Sovietology before 1989

The field of Sovietology encompassed the Soviet-type systems in the communist bloc, including both the 15 republics of the Soviet Union and the neighboring countries of Eastern Europe that were under its direct influence and control. The literature on Sovietology loosely broke into two camps—“totalitarian theory” and “revisionism”—both of which proved inadequate to understanding the collapse of communism.

The first approach began with Hannah Arendt’s classic work on the origins of totalitarianism, ^{Footnote 5} which equated Stalin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany in terms of having an omnipotent, omnipresent, and ruthlessly brutal ruler who enforced the strict and complete control of all aspects of society in the name of an official ideology, and who received the loyal support of the “atomized masses.” Drawing on this work, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski extended Arendt’s framework by substituting the communist leadership for a single ruler, thereby making totalitarianism an analytic lens for understanding the post-1945 communist countries from East Germany to Bulgaria, in addition to the Soviet Union. ^{Footnote 6} This highly normative and anti-communist totalitarian framework generated an elaborate research agenda that focused on the totalizing nature of communist state domination over society, which was only amplified by modern media and technology. Although it was still possible to provide thoughtful comparisons within the communist bloc, ^{Footnote 7} by describing communist systems as unique, the totalitarian approach thus eschewed comparison to the non-communist world. This created tensions within political science, since at the time the field of comparative politics was developing certain dominant paradigms—most prominently modernization theory—that presumed that all states, societies, and cultures were comparable and on similar “paths.” ^{Footnote 8}

By the early 1980s, the result of this effort to create an integrated field of comparative politics united by modernization theory was the development of a newly dominant “revisionist” paradigm within Sovietology, which focused on the emergence of pluralism within communist systems. Leading revisionists argued that the communist bloc was not unique, unchanging, and fundamentally different (or, for that matter, “evil”). Instead, they saw the potential for evolution, adaptation, reform, and change within the system, towards some form of modernity and relative “convergence” with the West. ^{Footnote 9} This approach moved away from the focus on state domination and ideology, and instead looked at such issues as economic development, domestic elite politics and authority building, and society itself. The most vivid—and probably exaggerated—example of this approach was Moshe Lewin’s account of why aspects of modernization (including industrialization, urbanization, education, and social differentiation) had unintentionally developed a modern “civil society” in the Soviet Union. ^{Footnote 10}

According to Stephen Hanson, despite their methodological and ideological differences, nearly all Sovietologists (totalitarian theorists and revisionists alike) employed a version of modernization theory that implied that as communist societies became more educated, urban, and industrialized, they would face increasing pressure to go on a path towards democratic capitalist “modernity.” The debate between totalitarian theorists and revisionists centered on “the question of whether continuing communist party dictatorship was or was not blocking this supposedly natural process.” ^{Footnote 11}

Despite the diversity of approaches within the broader field of Sovietology, the overwhelming consensus was that communist regimes would persist. Whether through quasi-totalitarian domination, sheer coercive state capacity, accommodation of societal needs, or gradual reform, most scholars—with some exceptions ^{Footnote 12} —agreed that communist systems were stable. It was virtually inconceivable that states within the communist bloc would be toppled, much less by popular mobilization.

In terms of the role of society and possible civic uprisings, few scholars in either camp viewed them as likely or potentially successful. Indeed, the Soviet army and domestic communist regimes in Eastern Europe had left few doubts about their intentions in response to earlier uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1981. Moreover, totalitarian theorists and most revisionists treated society as a secondary consideration to formal institutions and elite politics.

For totalitarian theorists, society was deemed a mere object—of coercion, atomization, indoctrination, mobilization, or “inclusion”—rather than an independent actor. Although revisionists did conceptualize the potential for change that a static totalitarian approach rendered impossible, most of them focused almost exclusively on the state and elites. ^{Footnote 13} Revisionists who sought to go beyond theories of totalitarianism and quiescent political culture presented an image of a public willing to exchange political and social aspirations for better living standards. ^{Footnote 14} This was tied to an overly optimistic modernization narrative that underemphasized the role of repression, and argued that factors such as improvements in communications and the development of civil society would lead to democratization within the Soviet and communist structures.

In short, both theories of totalitarianism that treated the Soviet leadership as all-powerful and the public as atomized, passive, or beholden to state ideology, and revisionist accounts that relied on a modernization narrative of the inevitability of gradual economic and political development were not satisfactory frameworks for explaining the Eastern European uprisings beginning in 1989. As we argue in the next section, explanations for 1989 after the fact tended to either rely on structural explanations that made the uprisings seem inevitable (ignoring the question of why most scholars failed to see this beforehand), or an oversimplified interpretation of the uprisings as evidence of the inherent appeal of economic liberalization and electoral democracy.

Explaining 1989 after the Fact

Given the state of the field of Sovietology on the eve of the 1989 East European revolutions, it makes sense that the uprisings came as a shock to the vast majority of scholars who had spent their careers studying the region. Indeed, as Nancy Bermeo—herself a West Europeanist—put it, the dramatic events leading to the Soviet collapse “compelled us to ask not simply why events unfolded as they did but why our predictive theories left us unprepared.” ^{Footnote 15} The collapse of communism provided an opportunity for many totalitarian theorists, who had been relegated to the margins of mainstream Sovietology for over a decade, to attack the “revisionists” for fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of Soviet-style socialism. Thus, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, William Odom, and others vehemently proclaimed that the pluralist variant of Sovietology was a dismal failure, which had never grasped the underlying essence and contradictions of communism. ^{Footnote 16} They claimed that almost all of the predictions made by pluralists, which were usually about various forms of adaptation, but not about collapse, proved to be wrong. Yet, in reality, most Sovietologists—totalitarian theorists and revisionists alike—not only failed to predict a revolution, but they expected just the opposite, namely that Gorbachev’s reforms would occur within the framework of the communist regime, though what that meant differed between Gorbachev enthusiasts (such as Archie Brown) and Gorbachev skeptics (such as William Odom). ^{Footnote 17}

Despite the unexpected nature of regime collapse in Eastern Europe in 1989, some retrospective explanations have tended to emphasize structural factors that made it seem inevitable. As Mark Beissinger puts it, “the critical question is how Soviet collapse—as opposed to its alternatives—came to be widely viewed as inevitable by a population that, only a short while before, could barely imagine such an outcome . . . . [W]hen the Soviet Union ceased to exist, not only had the unthinkable become the thinkable; it had become the prosaic.” ^{Footnote 18} While scholars can muster numerous factors to retroactively explain the communist collapse, many of these conditions were well known before the disintegration of purportedly stable regimes. Thus, they lend little explanatory power as to why a seemingly durable system suddenly imploded, or why most scholars failed to identify supposedly determinative weaknesses beforehand.

For example, James Brown argued that the key reason for the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe “was simply forty years of failure.” ^{Footnote 19} In her analysis of uprisings in East Germany, Susanne Lohmann argued that in hindsight “the regime’s economic collapse seems to have been inevitable, given its outdated and obsolete industrial structure and the depleted state of its environment.” ^{Footnote 20} Even more dramatically, Philip Roeder argued that the Soviet Union collapsed because of rigidity within the communist system “rooted in the vanguard regime created by the Bolsheviks after taking power in 1917.” ^{Footnote 21} Looking back on such work with the critical perspective of an outsider, Stathis Kalyvas points out that viewing crisis and stagnation as inherently part of a teleological process leading to the collapse of the state privileges macrostructural variables over microanalytical approaches that may be more appropriate for understanding political change. ^{Footnote 22}

As we have argued, both totalitarian theorists and revisionists employed a modernization narrative to frame their explanations of the roots of stability and change in the Soviet system. This implicit or explicit assumption continued as scholars attempted to explain the East European uprisings of 1989 as democratic revolutions.

As anthropologist Alexei Yurchak argues, much of the scholarship about communism was built on the assumption that it was “bad,” “immoral,” and “imposed,” and that it was experienced by ordinary people as such—which partly explains why the system collapsed. Such assumptions obscure the fact that many Soviet people did not experience things this way. Based on rich ethnographic work, Yurchak convincingly shows that “great numbers of people living in socialism genuinely supported its fundamental values and ideals, although their everyday practices may appear ‘duplicitous’ because they indeed routinely transgressed many norms and rules represented in that system’s official ideology.” ^{Footnote 23}

As Jeffery Isaac points out, interpretations of 1989 that focused on communist breakdown in terms of transitions to institutional democratic regimes miss the crucial role that direct political activity played in making the uprisings possible. They ignore the serious tensions between direct democracy and representative democratic institutions. Liberal interpretations of 1989 minimized “the importance of nonelectoral, nonparliamentary forms of political activity—in particular the kinds of civic initiatives that played an important role in resisting communism—in opposing authoritarianism and constituting genuine spaces of democratic politics.” ^{Footnote 24} For example, the Czechoslovakian human rights group Charter 77 spoke of an “antipolitical politics” that was expressly “anti-teleological in the sense that what was central to the Chartists was less the motives or the goals of action than the modes of action themselves.” ^{Footnote 25} For some Czech dissidents, “politics was primarily a way of being and acting so as palpably to experience one’s power and affirm one’s dignity,” ^{Footnote 26} rather than a process of strategic moves and bargains.

In other words—just as with the 2011 Arab uprisings—reducing explanations of popular mobilization and revolutionary movements to a mere phase in a transition towards institutional democracy risks imputing actors’ intentions, and making assumptions about protestors’ goals and experiences that they do not necessarily share. Studying ordinary citizens’ own interpretations of their experience with politics can potentially challenge scholarly paradigms about state-society relations, what it means to garner public support, and how this matters. ^{Footnote 27}

In short, while Sovietologists could not reasonably have been expected to predict uprisings in Eastern Europe in 1989, the leading paradigms were ill-equipped to explain them. Retrospectively deterministic accounts fail to account for why structural tensions did not make Soviet collapse obvious before the fact. By studying the Soviet Union primarily as a failure of economic and political development along a Western model, both totalitarian theorists and revisionists assumed that Soviet publics either saw it as such or would if they were not atomized or (mistakenly) beholden to state ideology. This hindered scholars from studying the roots and character of popular mobilization in a more nuanced manner.

Explaining “Authoritarian Persistence”

Given the empirical reality of no meaningful democratic reforms in the Middle East despite transitions in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa beginning in the mid-1970s, over the past decade political scientists have shifted from studying the bases of possible democratic transitions in the Arab world ^{Footnote 31} to examining how politics takes place under highly stable and adaptable authoritarian regimes. This was part of a conscious effort to move away from the teleological assumptions of a transition paradigm, which treated democratization as the natural outcome of tensions and change in dictatorships. ^{Footnote 32} However, much of the recent literature still implicitly studies authoritarianism as the absence of electoral democracy, treating the maintenance of non-democracies as the key outcome of interest. Terms such as “authoritarian persistence” and “authoritarian resilience,” which are frequently invoked in political science work on authoritarianism in the Middle East, imply that authoritarianism is somehow unnatural or unsustainable under normal circumstances, thus unintentionally bringing back some of the assumptions of “transitology” that were supposedly rejected.

Political scientists attempted to explain the supposed anomaly of “authoritarian persistence” in the Arab world through a wide array of explanations, including rentier economies, ^{Footnote 33} strong elite coalitions, ^{Footnote 34} stage-managed liberalization programs, ^{Footnote 35} coopted civil society, ^{Footnote 36} manipulated electoral politics, ^{Footnote 37} clientalism, ^{Footnote 38} fragmentation and cooptation of opposition groups, ^{Footnote 39} the politics of resource distribution, ^{Footnote 40} strong coercive apparatuses, ^{Footnote 41} vested military interests, ^{Footnote 42} and geostrategic aid. ^{Footnote 43}

Many of the insights from this literature are still highly relevant to understanding the contemporary Arab world in which the political and economic legacies of the past were certainly not wiped away by popular uprisings and civil conflicts. As recent events in Egypt illustrate, mass uprisings by no means lead automatically or conclusively to democratic transitions, much less consolidation. ^{Footnote 44} Amidst the rapid turnover in executive power since the uprisings began in January 2011, separation of powers, basic liberties, human rights, and freedom of expression could very well be less respected than they were under the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. Thus, expertise on institutional legacies, elite coalitions, and political factions’ organizational capabilities is still crucial. However, even if politics in Egypt were to devolve into a new entrenched autocracy, the significance of the uprisings and groundswell of direct political engagement itself should not be minimized by scholars eager to depict the uprisings in terms of a long-standing narrative of democratic transitions and authoritarian persistence. Additionally, studying the uprisings as part of a set of ongoing shifts in how political and social conflicts are being fought out avoids dismissing them as exceptional revolutionary “moments,” or brief interruptions to politics as normal. It also highlights the importance of treating these emerging political changes as significant in their own right. ^{Footnote 45}

Of course, political scientists were well aware of the numerous political, social, and economic strains on regimes in the Arab world. Political systems in the region were becoming more repressive, economies failed to provide jobs for an exploding youth demographic, inequality and corruption were growing, as were Islamist movements. Yet, they focused considerable energies to explain autocrats’ ability to survive despite such factors. ^{Footnote 46} Many of these challenges are not new. As John Waterbury noted more than 40 years ago, while reflecting on Morocco, many societies in the region were “ever on the verge of an explosion that never occurs.” ^{Footnote 47} Thus, retrospectively invoking well-known structural tensions, such as rising education and poor labor prospects, ^{Footnote 48} adds little to our understanding of why and how the uprisings actually unfolded.

Like many Sovietologists’ retrospective accounts of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, writing after the uprisings occurred, specialists on Arab authoritarianism have tended to give initial explanations that rely on factors that were well known, but largely explained away, beforehand. For example, Ellen Lust focuses on leadership succession crises in countries ruled by aging autocrats, sultanistic autocracies with underdeveloped political institutions, longstanding socio-economic strains, opposition and activism abetted by new forms of media, and diminished fear of Islamists’ participation in politics. Overall, “the Arab awakening was not produced by dramatic shocks, but rather by gradual, interlinked, dynamic processes that produced small but significant changes.” ^{Footnote 49} While this provides a cogent explanation for the general relevance of underlying tensions to the uprisings, it does not address why scholars did not see these now well-known factors as decisive before the fact.

Other scholars emphasize how the authoritarian persistence literature largely got things right. For example, Jason Brownlee and Joshua Stacher argue that in post-Mubarak Egypt “there is as much continuity as change.” ^{Footnote 50} They explain that as challenges to democratization continue to unfold, factors such as the lack of elite defections, the transitory nature of coordination between Islamists and liberals, and Egypt’s strategic relationship with the United States, confirm insights from the scholarship on authoritarian persistence. ^{Footnote 51} Likewise, reassessing the relevance of her previous work on the role of coercive apparatuses in maintaining authoritarian regimes in the Arab world, Eva Bellin argues that scholars of authoritarian persistence in the Middle East were largely correct in their key assessments, and that their findings should not be discredited just because leaders were toppled by popular uprisings in a few countries in the region. ^{Footnote 52}

Again, we do not dispute that political scientists correctly pointed out numerous barriers to successful democratic transitions in the Arab world. Additionally, insights by scholars such as those highlighted above presciently cautioned against overly optimistic assessments of the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere as democratic panaceas. However, by framing their questions in terms of (the absence of) broadly construed regime change from autocracy to democracy, they wind up treating utterly remarkable waves of mass mobilization as politically inconsequential.

Overlooking Popular Mobilization

Most of the literature on Middle East authoritarianism overlooked questions about grassroots mobilization, arguing that it was unlikely to seriously challenge regimes propped up in so many ways both domestically and from abroad. If addressing the potential for popular mobilization at all, work on authoritarian persistence generally focused on the barriers to widened collective action. For example, in her article on the role of strong coercive apparatuses in maintaining authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, Eva Bellin discusses the historical legacies (e.g., lack of a prior experience with democracy that could have fostered mass-based parties or labor unions) and contemporary dynamics (e.g., liberals’ fears of an Islamist takeover) that supposedly made popular mobilization unlikely. ^{Footnote 53}

Similarly, Lisa Blaydes argues that some groups in Egypt, such as liberal intellectuals, Coptic Christians, and secular feminists would be unlikely to support anti-regime protests because of their fears that Islamists would not respect personal or artistic freedoms. While Blaydes does discuss the potential for groups such as agricultural laborers, workers, and university students to engage in increased mass mobilization, she does not attempt to address whether “mobilization against the regime is forthcoming or even likely.” ^{Footnote 54} More generally, by focusing on factors such as elite cohesion, ^{Footnote 55} manipulation of the opposition, ^{Footnote 56} or resource distribution ^{Footnote 57} political scientists studying authoritarianism in the Arab world implicitly marginalized popular mobilization as a feasible source of regime instability, or as a subject worthy of study in its own right.

This is not to say that no one conducted in-depth scholarship on issues relevant to mass mobilization prior to the 2011 uprisings. Scholars from various disciplines conducted important research on issues such as the evolution of Islamist movements, ^{Footnote 58} labor politics and strikes, ^{Footnote 59} the politics of economic reform, ^{Footnote 60} emerging protest movements, ^{Footnote 61} how ordinary citizens interact with oppression and engage in politics informally, ^{Footnote 62} various forms of political participation, ^{Footnote 63} and shifts in public discourse with the emergence of regional media outlets and online activism. ^{Footnote 64} However, disciplinary pressure within political science to frame much of the scholarship about the Arab world in terms of overarching questions about democratization or authoritarian persistence led many political scientists to focus primarily on the determinants of regime change and institutional reform. This tended to make scholarship on everyday life under authoritarianism and nascent social movements seem largely descriptive and removed from broader debates within political science.

Taking Popular Mobilization Seriously (Whether or Not It Leads to Democratization)

Popular uprisings in the Arab world do not make work on the barriers to democratization in the region irrelevant. On the contrary, recent events illustrate the difficulty of establishing democratic institutions or consolidating reforms. However, the events beginning in 2011 demonstrate the need to take popular mobilization (potential or actual) more seriously. Analyzing the aftermath of the Arab uprisings through the lens of failed democratization or authoritarian persistence risks treating them as unimportant if they fail to achieve particular institutional reforms. A focus on regime type implicitly marginalizes lines of inquiry about social and political conflict that are important in and of themselves, even if they have little bearing on institutional reform. It also risks explaining away participants’ actual experiences with popular mobilization or ignoring them altogether if they do not neatly fit into a narrative about battles over democratization.

To some extent, our critique of political scientists’ overemphasis on institutional democratization or its absence has already become part of the conventional wisdom. As Lisa Anderson argues, decades of academic work on the region’s democratizing potential, or lack thereof, did not provide a foothold for political scientists to explain the sudden uprisings. ^{Footnote 65} Scholars tended to recycle arguments about the fragility of democracy in the region—e.g., hydrocarbon rents, and low public mobilization—to explain the persistence of authoritarian regimes. “That there was a tautological character to this argument is not surprising; after all, ‘authoritarianism’ is little more than a residual category in most political science, encompassing all the otherwise very varied nondemocratic regimes that have existed throughout history.” ^{Footnote 66} However, while some scholars recognized the conceptual problems (and the potential intellectual dead ends) of studying authoritarianism as the lack of institutional democracy in the Arab world, this remained a primary focus of many political scientists before and after the uprisings.

As the discussion of some of the post-mortem literature above suggests, the tendency to glaze over dynamics that seem unlikely to lead to broadly construed regime change is still alive and well. The most important task for scholars of authoritarianism is not to give (yet more) explanations for why near-term democratization in the Middle East is unlikely, but to ask why previous assessments of public quiescence in the face of widespread oppression were so dramatically wrong, and how various forms of political engagement impact political change—whether or not this leads to institutional democratization.