Francios Furet

The Passing of an Illusion

Preface

The Soviet regime, having entered the theater of history with great fan fare, left it on tiptoe. Its modest end is surprising when compared wit] its brilliant career. This is not to say that there is no diagnosis for th debilitating disease that afflicted the Soviet Union, but the diseas was concealed by the nation's ideology and international influence. Be cause of its important role-in world affairs, the Soviet Union deserves: place in world history. Furthermore, international public opinion could hardly imagine the possibility of a radical crisis in the social system es. tablished by Lenin and Stalin. The idea of reforming this system came up frequently in the last quarter of the twentieth century, giving rise to a multiform and energetic revisionism, which nonetheless continued to maintain the basic superiority of socialism over capitalism. It was incon-ceivable even to the enemies of socialism that the Soviet regime could disappear and that the October Revolution could be "erased." It was even more inconceivable that such a rupture could be initiated by the single party that held power.

The Communist world was certainly its own undoing. An indicatior, of this self-destruction is that the only. Communists left are those who. undefeated, went from one world to another, adapted to another system, became partisans of free markets and elections, or were recycled into nationalists. But not a trace remains of their earlier experiences. Former Communists seem obsessed with negation of the regime in which they lived, even if they carry on the same habits and mores. Class warfare, the dictatorship of the proletariat, Marxism-Leninism have given way to the very things they were supposed to replace-bourgeois proprietorship, the liberal democratic state, individual rights, free enterprise. All that remains of the regimes born of October is what they sought to destroy.

The end of the Russian Revolution, or the disappearance of the Soviet empire, revealed a tabula rasa that bore little resemblance to the state of affairs left by the French Revolution or the fall of the Napoleonic empire. The Thermidorians had strongly supported civil equality and the bourgeois world. Napoleon had certainly been an insatiable conqueror, an illusionist of victory right up to the defeat that canceled out all the gains of this lucky gambler; but after he had lost everything, he still left Europe a vast store of memories, ideas, and institutions, which even his enemies drew upon in order to defeat him. In France, he had founded a state that would last for centuries. Lenin, in contrast, left no estate. The October Revolution ended not by being defeated in war but by liquidating all that it had created. When the Soviet empire fell apart, it was in the strange position of having been a superpower without incarnating a civilization. It was an assemblage of supporters, clients, and colonies; it had constructed a military arsenal and adopted a world-scale foreign policy. Apart from its ideological messianism-which ensured it the adoration of its partisans-it had all the attributes of an international power and was respected by its adversaries. Nonetheless, its rapid dissolution left nothing behind, neither principles, nor laws, nor institutions, nor even a history. After the Germans, the Russians were the second great European nation incapable of giving a meaning to the twentieth century and thus to their past.

To call the series of events that led to the end of the Communist regimes in the USSR and in the Soviet empire a "revolution" is quite inaccurate. Yet that word is commonly used in this context, perhaps because we have no other word in our political vocabulary to describe the collapse of a social system. "Revolution" evokes the idea, familiar to the Western political tradition, of a violent rupture with an earlier regime. In this instance, however, the "ancien regime" was itself born of the Revolution of 1917 and continued to claim ties with that event; so we could also characterize its liquidation as a "counterrevolution," especially since it revived the bourgeois world despised by Lenin and Stalin. The way in which it was carried out surely bore scant resemblance either to an overthrow or to a founding. Revolution and counterrevolution evoke acts of volition, whereas the end of Communism was due to a series of circumstances.' What followed its end left little room for deliberate action. From the ruins of the Soviet Union there emerged no leaders ready to carry on, no real parties, no new society, no new economy. There was only an atomized and uniform population. Social clases, certainly, had disappeared: even the peasants, at least in the USSR, had been destroyed by the state. The various ethnic groups in the Soviet Union were not powerful enough to drive out the divided Party elite or to determine the course of events.

Communism thus ended in a sort of nothingness. It did not lead, as so many had hoped and predicted since Khrushchev's time, to a better Communism, which would erase the vices of the earlier one while retaining its virtues-the Communism that Dubcek managed to embody in the spring of 1968 but that Havel failed to achieve in the fall of 1989. Gorbachev had been making its contradictions obvious in Moscow since Sakharov's liberation, but Yeltsin dissipated it right after the putsch of August 1991. The only thing to be found among the debris of Communist regimes was the familiar repertory of liberal democracy. The very point of Communism had been transformed even in the eyes of its former supporters. Instead of being an exploration of the future, the Soviet experience constituted one of the great antiliberal and antidemocratic reactions in twentieth-century European history. The other, of course, was Fascism in its various guises.

One of the distinctive traits of-Communism was its inseparability from a basic illusion, which for many years appeared to be validated by Communism's own history, until it was dispelled by that history. By "illusion" I do not mean that the participants and supporters of Communism were unaware of what they were doing and accomplished things beyond what was required of them-which is generally the case. I mean rather that Communism sought to conform to the necessary development of historical Reason, and that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" thus appeared to have a scientific function. It was a different type of illusion from one based on a calculation of ends and means or issuing simply from belief in a just cause; for people lost in history, an illusion of this kind not only gives their life meaning but offers them the comforts of certainty. Unlike an error of judgment, which, with the aid of experience, can be discovered, appraised, and corrected, the Communist illusion involved a psychological investment, somewhat like a religious faith even though its object was historical.

This illusion did not "accompany" Communist history; it made it. Independent of Communist history insofar as it existed prior to experience, the illusion was, at the same time, subject to that history since the truth of its prophecies was contained in its course. Its socket was the political imagination of modern humankind, but it could only survive by constantly adjusting to circumstances. History was its daily bread; the unexpected was continually integrated into its system of beliefs. The only way to get rid of the Communist idea was to stop feeding it. As a belief in salvation through history, it could only be toppled by a radical historical denial, eliminating the need for the adjusting, mending, and patching that were its life's work.

Those constant adjustments are the subject of this book. This is not a history of Communism, even less a history of the Soviet Union, it is a history of the illusion of Communism during the time in which the USSR lent it consistency and vitality. In attempting to describe its evolution over a century, I do not regard it merely as something overtaken by liberal democracy; I see no good reason to substitute one philosophy of history for another. The utopia of a new humanity predates Soviet Communism and will survive it in other forms-without "worker" messianism, for example. What historians of the Communist idea in the twentieth century will find is an entirely closed circuit of the modern political imagination, beginning with the October Revolution and ending with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Beyond what it actually was, the Communist world always glorified what it wanted and what it would therefore become. With its disappearance, the question of what it would have become has been answered: today, Communism is completely contained within its past.

The history of the "idea" of Communism was greater than the history of its influence, even at the time of its greatest geographic expansion. Since Communism really was universal, touching populations, territories, and civilizations never penetrated by Christianity, a comprehensive study of it would require more expertise than I now command. I shall therefore limit my study to Europe, for it was there that the idea was born, seized power, and, by the end of the Second World War, was at its most popular. There, moreover, it took thirty years to die, between Khrushchev and Gorbachev. Europe was the only place where Marx and Engels, its "inventors," believed it could have a future. The great Marxists, such as Kautsky, thought Russia was too far away to become the movement's advance guard. Once in power, Lenin's only hope for survival was the revolutionary solidarity of the old European proletariats, farther to the west, primarily that of Germany. Stalin exploited the Russian development of the Communist idea to his own advantage, but he never renounced the idea itself, which took on a new lease in life with the anti-Fascist victory. Europe, mother of Communism, was also its principal arena. It was the cradle and the heart of its history.

Europe also provides a comparative perspective; there, the Communist idea can be studied in two different political forms, depending on whether it exerted its power through a one-party system or whether it was spread through liberal democratic public opinion, guided by local Communist parties but extending beyond them in less militant forms. These two worlds were in constant if unequal contact, the former secret and closed, the latter public and open. Interestingly, the Communist idea prospered better in the latter situation, in spite of the spectacle provided by the former. In the USSR, and then in what after 1945 would be called the "socialist camp," it formed the ideology and the language of absolute domination. Simultaneously a spiritual and a temporal power, its will to emancipate did not long survive its will to enslave. In the West, it was also subject to the narrow constraints of international solidarity through its sister parties; but since it was never actually in power there, it retained something of its original charm, dissociated from the character assumed by the Soviet empire at the other end of Europe. Its imaginary path is even more mysterious than its actual history. In seeking to trace its ins and outs, this essay presents a kind of inventory, which is perhaps the best way to describe and analyze a historical consciousness common to both Eastern and Western Europe-two regions long separated by both the reality and the illusion of Communism.

One last word about the author, since every historical work has its own history. I have a biographical connection with my subject: in my youth, I experienced the passing of an illusion as a Communist between 1949 and 1956. My subject is thus inseparable from my existence, and I experienced firsthand the illusion that I am attempting to trace back to the time in which it was most widespread. Should I regret that period of my life as I write its history? I do not think so. Forty years later I judge my erstwhile blindness with neither indulgence nor acrimonywithout indulgence because the excuses one often draws from intentions in no way cancel out ignorance and presumptuousness, without acrimony because that unfortunate engagement taught me something. I came away from Communism with a curiosity about the revolutionary passion and with an immunity to pseudo-religious investment in political action. My curiosity gave rise to this study; I hope the book will help elucidate the questions raised in it.

Epilogue

There was something accidental about the denunciation of Stalin by his successor. Khrushchev put so much fire into it that one sensed more than political calculation at work in the "secret report" to the Twentieth Congress: it was the voice of someone out to break a taboo and who, carried away by the shocking nature of what he was saying, had lost control of its effects. In one evening, Khrushchev abolished the laws of empty political rhetoric.

But his speech was also part of the logic of necessity or, in other words, of the succession. Of all the regimes strongly identified with the existence of one person, none has ever survived intact the death of the sole authority. Stalin's case was no exception. The devolution of such an exorbitant power onto a single head was not acceptable to any of the presumptive heirs. The shift from that point to the declaration of the regime as illegitimate was facilitated by the "collective leadership" slogan, which sounded better in the annals of Marxism than proclamations of devotion to the Leader. Though useless for interpreting what had already occurred, the doctrine remained indispensable to appropriate the present and the future.

The post-Stalin division of power, therefore, was largely predetermined along the classic lines of change and continuity. What Khrushchev added was a talent quite unexpected in an apparatchik formed by the school of fear and silence-a gift for dramatization and a taste for risk. By the same token, he gave the first succession crisis a foretaste of finality. He denounced the Terror, of which he had been an agent. He abased Stalin, whom he had celebrated. He struck at the past of the regime with so much brutality that he toppled its legend. He needed deStalinization to allow Soviet power to devolve, to his favor, but by choosing to realize the succession in a discontinuous fashion, he brought its ideological foundations into question. If only by virtue of the supreme authority of the movement, Communists in the USSR and in the world were dispossessed of an essential part of their past, of which they nonetheless remained the offspring. Nothing would be as before.

Not that the system had been shaken to its foundations within the Soviet Union. The leaders' rivalries in no way weakened the dictatorship of the Party over the country. The last-minute execution of Beria elicited no more of a reaction than those of Zinoviev and Bukharm, when the trials were in full swing. Nor did the eviction of Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich from the Central Committee in June 1957, or that of Marshall Zhukov in October, elicit much of a reaction from a dawning "public opinion." And from March 1958 on, Khrushchev, like Stalin, accumulated the two key posts of Prime Minister and First Party Secretary. Through his control of the party, he was furnished with absolute power and would soon be celebrated as an exceptionally wise statesman, regardless of the nature of his initiatives and whims.

His reign brought about no transformation of the regime's political institutions. The Communist Party remained the unique and omnipotent master, the KGB did not tolerate the least opposition. Nor did he institute economic reform: the socialization of all production and exchanges in the hands of power and the bureaucratic administration of the economy remained the cornerstones of society, as attested to by the failure of the First Secretary's vast agricultural projects. As for his foreign policy, it descended in a direct line from Stalin's: the reinforcement and, where possible, the extension of the socialist camp at the expense of imperialism, at the price of major technological developments in the military or, by default, fierce political confrontation-the Berlin Wall, an invention so extravagant that it seemed to have come out of another age, was built in 1961. All over the world, Khrushchev proclaimed that he was as loyal as ever to the ambition of all Bolsheviks-to bury capitalism.

What, then, made him appear so iconoclastic, and how did his historical persona gain its lasting reputation? The answer is simple: he represented the end of political assassinations and mass terror. He had beaten his rivals, but without liquidating them; they, in turn, would take their revenge in 1964 by paying him back in kind. He did nothing to reduce the arbitrariness of the state police. As late as 1957 he instituted a hunt for "parasites," thus providing a target for denunciations and a pretext for the KGB. But the country would no longer be subjected to repression comparable to the martyrdom of the Ukrainian peasantry, the Terror of 1936=38, or the massive deportation of the small ethnic groups. The secret report contained no profession of liberal faith on the part of Khrushchev, no new political ideas, and no new form of socialism. He had not attacked Stalin's system, or even all of his methodsonly those aspects of the Terror that were abhorrent, universal, and almost mad.

The Soviet Union, under Khrushchev, moved from the totalitarian stage to the police stage. I am employing these two terms not so much to define two different states of political society-such precision would be illusory-as to plot its evolution. It is clear that under Khrushchev, and after him as well, the USSR retained totalitarian features-the will of those in power to control thought through language and to have the people speak exclusively with the vocabulary and slogans imposed from above. But although that will was still inseparable from the dictatorship of the Party, which continued to function in the name of MarxismLeninism, it was not universally obeyed. Even in public, strange voices were allowed to be heard, voices thought to have been lost forever. The regime had lost the almost perfect power it had held over the vast buzz of self-celebration that had been issuing from the USSR for more than twenty-five years. Other Soviet citizens began making themselves heard, telling a different story.

In order to turn the USSR into an airtight space, which nothing could either leak out of or seep into without the police's prior knowledge, Stalin had taken particular care to subjugate or liquidate the intelligentsia. He had co-opted Gorky, and ordered the assassination of Mandelstam.' Khrushchev, in contrast, needed the intellectuals' support. With de-Stalinization, he stopped short of allowing a rebirth of the intelligentsia, but he did allow it to resurface. He afforded it a little public space. Gorbachev did the same, in different circumstances, thirty years later, no doubt motivated by similar intentions and by the same appraisal of means. Neither one of them had a great deal of choice in a society whose foundations had been destroyed. Many of Gorbachev's interlocutors, moreover, with Sakharov at the fore, had been born into the opposition under Khrushchev. Through them, Russian society began to find its voice again, as they showed the way to a moral and political renaissance.

Not that the intellectuals actually enjoyed freedom of speech, let alone freedom of publication. At the time of their first attempts to alert Khrushchev to their increasing opposition to hydrogen bomb testing in the late 1950s, Sakharov was rebuffed and began his career as a suspect. The Pasternak "scandal" broke out at the same time. Completed in 1955, Doctor Zhivago was published in November 1957, but in Italy. The Writers' Union, loyal interpreter of the will of those in power, opposed its publication in Moscow. Less than a year later, it received the Nobel Prize. The reverence accorded the book in the West provoked a hail of insults in the Soviet Union; the author was accused of betraying his country even as he restored to it its own history. The campaign orchestrated by the press and the Party was so intense that Pasternak was compelled to renege on his acceptance of the prize and express his submission in Pravda.

But we must not allow the sinister things that the "Pasternak affair" revealed about the Soviet world to obscure the new things that were happening there. First of all, Pasternak was alive, whereas twenty years earlier he would have been arrested, deported, and probably killed. Second, his book was published, whereas formerly the manuscript would have been seized and destroyed. Finally, his case was public, whereas formerly it would have been buried. The torrent of abuse that the Party directed toward him was made of base but strong passions-egalitarianism, nationalism. Pasternak inspired courageous positions and a commitment to liberty, the germ of a timid liberal movement, largely involving recently liberated survivors of the Gulag. Thus, although the Pasternak affair ended in sadness-the writer's isolation in his own country -- nonetheless inaugurated a new period in the relationship between the regime and the society. Persecution, when it no longer killed, gave its prey visibility. When it failed to destroy the literature of its opposition, it made people read it. To a certain extent, Khrushchev needed that literature; this need, in turn, lent a political status even to novels and poetry. The denunciation of the cult of personality had put the intelligentsia in the key role of special witness, a role it would continue to hold.

Thus arose an important if gradual modification in the image of the USSR held by Western intellectuals. Until then, these had only been aware of or familiar with Soviet writers favorable to the regime-who, more often than not, had been sent to meet them on some official mission. Gide, as we have seen, corresponded with Gorky prior to visiting him. Malraux, when one of the big wheels of Cominternian antiFascism between 1934 and 1939, received considerable attention from Koltsov and Ehrenburg. The notion of an anti-Soviet, Soviet intellectual was not only unknown but hardly conceivable. The case of Victor Serge, once it was settled, made few waves. The decimation of the Soviet intelligentsia during the 1930s went all but unnoticed in Western Europe. The Right ignored it, for lack of interest; the Left, for lack of perception.

The situation changed with Pasternak, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and all those who would accompany or follow them. The Soviet intellectual was no longer a witness to socialism but a dissident writer. In this reversal, we must not forget the part played by the new situation created by the death of Stalin, the end of the Stalinist myth, the weakening of the dictatorship, and the reemergence of individual voices. According to the ironic law governing this type of situation, it was just when Soviet intellectuals were no longer being exterminated that they found they could arouse sympathy. Once they had recovered their status as thinkers and writers, they also regained the special influence that repression had stripped them of and that had been granted to the celebrators of the regime. Now they were replacing those celebrators with their own image as writers or scholars persecuted for their ideas, fighters for liberty and democracy. These were familiar characters in the West, liberated by the disintegration of Soviet mythology, and they helped that disintegration accelerate and spread. They helped extend the critique of the Moscow regime to all of public opinion, even on the left. Kravchenko had been a mere functionary who deserted his country. Pasternak was a writer wounded by censorship, whose government had forbidden him to accept a Nobel Prize. Banned in Moscow, Doctor Zhivago had been published first in Italy and then throughout the world by an extreme leftwing publisher. It had not been necessary for the anti-Communist Right to defend the book: the Communist Left had itself taken the initiative.

We should not push this too far, however. The Italian Communism of the time was the most inclined toward "polycentrism," and, moreover, the decision to publish the book had not been dependent on an editorial decision from the Party. Even though widely hailed as a resurrection of great Russian literature, Pasternak's saga also made many Communists grit their teeth, accustomed as they were to more bracing Soviet texts and little disposed to admire the independence of an author hailed by class adversaries. It is true that Pasternak did not hide his limited admiration for the collapse of October 1917. Nonetheless, because it came as an unexpected confirmation of the secret report, the whole affair constituted an important turning point in the Western view of the USSR. Amazingly, Western opinion tended to cast Pasternak's lot in the terms Khrushchev had used to criticize Stalinist despotism. The very thing that had enabled the poet to return to the literary scene made the return of persecution scandalous. The trickle of liberty regained made visible what totalitarianism had managed to conceal-the distance between the Soviet regime and liberty. Instead of reducing suspicion, the denunciation of Stalin made suspicion universal. If Stalin had perpetrated so many crimes, why should anyone believe his successors, who had served him? During the dictator's time, the disappearance of a number of writers-Pilniak, Babel, Mandelstam-barely caused a ripple in Western opinion. Under Stalin's successors, the banning of a book-crowned in Stockholm, it is true-turned into a universal scandal.

The new visibility of persecution hit all the harder because Khrushchev, in his speech to the Twentieth Congress, seemed to have been promising to end it, and he required a minimum of support from the society at large as a counterweight to the hostility of his rivals in the old Bolshevik guard. So the logic that led to a frontal denunciation of Stalin continued for several years to benefit intellectuals, who were at once beneficiaries, witnesses, and actors in this liberalization. The author of the secret report stopped moving in that direction as a concession to his rivals. He had to go along with them in the Pasternak affair, but had no intention of ending de-Stalinization, which had granted him his title to govern the Party and the nation, and which was fostering a moral and literary renaissance. This explains his zigzagging policy of alternating concessions and repression, depending on the new master's mood and the political situation. The few years preceding and following the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961 witnessed the birth of samizdat, the literature from the concentration camps, protest poetry, the fight for civil rights, and free reflection on the Soviet experience-Vasily Grossman, Varlem Chalamov, Eugenia Ginsburg, Vladimir Bukovsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov. These years also yielded their share of arrests, incarcerations in psychiatric hospitals, and exorbitant condemnations. The fight, at least for the short term, remained totally unequal between a handful of men and the Soviet regime. But with the denunciation of Stalin, the regime itself had cast doubt on the arrests made in its name. Having lost its ideological foundation, repression weakened, though it was still indispensable.

The best account of these years can be found in a section of Solzhenitsyn's memoirs,' where he tells how he seized the chance of a lifetime. He was forty in 1958, old enough to be a survivor of the Gulag. He had been identified and arrested in February 1945. The war was not yet over and he was still in uniform. He "took" eight years of camp for having a bad attitude, but, as things turned out, the NKVD had offered him the greatest experience of his life: it added the sense of a providential mission to his passion for writing. Released in 1953, permitted to go home in 1956,6 rehabilitated in 1957, his genius was fueled almost accidentally by de-Stalinization. He wrote his first books in secret, and by the time the survivors returned and their suffering had ceased to be taboo, he already felt like the new Tolstoy of the Gulag.

Thus Solzhenitsyn could enter the literary pantheon through the official gate-which gave his anti-Soviet preaching unhoped-for influence. As a great writer, a tireless fighter, a prophetic personality, he would soon have become known in any case. But it was through an enormous misunderstanding that his great voice found a provisional forum in an official publication-that was the gift of luck. At the time when Solzhenitsyn submitted One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the journal Novy Mir, Khrushchev, in the midst of hostile intrigues with his rival, gave a new anti-Stalinist turn to the Twenty-Second Congress, in the fall of 1961. A few years earlier, he had authorized the persecution of Pasternak, less because of the substance of his work than because of the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West, followed by the intrusion of the Nobel Prize into the closely guarded system of Soviet literature. This time, he personally intervened in Novy Mir to authorize the work of someone who had been deported for literature of the very same sort!

No doubt Khrushchev wanted to avoid another Pasternak "affair" at a time when he had particular need of the intelligentsia. But he misjudged both the man and the work. Pasternak was one of the last writers to have escaped from the good old days, and with Doctor Zhivago he had returned to the tradition of Russian fiction; he had not shown much regard for the October Revolution, but in the end he had carefully avoided treating the most tragic times in national history in his novel; a son of the ancien regime, he still possessed the grace of understatement and thus a certain prudence. On the other hand, the only society familiar to Solzhenitsyn was the "building of socialism," which had fired his rebellious temperament-a temperament rendered even more violent by his powerful Christian faith. In looking for an ally, the First Secretary came across the most implacably anti-Soviet person he could have found. In seeking to draw literature onto his side, he suddenly; made the former prisoner into a "positive hero" of letters, something almost unique in the USSR. For the cardboard "new man" touted during the 1930s and 1940s by the "anti-Fascist" Writers' Congress, Khrushchev unwittingly substituted a genuine hero, as old as the world but whose condition had been renewed by the history of the twentieth centuryvictim of persecution, prisoner, deportee, in short, a zek. The Russian public transformed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich into a triumph. Solzhenitsyn immediately became famous in Russia; a little later, his fame spread to the West. This sequence enhanced his glory, for no one could. suspect him of being a mere product of anti-Soviet intrigue. The book by the erstwhile zek benefited from the same privilege as the secret report of the First Secretary, a few years earlier: since he was listened to and acclaimed in Moscow, he was an irreproachable witness for the West. At least Khrushchev, in denouncing Stalin, had taken care to separate the principle of own his power from the crimes of his predecessor. Solzhenitsyn, however, was at war with the principle itself.

The regime had even more to fear from one of its privileged sons. Sakharov was its most brilliant physicist, prized from an early age for his potential use to the regime, in 1953 a member of the Academy of Sciences at the age of thirty-two, and one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. From 1957 on, he was also caught up, in his own way, in de-Stalinization. As his Western European and American colleagues had done fifteen years earlier, he worried about the threat to humanity posed by nuclear tests and the dangers of a nuclear war. This led to a series of confidential notes and rebuffs that would bring Sakharov to increasingly overt opposition. Later, he would explain that the atomic question had always been half scientific and half political and that it had naturally blazed a trail for political questions. No matter what the question, the key was to leave conformism behind. Having made that break, the rest followed naturally.' The regime itself contributed to this evolution by gradually pushing the physicist into the small circles of intellectual opposition. Alongside Solzhenitsyn, this would give him moral stature of another kind, no less prestigious and no less familiar to the civilized world than to the world of the accursed writer-prophetthat of the savant fighting for peace and liberty in the name of science and progress.

When Khrushchev was driven from the government, in the fall of 1964, for having acted too impetuously, it was beyond the power of any of his successors to bring back the period when the Soviet Union had been a hermetically sealed territory, from which only the official voice of power could be heard, echoed by millions of subjugated people. From now on, the USSR was a state that no word in any language could adequately describe, but which could best be defined in chronological terms such as "post-totalitarian," meaning sufficiently repressive to fill the prisons and psychiatric hospitals with people who thought incorrectly but no longer capable of inspiring the universal fear that was the condition of universal silence. The remains of loyalty to Stalinist despotism were thwarted by the remains of de-Stalinization. What was left of the Terror no longer had the support of the zeitgeist. The murderers had lost their faith and had become cynical. The victims no longer lived in fear; they protested. The Brezhnev years, from the mid-1960s on, were probably the least unhappy, in material terms, in Soviet Russian history. But they were also the least legitimate. The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and occupied Afghanistan. It exiled, imprisoned, and deported its dissidents. It was in the hands of a bureaucracy of corrupt old men. The marriage between the revolutionary idea and its territories was drawing to a close. It had lasted a century.

It was now that the West began burying the Communist idea, a process that would take thirty years. The burial was surrounded by a huge crowd and accompanied by many tears. Even the younger generations participated occasionally, trying to make it look like a renaissance. I would like to have followed that cortege step by step, but it would have made this book too long. Let us content ourselves with an outline.

When the Soviet Union ceased to be a revered model, when even the European Left began listening to the dissidents, though not agreeing with them, the Communist idea exploited several substitute fields. It found new fronts, as we have seen, within the old Stalinist ideocratic empire, in states that had been emancipated less by the death of the despot than by the denunciation of his crimes: either they liberated themselves from Moscow's control by defending Stalin, as in Mao's China, or else they gained a little autonomy by pushing Khrushchevism, like the first Gomulka or the second Kadar. The secret report of 1956 had inevitably opened up these two paths, which modified themselves in due course: in matters of ideological heresy, only the first step counts, and it had been taken by Khrushchev. Since then, moreover, through the dissidents, the USSR itself has let a good many discordant voices be heard, more than one of which harked back to another kind of Communism.

The Communist idea had gained in dimensions what it had lost in unity. It had even gone beyond the geographical heritage of Stalin through Third World independence movements. The French intellectual Far Left briefly believed that the Algerian FLN was a rediscovered partner in a policy of "revolutionary defeatism." That was one way to apply the Leninist schema of 1914 to the situation created by the Algerian nationalists' struggle against the French "bourgeoisie." In a more general way, the battles and wars linked to the emancipation of colonized peoples would rejuvenate the themes of "imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism" by opening up new territories to them, even more distant from Russia than Russia had been from Europe in 1917. At the time, that distance had been erased by the familiarity produced by the circumstances of the war and the idea of the socialist revolution. Half a century later, other factors, of very different orders, contributed to the reduction of that distance: the rapid universalization of the world through technological progress and through the United Nations, the sense of guilt on the part of white peoples, the simplification of world politics into two basic camps. The theory of imperialism came just at the right time to designate the principal link in the capitalist systemthat ever-present enemy of the emancipation of peoples, the United States. The Americans were a nation born of a colonial revolt but were also a nation descended from European civilization; it was in the second role that the United States provided this late version of Leninism with a unified image as adversary.

Hatred of the United States lent a universal shape to the hatred of capital. But it no longer had any special point of application in the adoration or imitation of the USSR. It fed diverse movements and regimes, which were generally channeled by Soviet diplomacy, sometimes infiltrated, often aided materially, but not obliged to pattern their government or language on Moscow. Khrushchev had attempted to reoutline the "socialist camp" with an enlarged base but blander ideology, for which he paid the price at the Twentieth Congress. The Soviet Union had won supplementary political space in the third world, but at the risk of yielding the advantage of revolution to its rivals. China, as we have seen, was the first of these. Khrushchev had more or less brought Tito back into the family, but had lost Mao Tse-tung.

The Chinese president naturally wanted to corner the market on the fascination once exercised by Stalin. Circumstances had changed, and the Chinese leader was no longer borne along by the great wave of antiFascism. Chinese history, even recently, even insofar as it had been shared with the West during the Second World War, remains mysterious to the democratic public, which seldom gets excited about things so far out of its grasp. The Communist parties, moreover, were keeping an eye out for trouble. In contrast to Stalinism, in the West, Maoism would remain limited to small groups of students and intellectuals, incapable of even forming parties. It could only remobilize on a very small scale the ideological passion that had been disaffected since the Twentieth Soviet Congress.

As we have seen, Mao's China rapidly distanced itself from "deStalinization." It had cloaked its power struggle with the Soviet Union in the old universal language prostituted by Khrushchev-MarxismLeninism-which had lost its authority. The orphans of Stalinism were to speak that language once again in its Chinese version. Against the "revisionists" of the Kremlin, Mao represented fidelity to tradition: as Trotsky had accused Stalin of betraying Lenin, so Mao accused Khrushchev of betraying Stalin. Nor was the accusation far-fetched. Like Stalin, Mao wanted to make a revolution within the revolution. His Great Leap Forward was similar to the forced march of the first FiveYear Plans, and his Cultural Revolution to "socialism in one country." Both Stalin and Mao tried to destroy the party of which they remained the leaders-Stalin through the police, Mao through the Red Guards. Both had been masters of the Marxist-Leninist catechism, presented in simple, scriptural formulas: Questions of Leninism, The Little Red Book-two international bestsellers.

The shift of the revolutionary passion from Stalin to Mao Tse-tung was obscured by the conflict between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, which filled the 1960s and 1970s with its tumult. The Chinese Communist Party's violent hostility toward the USSR concealed what bound it to its hated adversary, which had furnished it with its language, its emotions, and its methods of terrorist domination. Maoism was a curious animal-a kind of anti-Soviet Stalinism for which Khrushchev had provided the opportunity but not the substance. Mao was fighting the Soviet Union with its own language, which he discredited by claiming to speak it better. If "imperialism" was henceforth the principal target of Moscow's "revisionism," what meaning could the words of ideology still have? The extraordinary power of these words over the imagination was revealed in their ability to arouse in the West, among student groups, the fanaticism of Communism's heyday, this time at Mao's service. But this fanaticism was closer to a millenarian heresy than to a religion of history. It reflected the twilight of MarxismLeninism, not its renaissance. It one-upped Stalinism, but as an illusion about an illusion. It was like a child arriving at the store of the century's ideologies after closing time; an anti-Soviet copy of Sovietism, it was not born to last.

During the same period, "Castroism" was another incarnation of the revolutionary idea in the West. As in Mao's China, it involved a charismatic leader, an intellectual figure chosen by history, leading a popular army to victory. Castro had his own "long march," though it was not as long. It was only at the end of 1958 that he seized power with his guerrilleros. He was too young, too exotic, and too recent to be caught up in the internal battles that divided the Communist world. He had not, like Mao, aroused Khrushchev's wrath; nor, like Khrushchev, had he aroused that of Mao. And his Marxism had a tropical charm unlike the austerity of the Eurasian plains. The ideological pilgrimage to Cuba was all but made into a package tour.

The image of Fidel Castro, seconded by that of Che Guevara, thus added its particular features to the revolutionary kaleidoscope that succeeded Stalinist monolithism. As it had done for Mao, the European Left developed a minor cult for the bearded dictator, in a less hieratic version, more appropriate to the dimensions of the Cuban theater and the good life in the West. If the cult of Mao had been one of the last outbreaks of pure Communist messianism, that of Castro allowed for a less puritanical and authoritarian approach. In Paris, for the disciples of Louis Althusser, Maoist China incarnated the utopia of a poor, austere, and just universe. For Californian students, Cuba under Castro represented a Latin paradise and communitarian warmth. How far we are from the 1930s and the enthusiasm evoked by the Soviet Five-Year Plans! Economic growth no longer counted, compared to such ideas as equality or community. The West was rich, and increasingly so, borne along by economic progress and the consumer society. Contrary to the unanimous predictions of the interwar period, Western capitalism, far from being dead and buried, was flourishing. The Communist utopia fell back on the glorification of poverty, but its audience now consisted only of the children of the wealthy.

This social shift was typical of the time. It was most visible in those Western nations, such as France and Italy, in which the Communist parties maintained their hold over a section of the workers but had little influence on the student movements, which sought their inspiration elsewhere than the USSR. The students, when unfamiliar with the Marxist political tradition, had no reason to exempt the Soviet Union from their criticism of modern bureaucratic oppression. And when they recycled Marxism to incriminate capitalism, they sought new clothes for it, outside of the Muscovite cloakroom. Even as Western Marxism was liberating itself, it was returning to a less risky function than that of a state philosophy; it now served merely to denounce bourgeois society, and it harked back to Marcuse and Gramsci rather than to Zhdanov or Laurent Casanova. The crisis of Marxism-Leninism made Marxism itself appear to have a second wind, at the price of an eclectic interpretation, according to which it could lead either to the resumption of revolutionary radicalism or to a more frequent demand for a kind of antibourgeois individualism. The student protests at the end of the 1960s manifested all the various strains of Marxism, in a family portrait from which the bond of shared loyalty to a chosen country had disappeared. The movement now had its source and its heart in something much more diffuse than class or an international strategy: it marked a new political age, in which the working class was losing its messianic role at the same time as the Soviet Union was gradually being stripped of its myth. The hour belonged to an intellectual bohemia divided between self-hatred and the cult of self, a grouping of those who were condemning the existing society rather than calling for a model society. Periodic attempts to meet with the battalions of factory workers were merely holdovers from the past; students found the doors closed. The opposition to capitalism and bourgeois democracy had moved to a new set of actors, references, and registers.

In the West, therefore, everything was conspiring to weaken the myth of the Soviet Union. European societies had entered a period of rapid transformation, propelled by the very capitalist economy they had declared under sentence of death a quarter of a century earlier. They were integrating their workers better than their students; they were weakening class solidarity while sharpening expectations and frustrations. From the de-Stalinization period, European societies retained the Communist idea in the repertory of their political images, but they had extinguished its magic. That magic may have survived in old Cominternist parties, traces of another age, or, in the manner of Trotskyism, traveling aimlessly between scattered groups, but the plurality of models it cited as well as the contradictory policies it embraced were yet another sign that its Soviet embodiment was exhausted. The USSR was more than ever a military superpower at a lime when it had already lost much of its utopian function.

None of the substitute images really took the Soviet Union's place in the imaginary order in which it had held such a fundamental position since October 1917. Maoist activism only nourished small terrorist groups, without a real place in opinion. Castro aged much more quickly than October 1917; within only a few years, the young revolutionary hero had turned into a Stalinoid tyrant. In Europe, what was left of Communism's attraction was largely due to the luster it had managed to retain from the great pro-Soviet years-a heritage managed by former Cominform parties with a flair for adjusting to circumstances. It was no longer a matter of celebrating the USSR with triumphalist accents but of protecting its image at the price of inevitable concessions. The homeland of socialism was no longer the ideal regime where material and moral progress, liberty and equality all came into their own together. It was a country that had known the "cult of personality," the full consequences of which had yet to be overcome. That euphemism had allowed the general blessing which, in spite of the mistakes of its heirs, continued to enfold the October Revolution and to be extended to Brezhnev. It was sufficiently abstract to permit the Communist parties a minimal liberty of disavowal, indispensable to the maintenance of the principal thesis: that the Soviet Union incarnated the sense of historyin other words, the essential superiority of socialism over capitalism.

This margin of maneuver allowed the essential elements to be saved, while opening up a bit of space for the idea of a less authoritarian Communism, which could combine greater flexibility in the administration of the economy with a freer political debate and a devolution of power. Thus a kind of debased utopia emerged, drawn from its original form and destined to underline its decline: something that would remain derivative of the Soviet "genre" without a deficit of individual liberties. This squaring of the philosophical circle, reconciling Marxism with the idea of the "Rights of Man," fit poorly into the historical order, since the dictatorship of a single party was an instrument common to all extant Communist regimes. Nonetheless, it formed a basis for the hopes invested in the relative moderation of Kadar's government in Hungary, prior to explaining Western enthusiasm for the "Prague Spring." Public opinion was less taken with the margin of independence that had been recovered vis-a-vis Moscow than with the "liberal" images of Communism that began to appear; one of the secrets of Dubcek's popularity among the European Left in 1968 was that he represented the resurgence of liberty within the one-party regime, yet did not leave space for the new "bourgeois" parties. The Czech episode illustrates the limits within which even the most liberal "revisionism" evolved. It was not even altered by Soviet military intervention, for the brief attempt at "Eurocommunism" during the 1970s was still based on a "soft" version of Soviet Communism, gentle, pacifistic-in other words, Western-but remaining part of the family, another child of the October revolution.

Such was the form in which the Communist idea sank below the horizon of history, fashioned by the dual effort to alter its lifestyle and to keep it loyal to its origins. Freed from the Procrustean bed of Stalinism, it had lost its power but gained flexibility. Having barely escaped with its life, it still managed to gather those whose memories still tied them to the old image, as well as those who wanted to give it a new youth. They all shared, at least, hostility to those who sought to dishonor that past or to prevent a renaissance. Although-or perhaps because-Communism had become less fanatic in some places, antiCommunism was still a damnable heresy.

This old taboo had been the most loyal ally of the Communist idea from the start, since it forbade criticism of the taboo itself. It played a role similar to that of anti-Fascism in its Cominterman version, guaranteeing the Soviet experience a protection all the more airtight because it followed a line of reasoning alien to Soviet history and thus independent of reality. The immunity thus guaranteed to the USSR had found one of its supports in the fight against Hitler. But its foundation was older, independent of circumstances, and of a primordial order: since 1917, all criticisms of the October Revolution had been subject to the accusation of opposing the emancipation of workers and denying history. This accusation had been a constant means of Communist agitprop, hammered home, from Lenin to Brezhnev, with the violence of excommunication. It is difficult to imagine, now that it has disappeared, how and why it intimidated so many. But we need only remind ourselves how deified "history" bewitched the minds of the twentieth century. The Communists managed to capture that bewitchment to their benefit in the name of the "working class." This explains their power to disallow.

Curiously, the deification of history survived the weakening of the Communists and even gained strength and further justification from their decline. Khrushchev destroyed the myth of Stalin, but his belief in the direction of history was unshaken. He dealt a blow to the image of the Soviet Union but spread that of socialism. The society that was supposed to replace capitalism had lost nothing of its need to have diverse models, some of which it had yet to invent. The students in Paris, Berlin, and Rome who criticized the Soviet bureaucracy in 1968 had other versions of socialism in mind. But these children of the capitalism of abundance still consigned capitalism to the trash heap of history, just as the generation of the Great Depression had done thirty-five years earlier. The older generation, with memories of the depression and World War 11, could still admire the Soviet Union, but prosperity offered no such resources to their offspring. For young people, however, who hated the market economy for the opposite reasons, the idea of socialism, even though ruined by the Soviet Union, nonetheless served their revolt, since it had got rid of its bad shepherds. In all of its formsChinese, Cuban, Albanian, Italian, Czech, Soviet, Cambodian, Sandinistan-Communism had preserved its historical privilege as the grave digger of capitalism.

So the prohibition on anti-Communism at this time was as strict as ever. It gave shape to the minimal orthodoxy that united vague thoughts and idealized policies around a common rejection. The Communist parties watched over it as naturally as they would over a working-class tradition. They were diminished, aged, but. still on their feet, loyal to their leaking ship and continuing to draw significant dividends from their mythological capital .14 They remained strong enough to think they might eventually recuperate the marginal heretics of Maoism nor Castroism, but no longer had the strength to haggle over details.

Student protests did not produce unconditional supporters of the revolution. Instead, as a result of the democratization of the universities and the ideas of 1968, a mostly left-wing middle class emerged. The major legacy of the "events" that occurred at the Sorbonne, at the Free University in Berlin, at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, at Oxford University, and elsewhere was neither Maoism nor Castro-Gueverrism, which were evanescent, but a new bourgeois progressivism, more widespread than the old and with a different spirit. The old sixty-eighters had soon made their peace with the market, publicity, and consumer society, to which many of them took like ducks to water, as if they had denounced the sins of these institutions so as to better adapt to them. But they tried to hang onto the intellectual benefits of the idea of revolution in the midst of their social establishment. For the authors they admired Marcuse, Foucault, Althusser-totalitarianism only persisted in the bourgeois order. It would be difficult indeed to find a critical analysis of "true socialism" in the twentieth century.

In France, admittedly, the "new philosophers" brought an end to that immunity by finally allowing the concept of totalitarianism to be applied to the history of the Soviet Union." But the French case was unique, owing to the exceptional reception that the publication of the Gulag Archipelago received in France." On the other hand, late antiStalinism did not stop the flourishing of a compensatory "revisionism," which was aimed at reviving the purged Marxist-Leninist tradition. During the same years when Solzhenitsyn's book was a bestseller in its French edition, the socialist Left joined forces with the oldest Stalinist party in the West in hopes of a renaissance, for they both sought to "break with capitalism." It was an anachronistic union but a fertile one, for it produced the presidency of Frangois Mitterrand, who got caught for a while in the last neo-Bolshevik program of universal history. The Soviet myth had died in intellectual opinion, but survived in a debased form among the people at large, through the revisionist idea and, negatively, through condemnation of anti-Communism.

There is no place where this latter phenomenon was more obvious, during the same period, than in American universities, which offer the perfect setting to observe a taboo typical of the post-1960s generations. In the United States, anti-Communist sentiments had been widely shared in intellectual circles, in unison with the country at large, since the post-World War II years. The student revolts of the sixties, more drawn out and greater in scale than in Europe, broke up the consensus of the cold war. Young people combined their distaste for consumer society with denunciation of the Vietnam War. For the time being, their target was their own country, in a version of Leninist defeatism with the fronts reversed. The privileged children of the universities found themselves supporting revolution, while the labor unions sided with order. The ideas and passions displayed by the students were much more complex than the class hatred that the founder of Bolshevism, following Marx, had considered the engine of revolutionary action. But, more essentially, what emerged from the protests, swept along by a theatrical compassion for Vietnam, was a resurgence of illusionism about the Communist world. A better description might be a "new wave" of illusionism, different from the first, and much more widespread.

The remains of the American Communist Party after McCarthyism had foundered at the time of the Twentieth Congress. The revolutionary activism reborn with the student protests was no longer under Soviet direction. As in Paris, Rome, and Berlin, the references had shifted to Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Guevara, and, later, Ortega, the hero of "Sandinistan" Nicaragua. But the resurgence of exotic fanaticism touched only tiny minorities and was fleeting. The durable part of the student movement was the reinvention of a "radical" political culture, which saw the United States as less democratic than it claimed to be and the Soviet Union as more democratic than its adversaries believed. The philistines in Washington had tried to cast the two camps as two different types of society, as distinct from one another as liberty from servitude and good from evil. In return, the "radicals," when it was their turn to join university faculties, would teach the following generations about the United States' responsibility for the cold war and about the attenuating circumstances that could be applied to the Soviet Union if we would only take a new look at it.

Let us now turn to the social sciences, for they will lend this essay an air of objectivity by ratifying the social scientist's ambition to find the true causes of social functioning hidden beneath the interminable commentary that every society issues about itself. At this game, the particular ideological character of Soviet society loses its importance. The Soviet Union is a "pluralistic" society like all complex societies. The term "totalitarian," which Hannah Arendt made a part of our vocabulary, loses its pertinence and applicability in relation not only to Brezhnev's USSR but also to Stalin's. The word makes even less sense when it is not the state that is under consideration but social actors. For social scientists supplement their "scientific" qualities with democratic virtues. They combine the "infrastructural" approach with a fondness for the "little man"; they work the fabric of society from bottom to top. Thanks to the social scientists, the USSR was restored to the common context in which societies are judged.

The reader may here have recognized the new type of Sovietology, which, in the United States and Western Europe, took center stage in academia for the last twenty years of the Soviet regime. Like all schools of historiography, it has its good points and its bad, depending on the subject and the writer." My present ambition is not to establish a critical bibliography but to try to describe the spirit common to these works, often put forth as a generational solidarity, especially in the United States, where the social and moral crisis of the 1960s was most profound. The elders-Merle Fainsod, Leonard Schapiro, Richard Pipes, Adam Ulam, Martin Malia, Alain Besancon, Robert Conquest -were suspected of having written cold war Sovietology. The younger generation, more inclined to incriminate their own country, rejected antiCommunism from the opposite end. This meant demonstrating that Stalinism was not only a distinct period but was quite different from the history of Bolshevism; there were certainly many dreadful moments in the history initiated by the October Revolution, but such moments did not condemn the whole of that history since they were -not a necessary consequence of it. This was an educated version of the idea-influential at the time-that Communism, including Brezhnev's version, ought to be saved from the crimes committed by Stalin, or, in a more general form, that the regime founded in October 1917 was good in spite of the disasters following its birth, whereas capitalism was bad in spite of the riches it engendered.

By a curious reversal, American professors came to hate the concept of totalitarianism after having studied it and written about it, whereas French intellectuals, at just about the same time, were beginning to study it after having ignored it. But it was American universities that expressed the most general spirit of the times, which was also visible in Italy, Britain, and Germany: in the last two decades of its existence, the Soviet Union, although it had forever lost the extravagant privilege of being a universal model, was still protected by what had survived of its founding promise. The failure of the October Revolution to achieve its goal, recognized by all, had in no way extinguished the Communist idea; it would find other temporary homelands. In the Soviet Union itself, its heritage remained sheltered from the influence it retained: its tragic side could be attributed more to the circumstances of its history than to Lenin or Stalin. Moreover, the modern society that was built in its name was susceptible to resale, to the limited extent that, in emerging from poverty, it rediscovered the star that had shone down on its cradle. The homeland of Marxism-Leninism also found itself under the paradoxical protection of the "revisionist" idea.

During this period, the image of Communism in the West underwent a contradictory evolution: the decline of Soviet mythology in its hard version corresponded to an extension of its soft version. The postwar times had turned around, and the USSR had lost forever its character as a model country, celebrated by Communist parties all over the world. Its partisans became less and less demanding, and were content with a "generally positive" score, paired with a hope for brilliant tomorrows. Because the Soviet Union was no longer the imperfect matrix of a better social order, it offered less ammunition to its adversaries, who were suspected of belonging to an outdated age of political passions. Exhausted as it was, it still furnished support for anticapitalist or anti-imperialist sentiments. If no one, not even the Communists, felt constrained to justify or praise the least of its deeds, the idea that had served as its banner was all the more universally available. Liberated from its obligation to be infallible, the October Revolution recovered some of its features, faded but rejuvenated.

This return to the original promise intersected with the political inclinations of the student generations. These generations had brought the Rights of Man to the fore, in place of class struggle. This done, they anticipated the end of the Soviet Union, since they claimed that the regime born of October was being judged by the tribunal of those very principles that Marx and Lenin had denounced as bourgeois lies. But what they really wanted to do, without knowing it, was something different: they were trying to give a fresh coat of paint to the confrontation between the ideologies of the universal and the particular by means of democratic abstraction. In this game, the Communists were at a disadvantage, since they were in contradiction with their own doctrine, and in legal matters, even late in the century, their score was pathetip. But in the world of moral finalities that formed the universalism of the Rights of Man, they could still make a case for their intentions: they found a retaining wall against history in the ideal kinship that linked them, in their purposes, to a liberal and democratic utopia. Right up to the end, the Soviet Union sheltered its image in what it wished to destroy. On the eve of the implosion of the regime founded by Lenin, antiCommunism was more generally condemned in the West than during the heyday of victorious anti-Fascism.

The last episode in Soviet history provides us with the ultimate demonstration that reformed Communism, socialism with "a human face," is the most universal form of political investment, of which I have been attempting to write the history. Gorbachev closed the chapter of Communist leaders acclaimed by the West.

The manner in which first the Soviet Union and then its empire fell apart remains mysterious. The role played by volition is the most difficult thing to discern; that of objective factors is easier to establish. The continually mounting price of world power and, especially, the arms race exhausted the Soviet economy, which badly needed a major boost. Perhaps historians will one day believe that President Reagan's policies were more efficacious than generally understood by the international press. It remains true that the internal decay of the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev years had reached such a degree that not only the power of the state but also its physical and moral health, supplies, living conditions, and hospitals-in short, the ability of public authorities to meet basic social needs-were in question. A measure of conditions, according to one demographer, was that infant mortality rates had never been higher than during the 1970s.

Individuals, it is true, could live a little better than in the past, which is not saying much, since the regime was at the end of its rope, the party rife with corruption, cynicism, drunkenness, and widespread laziness. A major weakness of a one-party system with full powers over society is that the decline of the party brings on a general decline in the state. Nevertheless, this twilight Bolshevism could probably have survived a little longer and even made it to the end of the century. Although it had lost its faith, it maintained a vast police force, checking to see that people were still speaking the dead language of ideology. Sakharov was well guarded at Gorky. The psychiatric hospitals took care of the dissidents. Brezhnev's successors, however, especially Andropov and, later, Gorbachev, knew how to distance themselves from him: the risks of this logic had already been demonstrated by Khrushchev and had been the weak point in the dictatorship of the party since Lenin's death. To what extent a concerted program of reform was part of the tacit contract between Andropov, and then Gorbachev, and the majority of the Central Committee, nobody knows. This history remains to be written, and even to be known, since the Soviet Union remained blanketed in silence even on the eve of its dissolution. What is certain, at least, is that it began as a classic succession crisis, each new boss of the Party compelled to take control of the apparatus. Andropov and his immediate successor, Chernenko, did not stay in office long enough to present targets for the man who succeeded them; Brezhnev's men were still the ones to be put down or eliminated if one were to become master. So Gorbachev did as Khrushchev had done after Stalin, and as Brezhnev had done after Khrushchev: he grabbed as much power as he could.

But he did it in a new way. Before Gorbachev, the Party had been the sole means to power. The General Secretary could turn against it, or destroy its very framework and make it over, as Stalin had done in the 1930s. But no one had ever been master of the Soviet Union without having absolute authority over the Communist apparatus. When Khrushchev lost that authority in 1964, he fell. Gorbachev took another route to cement his position. It was not enough for him to remodel the upper levels of the Party; he also drew support from elements outside the Party. The liberation of Sakharov in 1986 indicated that he had changed the rules of the regime.

This tactic was not unlike Mao Tse-tung's launching of the Red Guards against the Party apparatus. It was intended both to reinvent Communist enthusiasm and to weaken the Communist leaders, Gorbachev's open and potential rivals for the politburo. But things came out differently: everyone stopped responding to orders. The modest step taken toward society, and the relative suspension of police terror, revealed not a mounting of Communism but a vague aspiration toward democracy, which Gorbachev increasingly relied on, both by choice and by necessity. Khrushchev had never brought the Party's political monopoly into question. His distant successor violated that basic rule; 21 threatened, as Khrushchev had been, with being put into the minority on the Central Committee, he reanimated the Parliament and was obliged to seek support from fragments of public opinion such as the intelligentsia. But by weakening his adversaries, he weakened himself, destroying the source of his legitimacy, offering a new field to unexpected rivals. And by dispelling people's fear of speaking out, he suppressed the principle of obedience. Even the mounting economic disorder was in part due to this policy, insofar as such disorder is inseparable from state anarchy. "By suppressing the use of terror," one member of the Soviet Parliament said to me at the time, "Gorbachev had also suppressed confidence." This profound and frightening statement illustrates the fragility and ambiguity of the first and last "President of the Soviet Union": he was too much of a Communist for the freedom he had allowed in. It is probably too early to know exactly what Gorbachev's intentions were. The only thing we can be sure of is that he did not want to do what he did.

There is no reason to assume that he had been a closet antiCommunist, or even a bad Communist, before and after his accession to power. This product of the closed world of Sovietism should probably be taken at his word, as he continually preached the rebirth of Communism through reform. He opened the way to the liquidation of the Eastern European Communist regimes, in the fall of 1989, not because he had deliberately intended to do so but because he refused to spill blood. In the homeland of Bolshevism, he remained loyal to the original idea, renovating and renewing it, but not betraying it. Even his abandoning of the political monopoly of the Party was probably part of a strategy: to collect around him, along with the Communist majority, a large president's party, flanked by a marginalized Right and Left. His goal was something like the Mexican institutional revolutionary party, the loyal guardian of revolutionary legitimacy lost in the night of time. The fact that the project soon appeared to have no substance does not prove that it had never been entertained.

The most remarkable part of this story is not that Gorbachev tried to breathe new life into the Communist idea, but that the West believed him and was enthusiastic about him. Admittedly, many governments had their reservations, in spite of the popularity of the last Soviet leader in the West. No established power likes sudden breaks in situations and custom, and the USSR had for so long been a familiar part of the international scene that no one wanted it to disappear, not even its most constant adversaries. Besides, Gorbachev was pushing for détente and arms reduction; Western financial aid, which had never failed the USSR, became massive when it was no longer a matter of helping to make ends meet but of staving off collapse.

If capitalist governments were eager to help, they were outdone by Western public opinion, which, with the vague but encouraging terms of glasnost and perestroika, began to celebrate the Soviet Union's promise to conform to the late twentieth-century obsession with "human rights"-to become a society that was less a paradise for the workers, as in the interwar years (for worker messianism hardly existed anymore in the 1980s), than a world of individuals at once free and protected from inequality. Gorbachev's Soviet Union always retained from the original October the benediction of having broken with capitalism, to which it added that of the rediscovery of "rights." What was called "socialism with a human face" in Prague in the spring of 1968 was now embodied by the mother-nation of Communism, which had finally espoused the ambition that the Red Army had destroyed in the womb twenty years earlier.

The last years of the Soviet myth were thus wrapped in a fictitious synthesis between the principles of Bolshevism and those of liberal democratic pluralism. For Bolshevism was compatible with nationalism, as Stalin had shown all along, even with some autonomy restored to the market-as a temporary expedient, of course-as Lenin had thought to do with the NEP. But Bolshevism had no flexibility whatsoever in matters of ideology and political liberty. It could only hold sway through lies and fear. Even Khrushchev had to kill Nagy. Brezhnev put up with Ceausescu and Kadar, but not with Dubcek. Gorbachev took up what Nagy and Dubcek had begun, but on a far wider scale, in the center of the empire: the reforms and the renaissance of Bolshevism were mixed with the principles that Bolshevism had sought to destroy in October 1917. He pretended to renovate the communist regime, but had no other ideas than those borrowed from the Western tradition, no other means than those he begged from the major capitalist democracies. His actions contradicted his stated intentions. When reference to the West gradually became a philosophy shared with Sakharov, unifying nomenklatura and intellectual opposition, there was nothing left of the Communist idea but what it had destroyed. A society had been so badly broken that it had even lost its resources for a Western-style reconstruction, and it had no other resources.

The nations of Eastern and Central Europe, having broken with Moscow in order to rediscover the sources of their own history, immediately understood what was happening. In Russia itself, Gorbachev was still hated as a Communist leader, though he was more like a politician who had sold himself to the West. He acted as though he were still governing the country, but only Western public opinion believed it, credulous as always with respect to the Soviet Union. The Russians felt Gorbachev was presiding over a general disintegration with no foreseeable future, as though to deny once more one of Marxism's last ideas that societies die only when the elements that are to take their place are ready, formed in the heart of the old world. But nothing like that was happening in Russia. Soviet Communism was disintegrating from within; Gorbachev merely speeded up its death, until his rival, Yeltsin, liquidated it. Born of a revolution, it would die of an involution. But its last leader, despised in Russia, was adored by the West right up to the end. Westerners had a hard time accepting his fall, since it necessarily spelled the end of an illusion that had filled the twentieth century. The Soviet Union left the scene of history before exhausting the patience of its foreign partisans. It left many orphans throughout the world. By the failure of the regime born of October 1917 and, perhaps even more, by the radical character it assumed, the Communist idea was deprived not only of its chosen ground but also of any recourse: what died before our eyes with Gorbachev's Soviet Union were all the versions of Communism, and even the ambition to humanize it under more favorable conditions. It was as if the greatest path to social happiness ever opened to the modern imagination had been shut off.. Communism had never conceived of any other tribunal than that of history, and here it was, condemned by history to vanish from the Earth. It could have lost the cold war and still survived as a regime. It could have engendered rival states, without dying as a principle. It could have presided over the development of diverse societies, which would nonetheless have preserved the original model.

One can imagine other fates: it might have worn itself out entirely but have lived on as a body of ideas. But the fate it met left nothing of those ideas. In the space of a few months, the Communist regimes were forced to make way for ideas that the October Revolution had believed it was destroying and replacing: private property, the market, individual rights, " formal" constitutionalism, the separation of powers-the whole panoply of liberal democracy. The failure was total, for it wiped out the original aspiration.

The downfall of Communism has affected not only Communists and Communist sympathizers. For many others it has forced a reconsideration of convictions as old as the Western Left, even of democracy itself, starting with the sense of history by which Marxism-Leninism claimed to give democratic optimism a scientific guarantee. If capitalism has become the future of socialism, if the bourgeois world is what comes after the "proletarian revolution," whatever happened to temporal certainty? The inversion of canonical priorities has undone the dovetailing of epochs on the road to progress. Once again, history has become a tunnel that we enter in darkness, not knowing where our actions will lead, uncertain of our destiny, stripped of the illusory security of a science of what we do. At the end of the twentieth century, deprived of God, we have seen the foundations of deified history crumbling-a disaster that must somehow be averted. To add to this threat of uncertainty, there is the shock of a closed future. Westerners have become accustomed to investing society with unlimited hope, since that promises freedom and equality for everyone. In order for these qualities to assume their full meaning, it might one day be necessary to go beyond the-horizon of capitalism, to go beyond the universe of rich and poor. But the end of Communism has brought the individual back into the antinomy essential to bourgeois democracy. It has revealed, as if something quite new, the complementary and contradictory terms of the liberal equation-individual rights, and the market-thus compromising the very foundation of what has constituted revolutionary messianism for two hundred years. The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying to formulate a new concept. Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is. This condition is too austere and contrary to the spirit of modern societies to last. Democracy, by virtue of its existence, creates the need for a world beyond the bourgeoisie and beyond Capital, a world in which a genuine human community can flourish. Throughout this book, the example of the Soviet Union has confirmed democracy's need for a utopia. The idea of Communism, in all its periods, never ceased to protect the history of Communism, right up to the last moment, when the history, by simply stopping, made the idea disappear also, having so long embodied it. But the end of the Soviet world in no way alters the democratic call for another society, and for that very reason we have every reason to believe that the massive failure of Communism will continue to enjoy attenuating circumstances in world opinion, and perhaps even renewed admiration. The Communist idea will not rise again in the form in which it died. The proletarian revolution, Marxist-Leninist science, the ideological election of a party, a territory, or an empire have undoubtedly come to an end along with the Soviet Union. The disappearance of these figures familiar to our century brings our age to a close; it does not, however, spell the end of the democratic repertory.