The Soviet Union Adrift
Article Summary and Author Biography
"Although the most visible manifestations of the Soviet crisis are economic, the root problem is political", the political authority having assumed responsibilities vastly beyond its competence to discharge. Gorbachev's attempts to reform merely exposed more rotten wood, the further they were pressed, and seriously under-estimated the intensity of the nationalities question. The Union is likely to disintegrate, as the federalists will run out of time, although the Soviet military and the KGB, plus reactionary political elements, retain latent power to resist disintegration or stage a crack-down. The USSR is now "in the throes of accelerating anarchy", and is part of a larger global slide into instability.
Richard Pipes is Baird Professor of History at Harvard and the author of The Russian Revolution. In 1981-82 he served as director of East European and Soviet Affairs in the National Security Council.
During the four decades that followed World War II, the United States faced a rigid and hostile Soviet Union. The resulting state of international tension led to two wars in which U.S. troops fought Soviet proxies, precipitated a number of regional conflicts and compelled the two countries to spend vast resources on defense. In a paradoxical way, however, this tension also maintained global stability as each of the superpowers restrained its allies and clients and avoided direct military confrontation. It is generally agreed that this period of history has now come to an end. Understandably, not a few political and military figures in both countries look back with nostalgia on the days of the Cold War.
With the approach of the 21st century the international situation is assuming new and as yet only dimly understood shapes. Various processes are at work, the most important of which may well be the waning of the nation-state, the principal organizing force of Western society and its possessions since the seventeenth century. Pressures from below in the form of ethnic separatism, guerrilla movements, religious fundamentalism and terrorism sap legitimate governments of their traditional authority. At the same time, emerging supranational bodies limit the scope of sovereignty. The flow of capital ignores national frontiers. So does the movement of populations, which surpasses anything experienced since the great migrations of antiquity. Escaping war or driven by the quest for economic opportunity, tens of millions of people uproot themselves. Just how far this migration has progressed is revealed by the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, which dispossessed from this minuscule country more than one million migrant workers in less than a month. The politics of the future are likely to be less predictable as the number of international actors grows exponentially. Just as the classical empires of the nineteenth century gave way to a multiplicity of nation-states, so too are the nation-states of today reeling from the pull of centrifugal forces. One cannot escape the impression that much of the modern world is entering a period of neo-feudalism.
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