74. English, Russia and the Idea of the West, p. 100.
75. Ibid., pp. 108-9.
76. Ibid., p. 114.
77. I am rephrasing Alain Besançon's evaluation of Gorbachev's project of reform from his article “Breaking the Spell,” in Can the Soviet System Survive Reform? Seven Colloquies about the State of Soviet Socialism Seventy Years after the Bolshevik Revolution, ed. George R. Urban (London: Pinter, 1989). The journal Slavic Review reignited this discussion through the publication, in Autumn 2004, of Stephen F. Cohen's piece “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” along with replies from Archie Brown, Mark Kramer, Stephen Hanson, Karen Dawisha, and Georgi Derluguian.
78. Quoted in Silvio Pons, “Western Communists, Gorbachev, and the 1989 Revolutions,” Journal of European History 18 (2009): 366.
79. Vladimir Kontorovich, “The Economic Fallacy,” in National Interest 31 (Spring 1993):35-45.
80. Stephen E. Hanson, “Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?” in The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Daniel Chirot (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), p. 54. See also Stephen E. Hanson, Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
81. Zubok, Zhivago's Children, p. 335.
82. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 27. Mark Kramer, who develops Kotkin's point of view, strengthens his argument on Gorbachev's refusal to continue muddling through of the stagnation years by quoting a telling statement made by Islam Karimov during a Politburo meeting in January 1991: “Back in 1985, Mikhail Sergeevich, if I may say so, you didn't have to launch perestroika…. Everything would have continued as it was, and you would have thrived, and we would have thrived. And no catastrophes of any sort would have occurred.” Mark Kramer, “The Reform of the Soviet System and the Demise of the Soviet State,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 505-12.
83. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Bodley Head, 2009), p. 598.
84. For a synthetic analysis of the various trends of thinking that were born in post-Stalinist USSR and which resulted by the end of 1980s in the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as state ideology, see Archie Brown, ed., The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
85. Robert English, “The Sociology of New Thinking: Elites, Identity Change, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 43-80.
86. Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (London: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also his previous research on Gorbachev and the aftermath of perestroika: Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova, eds., Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin: Political Leadership in Russia's Transition (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001).
87. Zubok, Zhivago's Children, p. 120.
88. For an analysis of the transformations within the Soviet leadership and higher ranks of the CPSU in the last decades of the USSR, see Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); and Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1980).
89. See Georgii Arbatov, The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Times Books, 1992); and Aleksandr Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).
90. English, “The Sociology of New Thinking,” p. 76. R. English's article is part of a thematic issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies 2 (Spring 2005) on the role of ideas in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. See also Nina Tannenwald and William C. Wohlforth, “Introduction: The Role of Ideas and the End of the Cold War,” 3-12; Nina Tannenwald, “Ideas and Explanation: Advancing the Theoretical Agenda,” 13-42; Andrew Bennett, “The Guns That Didn't Smoke: Ideas and the Soviet Non-use of Force in 1989,” 81-109; Daniel C. Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” 110-41; and William C. Wohlforth, “The End of the Cold War as a Hard Case for Ideas,” 165-73.
91. For an intellectual history of the ascendance of this group and of their ideas, see English, Russia and the Idea of the West.
92. Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 132.
93. Pravda, February 6, 1990.
94. See Gorbachev and Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev, pp. 56-58.
95. See comments along these lines in Stephen F. Cohen, “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 459-88; Archie Brown, “The Soviet Union: Reform of the System or Systemic Transformation?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 489-504; and Mark Kramer, “The Reform of the Soviet System,” p. 506.
96. Anatoly S. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed. Robert D. English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 105.
97. Daniel C. Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 129.
98. Brown, Seven Years, p. 157.
99. X. I. Ding, “Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism: The Case of China,” British Journal of Political Science 24 (July 1994): 293-318.
100. I am employing Frederick Corney's terminology. See Corney, “What Is to Be Done,” p. 267.
101. Quoted in Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997). See Aleksander Yakovlev, Ce que nous voulons faire de l'Union Sovietique: Entretiens avec Lilly Marcou (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), p. 104.
102. See Labor Focus on Eastern Europe 9, no. 3 (November 1987-February 1988): 5-6.
103. Stephen Cohen, “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” pp. 487-88.
104. Brown, “The Soviet Union,” pp. 494-95.
105. Karen Dawisha, “The Question of Questions: Was the Soviet Union Worth Saving?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 513-26; and Stephen Hanson, “Reform and Revolution in the Late Soviet Context,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 527-34.
106. Hanson, “Reform and Revolution,” p. 533. It is no surprise that Stephen Cohen, who throughout his scholarly work has sought to find the ever elusive solution from above (Bukharin, Gorbachev) to counter Stalin's Great Break, dismisses arguments in favor of an anti-Soviet revolution from below. For descriptions of the development of alternative politics from below before and during Gorbachev's reign, see Steven M. Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Edward W. Walker, Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); also Walter D. Connor, “Soviet Society, Public Attitudes, and the Perils of Gorbachev's Reforms: The Social Context of the End of the USSR,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 43-80; Astrid S. Tuminez, “Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Break-up of the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 81-136; and Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 1,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 178-256; Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 2,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 3-64; Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 3,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 3-96.