III
In the meantime Soviet socialism was dying.
Unlike the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Empire, the end of the USSR took place in comparative slow motion, between the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and its formal death in late 1991. It had its moments of headline drama – Yeltsin on the tank in Moscow resisting the attempted coup of August 1991 – but its basic action took place in the darkness of the Soviet corridors of power, such as the unpublicized but fundamental decision in 1989 to abandon the last of the Five-Year Plans (1986–92) in mid-course. As it happens, I was working on the Soviet economy at the UN university’s World Institute of Development and Economic Research (WIDER) and watched the process in the agreeable and acutely Russia-watching city of Helsinki, a few hours by land, a few minutes by air from the Soviets, where I spent some summers during those final years. If it did nothing else, it gave me an insight into the disastrous blindness of the western economists who passed through there, moving comfortably between airport, transnational hotel chain and limo, preparing to put the Russian economy to rights by the untrammelled operations of the free market, as certain of the possession of eternal truth as any Islamic theologian.
By the 1980s the idea that the socialism of the USSR or its followers was what those of us inspired by the October Revolution had in mind was dead. A case could still be made for it as the necessary counterweight to the other superpower, and with greater moral conviction as the supporter of the liberation of oppressed peoples, notably in South Africa. The Moscow regime supported the ANC struggle, financed and armed it for decades when there was no foreseeable prospect of its success or of Soviet benefit. A devotion to colonial liberation was probably the last relic of the spirit of world revolution. Indeed, what had kept me immune to the appeal of Maoism was that, in spite of its internationalist rhetoric in the days of the Sino-Soviet split, Chinese Communism and Maoist ideology seemed to me essentially national if not nationalist, an impression not weakened by a few weeks’ visit to that impressive country in 1985. Unlike the USSR, which would never have backed a movement as remote from social revolution as the thuggish UNITA in Angola, Maoist China, which advertised its vocation as the centre of global armed struggle, actually supported guerrilla movements very selectively, and almost entirely on anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnamese grounds.
We, or at least I, no longer had many hopes. My friend Georg Eisler recalls how, returning from Cuba in the 1960s, I wondered how long it would take before Havana became assimilated to Sofia. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which I remember as vividly as others do the death of Kennedy, made it unthinkable even to visit Prague again, but would one want to retire from the West even to a relatively liberal country like Hungary? The answer was no, even though, for an old central European, it was intellectually and culturally far more lively and less provincial than its radiantly prosperous neighbour, Austria.
What did old communists and the general left expect from the USSR in the 1980s except that it should be a counterweight to the USA and by its very existence frighten the rich and the rulers of the world into taking some notice of the needs of the poor? Nothing, any longer. And yet we felt a strange sense of relief, even a glimmer of hope, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. In spite of everything he seemed to represent our kind of socialism – indeed, to judge by early statements, the sort of communism represented by the Italians or the ‘socialism with a human face’ of the Prague Spring – which we had thought almost extinct there. Curiously, our admiration was not to be significantly diminished by the tragedy of his dramatic failure inside the Soviet Union, which was almost total. More than any other single man, he became responsible for destroying it. But he had also been, one might say, almost singlehandedly responsible for ending half a century’s nightmare of nuclear world war and, in Eastern Europe, for the decision to let go of the USSR’s satellite states. It was he who, in effect, tore down the Berlin Wall. Like so many in the West I shall go on thinking of him with unalloyed gratitude and moral approval. If there is one image from the 1980s that has stayed with me, it is the multiple face of Mikhail Gorbachev on the display screens in a TV shop which suddenly stopped me in my tracks somewhere on West 57th Street in New York. I listened to him addressing the United Nations with a sense of wonder and relief.
That he would fail at home was, alas, soon obvious; perhaps even that he and his fellow-reformers were too foolhardy or, if one prefers, neither big nor knowledgeable enough about the nature of the world they were ruling, to know quite what they were doing. Perhaps nobody was, and the best thing for the Soviet Union and its peoples would have been to continue its slow descent hoping for piecemeal improvement under a less ambitious and more realistic reformer. So, as I wrote from Helsinki in a commentary on the 1991 failed coup that ended the Gorbachev era, ‘he chose glasnost in order to force perestroika; it should have been the other way round. And neither marxism nor western economists had either experience or theory that helped.’ 7 Like a crippled giant tanker moving toward the reefs a rudderless Soviet Union therefore drifted towards disintegration.8 Finally it foundered. And the losers, in the short and medium term, were not only the peoples of the former USSR, but the poor of the world.
‘Capitalism and the rich have, for the time being, stopped being scared,’ I wrote in 1990.
Why should the rich, especially in countries like ours where they now glory in injustice and inequality, bother about anyone except themselves? What political penalties do they need to fear if they allow welfare to erode and the protection of those who need it to atrophy? This is the chief effect of the disappearance of even a very bad socialist region from the globe. 9
Ten years after the end of the USSR, it is possible that fear has returned. The rich and the governments whom they have convinced of their indispensability may once again discover that the poor require concessions rather than contempt. But, thanks to the weakening of the fabric of social democracy and the disintegration of communism, the danger today comes from the enemies of reason: religious and ethno-tribal fundamentalists, xenophobes, among them the heirs of fascism or parties inspired by fascism, who sit in the governments of India, Israel and Italy. It is one of the many ironies of history that, after half a century of anti-communist Cold War, the only enemies of the Washington government who have actually killed its citizens on the territory of the USA are its own ultra-right zealots and fundamentalist Sunni Muslim militants once deliberately financed by the ‘free world’ against the Soviets. The world may yet regret that, faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative of socialism or barbarism, it decided against socialism.
17
Among the Historians
What has happened to the writing of history in my lifetime? Readers not interested in this somewhat specialized subject may skip this chapter, although it is unfortunately not as academic as it seems at first sight. There is no getting away from the past, i.e. from those who record, interpret, argue about and construct it. Our everyday lives, the states we live in, the governments we live under, are surrounded by, drenched in, the products of my profession. What goes into school textbooks and politicians’ speeches about the past, the material for writers of fiction, makers of TV programmes and videos, comes ultimately from historians. What is more, most historians, including all good ones, know that in investigating the past, even the remote past, they are also thinking and expressing opinions in terms of and about the present and its concerns. Understanding history is as important for citizens as for experts, and Britain is lucky in having a powerful tradition of serious but accessible writing by experts for a wider public: Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Charles Darwin, Maynard Keynes. Historians should not write only for other historians.