The Awakening of the Soviet Union: Enlarged Edition

"Ever since Krushchev eased the (Stalinist) terror in the late '50s . . . there have been warnings that we were misunderstanding" the USSR, writes Geoffrey Hosking, a University of London historian of Russia. This is true. Various memoirs, such as "Hustling on Gorky Street," which was the autobiography of a petty hoodlum in South Russia, indicated that the new, milder Communist totalitarianism did not control everyone. But there was no reason to think that the Russian underworld would be the catalyst to bring down the party overlords and it wasn't. It still appears that the revolutionary change in the USSR is coming from the top down -- Mikhail Gorbachev, after all, is a confirmed Leninist. But the pace of change appears, in Hosking's view, to be attributable to fortuitous events, especially the public relations fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. Before Chernobyl, glasnost was just a word; afterward it began to be a reality -- with the exception of the Soviet military, which is still a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Hosking believes the military will not become an actor in the Soviet Union's restructuring. "The Awakening of the Soviet Union" is an important window into Russia because Hosking has known some of the key actors since before Gorbachev's initiatives. The fundamental point of this book is that seeds of a civil society always existed in the Soviet Union. Now the shoots from those seeds are "re-emerging, in very diverse forms, from under the totalitarian carapace." He accepts the distinction used by former United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick to separate "totalitarian" from "authoritarian" regimes and finds the USSR today to be merely authoritarian. "At the grassroots, people (in the USSR) improvise a facade for the occasional appearance of the dreaded 'government inspector,' but otherwise do their own thing in their own way, treating officials as just another unpredictable element in a forbidding environment," he writes. Two can play that game, and Hosking predicts that the biggest threat to the success of perestroika could come from an "alliance between the Communist Party's conservative apparatchiks and a militant Russian nationalism." This book was completed in 1989 -- it is actually the annual Reith Lectures presented by the BBC -- so Hosking foretold the furor over breakaway subject peoples -- Lithuanians, Georgians etc. -- would tend to freeze perestroika in its tracks. This prediction appears to be coming true. Richard Viguerie, the Republican fund-raiser, claims the collapse of Leninism is mostly thanks to Ronald Reagan. This is hogwash, and Hosking makes it plan that the changes in the USSR today are the result of internal forces. Not one of the grassroots organizations now rearranging Soviet life claims any particular inspiration from any form of Americanism, particularly not from rightwing Republicanism, since many of these innovators want not capitalism but a purer socialism. In fact, there are more monarchi