maybe now but i don't think it was that ok mark you know. can we get down to personalities here and i brought up yeltsin and got a bunch of i mean how much is it you know i know i know going to child is very popular still in the west but i mean here in russia he is blamed for the collapse of the soviet union i mean was it lack of political foresight. the lack of political will because again you could look at it and you could be ideological but i suppose is that he really didn't know what he wanted to change and you know how to do it and you know ate it and that's what the result was because he really never really had a road map because everyone here on this program is that we kind of vacillated back and forth and once you do that you know you won't run out of options you know you

look if you look at the public opinion polling at the time inside the soviet union you find that gorbachev actually was the most popular politician in the soviet union until about april or may one nine hundred ninety which is when he. his popularity switches and actually yeltsin becomes more popular and then at least within russia. moscow in particular yeltsin becomes more popular than gorbachev so what was happening then at the time well events were spinning out of control at that time this was after the collapse of eastern europe of course this was when elections were beginning to happen in in the republics and non noncommunist movements were coming to power nationalist movements secession was on the agenda in multiple republics violence had already occurred elsewhere so the problem that gorbachev you know faced and why he was kind of swept away was that he acted too late and he was always too late had he i think has run suggested earlier had he

acted earlier to sort of contain some of the excesses of of nationalists and to to put some limits on glasnost some how to to prevent. you know the ways in which things ultimately escape control then perhaps he might have been able to ride this thing but as it as a you know it it developed it ultimately just became a tsunami that he couldn't control what you think about that ronald i mean i add to the right jumping yeah. yeah well you see i agree with mark there is we can find in retrospect even at the time dozens of causes why the system and why the soviet union state would collapse in other words this was all over determined we say in the literature but over determination is not predetermination it was not inevitable if gorbachev it acted more consistently if he had used the power he had

if he had maybe sequence the reforms now to five different revolutions at once and the cold war and archetypes the economy democratic the democrat ties the state loosen up the federation all at once this was almost impossible for for a single state to survive in that way. and gorbachev of course is an incredibly admirable figure i mean he probably introduced more freedom in the world than any figure certainly in the twentieth century he reversed many of the trends that lead toward more authoritarian states towards entry to the mark democratic states towards incurious and he was an anti imperialist too particularly in eastern europe and yet ultimately he's a failure ultimately the one thing a state leader has to do is preserve his own state and this he failed to do amazing the irony of history thank you very much and i move on out of time many thanks my guest today in ann arbor princeton and in washington and thanks to our viewers for watching us here to see you next time and remember prostitute.

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