Volume 38, Number 15 · September 26, 1991
The Anatomy of Collapse
By Roderick MacFarquhar
In Moscow, 1991, as in Beijing in 1989, eight hard liners made a last-ditch stand to preserve communism. Yet in both cases, the Communist party was left on the sidelines and no appeal was made for support in the name of Communist doctrine. Politics and persuasion were thrust aside in favor of force. The big difference in the two cases was that in Beijing in 1989, the chief reformer, Deng Xiaoping, sided with the hard liners. His authority was just sufficient to overcome divisions in the military and to engineer the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Conceivably, if Gorbachev had gone over to the Moscow plotters last month, the Communist system might have been preserved in the Soviet Union.
Feature, 3764 words
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