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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Georgi Derluguian writes that Cohen’s exposition of the alternatives facing Gorbachev as reformer misses key elements that would give his analysis a firm disciplinary foundation: the social mechanisms involved in formulating and spreading competing discourses, the structural coalescence of potentially contentious groups and their actual mobilizing, the institutionalization of political gains, elite and oppositional brokerage, geopolitical configuration, and shifts in economic flows. He calls for a more rigorous analysis that would incorporate these elements, and he illustrates his method by sketching a number of key nodal points in the history of the USSR that would allow scholars to examine counterfactual, alternative pasts.
The epigraph is taken from Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, "1989: The Continuation of 1968," in George Katsiaficas, ed., After the Fall: 1989 and the Future of Freedom (New York, 2001), 43. Note that this essay was originally circulated in July 1992.
1 Cohen, Stephen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.
2 Amalrik, Andrei, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; and Kotkin, Stephen, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar. For the analytical reconstruction of alternative pasts, it might also be profitable to revisit George W. Breslauer, Five Images ofthe Soviet Future: A Critical Review and Synthesis(Berkeley, 1978); and Luttwak, Edward N., The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.
3 Michael Burawoy, “The Great Involution: Russia's Response to the Market” (unpublished paper, 1999) available at http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/burawoy/ (last consulted 29 April 2004).
4 Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book ofEssays (Cambridge, Mass., 1962)Google Scholar.
5 Possible ways of overcoming die legacies of this nineteenth-century paradigm of deterministic social laws and unavoidable unilinear progress are discussed by Tilly, Charles, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984)Google Scholar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms(Cambridge, Mass., 1991). But one might as well have fun with the witty and erudite essays of the paleontologist Gould, Stephen Jay, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar or explore the paradoxes of the new understanding of the physical universe together with the Nobel laureate in chemistry Iliya Prigogine and his collaborator Stengers, Isabelle, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.
6 See Hirschman, Albert, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)Google Scholar.
7 Furman, Dmitrii E., Nashi desiat’ let: Politicheskii protsess v Rossii s 1991 po 2001 gody (Moscow, 2001)Google Scholar.
8 Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loic J. D., An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar; and Pierre Bourdieu, “A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism,” New LeftReview1/227 (January-February 1998): 125–30.
9 For the conceptualization of political processes as the “concatenation of social mechanisms,” see McAdam, Doug, Tarrow, Sidney, and Tilly, Charles, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, Eng., 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see the incisive methodological essays of Arthur Stinchcombe, “Tilly on the Past as a Sequence of Futures,” postscript to Tilly, Charles, Roads fromPast toFuture (Lanham, Md., 1997), 387–409 Google Scholar, and “Ending Revolutions and Building New Governments,” Annual Review ofPolitical Science2 (June 1999): 49–73. Even more strongly recommended is the classic example of Stinchcombe's theoretical sarcasm, “On Softheadednesson the Future,“Ethics93 (October 1982): 114–28. Finally, agood summary of recent work on the theories of revolution (that includes a chapter on the east European rebellions of 1989–1991) is provided by Goodwin, Jeff, No Other Way Out: States and RevolutionaryMovements, 1945–1991 (Cambridge, Eng., 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasantin the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966)Google Scholar; and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions:A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China(Cambridge, Eng., 1979). Collins, Randall, Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run (Stanford, 1999)Google Scholar provides a synthesis of the new state-centered theories of revolution with the neo-Weberian theory of geopolitics.
11 Sohrabi, Nader, “Global Waves, Local Actors: What the Young Turks Knew about Other Revolutions and Why It Mattered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 1 (2002): 45–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944) or, better still, the second edition published in 2001 by Beacon Press with the thought-provoking foreword by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist of the World Bank, now turned its critic. A strong counterpoint is provided by the leading economic formalizer of worldsystems analysis Arrighi, Giovanni, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Originsof Our Times (London, 1994)Google Scholar. Standing on its own is the tremendous world-historical exposition of Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993)Google Scholar.
13 The paradoxes of the nationality question in the former Russian empire are brilliantly analyzed by Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, andthe Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar and the definitive account was achieved by Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, 2001)Google Scholar.
14 Randall Collins, “The Geopolitical Basis of Revolution: The Prediction of the Soviet Collapse,” Macrohistory, 37–69.
15 For a general discussion of the nonproliferation of Nazism, see the historical sociologist John Markoff, Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1996), and Hobsbawm, Eric, “The End of Liberalism,” The Age of Extremes: AHistory of the World, 1914-1991 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.
16 See the classic Dehio, Ludwig, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the EuropeanPower Struggle, translated from German by Fullman, Charles (New York, 1962)Google Scholar and the recent dieoretical synthesis by Arrighi, Giovanni, Silver, Beverly, et al., Chaos and Governancein the Modern World-System (Minneapolis, 1999)Google Scholar.
17 On die effects of power-prestige, see Collins, Randall, Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge, Eng., 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Social Science and the Communist Interlude,” TheEssentialWallerstein (New York, 2000), 374–86Google Scholar.
19 Hanson, Stephen, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, 1997), 19 Google Scholar.
20 The concept of a “developmental state” as neither pure market nor pure planned economy was originally proposed by Johnson, Chalmers, MJTI and the Japanese Miracle: TheGrowth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Stanford, 1982)Google Scholar. See the richly elaborating essays in Meredith Woo-Cumings, ed., The Developmental State (Ithaca, 1999).
21 Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Marx, Marxism-Leninism, and Socialist Experiences in the Modern World-System,” Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 84–97 Google Scholar.
22 For theoretical rigor, clarity, and robust generalization, the best explanation of Soviet collectivization, in my opinion, is Scott, James, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemesto Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar.
23 Special thanks to Oleksandr Fisun for suggesting this gag.
24 See Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Stephens, Evelyn H., and Stephens, John D., CapitalistDevelopment and Democracy (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, “Democracy Is a Lake,” Roadsfrom Past to Future (Lanham, Md., 1997), 193–215 Google Scholar; and the theoretical summary in Markoff, Waves of Democracy.
25 Silver, Beverly J., Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge, Eng., 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 The relevant iconoclast analyses are by Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment: Modernity,Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order (New York, 1997); and Cumings, Bruce, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1981–90)Google Scholar.
27 Slavicists may be excused from looking beyond their area, but since the Chinese alternative to the Soviet collapse emerges time and again in discussions, it would be useful to consult the illuminating works of Arrighi, Giovanni, Hamashita, Takeshi, and Selden, Mark, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives (London, 2003)Google Scholar; and Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York, 1997).
28 Another iconoclast example is Hopf, Ted, Social Construction of International Politics:Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar.
29 Khrushchev's personal trajectory and outlook encapsulate the contradictions and high hopes of the developmental quest to catch up with the modern west. See the wonderfully researched and penetrating biography by Taubman, William, Kiirushchev: The Man andHis Era (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.
30 See Ekiert, Grzegorz, The State against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath inEast-Central Europe (Princeton, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Eyal, Gil, Szelenyi, Ivan, and Townsley, Eleanor, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in PostcommunistCentral Europe (London, 1998)Google Scholar; Maryjane Osa, Solidarity and Contention: Netxoorks of PolishOpposition (Minneapolis, 2003).
31 Rutland, Peter, The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The Role of LocalParty Organs in Economic Management (Cambridge, Eng., 1993)Google Scholar.
32 Derluguian, Georgi, Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography (London, 2004)Google Scholar.
33 The terms revolutionary situationand revolutionary outcomeare used here as conceptualized by Tilly, Charles, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar.
34 The best analyses are Solnick, Steven, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in SovietInstitutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)Google Scholar; and David Woodruff, Money Unmade: Barter and theFate of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, 1999).
35 Suny, The Revenge of the Past; Bunce, Valerie, Subversive Institutions: The Design andthe Destruction of Socialism and the State (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.
36 Todd, Emmanuel, The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere, trans. Waggoner, John, preface, Revel, Jean-Francois (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Todd, Emmanuel, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, trans. Jon Delogu, C., foreword, Lind, Michael (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.
