The New CommonWealth

For anyone who has followed closely the events in Eastern Europe for the past thirty years, the systematic absence of one possible scenario from the mainstream media dialog is baffling – namely that today's Russian troubles may be only a shield behind which a more powerful regeneration is in progress. The New York Times Magazine , August 10 1997, brings up one of many questions to which modern history awaits a convincing answer. On the occasion of former Defense Secretary McNamara's revisiting Vietnam, it reminds us of one such unelucidated inconsistency: "If the reason [for the war in Vietnam] was to fight communism, why did the U.S. not help China in 1949, or why did the U.S. not help the Batista regime in Cuba in 1959?"

There are indeed significant and puzzling inconsistencies in the story of the Soviet Union's "collapse." Consider the artfulness, bordering on the Machiavellian, and the lengthy effort that went into its demise and one has sufficient grounds for a different tale. The process of "collapse," basically from 1983 on, came about as the country's establishment applied blow after blow to the highly coherent and resilient Soviet system. The most intriguing aspect of this incredible series of events is that behind it was the political will of the elite – the Soviet elite who had decided that the Soviet system must be dismembered, while the so-called disgruntled masses played a minor role. That amounts, but only on a superficial look, to the impression that the elite itself might have voluntarily decided to dismantle and demobilize its own lines of defense and submit to a condition of servitude to the rest of the world. On the contrary, I am not only in agreement with Weir and Kotz and others who ascribe perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet system to the Soviet elite, but I suggest that today's troubles are not a result of a failed perestroika but are only Phase II of perestroika. From socialism to capitalism and back to a superior form of socialism is how the old Marxist dialecticians would phrase it. By compromising both models – the old communist orthodoxy as well as the newer aspirant, casino capitalism – the power establishment makes it possible to bring the country safely back to socialist capitalism.

But if one accepts this hypothesis, then it becomes the premise of an unsettling line of reasoning. The elite of the second most powerful corporation in the world, the Soviet Union, must have had a self-serving reason to take such risks and must as well have had the opportunity to reformulate its modus operandi.

If this is so, the further implication would be that the "collapse" was possible not in reaction to a stronger U.S. but precisely because the other superpower also showed every sign of weakness and crisis so that it could not mount any credible offensive, economically or militarily, while the Soviet Union went through its own version of the Great Depression en route toward economic restructuring and political modernization.