Explains why Gorbachev must succumb to the power of the political forces he himself set in motion.
Robert G. Kaiser, deputy managing editor of The Washington Post, is the author of Russia: The People and the Power. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Why Gorbachev Happened, His Triumphs and His Failure.
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Nothing is certain in the troubled Russian republic - except the resurrection of the long-dormant nationalist right wing. The end of empire has fueled a sense of national humiliation comparable to Weimar Germany's after Versailles. Even if fascism is unlikely to prevail, the new right nonetheless has "a reasonable chance in the struggle for Russia's soul and political future."
Mikhail Gorbachev addressed a closed party audience: "What is at stake today is the ability of the Soviet Union to enter the new millennium in a manner worthy of a great and prosperous power. . . . Without the hard work and complete dedication of each and every one it is not even possible to preserve what has been achieved." This speech, only a part of which has been published, continued: "There has been a failure to perceive properly the need for change in some aspects of production relations," to perceive the need to overcome "the stagnant conservatism of Soviet production relations."
Examines the challenges now facing the Russian people after the collapse of communism, in terms of the calamitous loss of entire generations of a free-thinking intelligentsia, first the 'bourgeois', then the Marxist -- a loss which now deprives them of the patience, understanding and articulateness needed to establish and secure democratic rule. Western help should be not merely financial, but intellectual and cultural. To be read with this author's 1947 forecast, under the pseudonym 'X', of the reasons and character of the collapse of communism. The analysis of the 'calamity' of Stalinism acknowledges a debt to Robert W Tucker 'Stalin in power: the revolution from above' (WW Norton, 1990).
