Volume 39, Number 11 · June 11, 1992
Who Killed Soviet Communism?
By Theodore H. Draper
PUBLICATIONS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons
by Mikhail Gorbachev
HarperCollins, 127 pp., $18.00
'Gorbachev's Endgame'
by Jerry F. Hough
World Policy Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4 pp.
'Liberalization and Democratization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe'
World Politics, Vol. 44, No. 1 pp.
The mystery of Soviet communism is why it came to such an unexpected end. For such an all-embracing system to die, almost everyone expected that it would have to be killed. Instead, it collapsed, as if a house had fallen in on itself. Its old ruling bureaucracies have largely escaped unscathed and have even benefited from the new opportunities to wheel and deal. Paradoxically, the life of Soviet communism seems to be much less a problem than its death.
Review, 5260 words
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