The National Interest articles from March 1993

The National Interest archives from March 1993

Fortune and fate. (analysis of the collapse of the former USSR) (Special Issue: The Strange Death of Soviet Communism)
March 22, 1993... RETROSPECTIVELY, it might appear that the Soviet Union was rotten and ready to expire in 1985, when Gorbachev came to power. Yet, to my knowledge, no Sovietologist offered that judgment. This was not because they were all ignorant of their...

Did the West undo the East? (influence of Western nations on the collapse of Communism in the former USSR) (Special Issue: The Strange Death of Soviet Communism)
March 22, 1993... THE COLD WAR, it was often said, was a struggle not merely between states but between incompatible social and political systems. There was as a result no issue of Western policy more important, more persistent or more controversial than whether...

The economic fallacy. (economic problems and the collapse of communism in the former USSR) (Special Issue: The Strange Death of Soviet Communism)
March 22, 1993... AHIGHLY VISIBLE economic crisis gripped the Soviet Union during the last three years of its existence. Western reporting from Moscow told stories of long lines, empty shelves, and fear of starvation. Many official decrees designed to save the...

The role of popular discontent. (collapse of communism in the former USSR)
March 22, 1993... HOW MUCH DID popular disaffection with communism and Soviet imperialism contribute to the collapse of the USSR? This complex question has in general been little researched or understood by Sovietologists. First, most of them have not studied...

One who got it right. (Sovietologist Bernard Levin)(predicting the collapse of communism in the former USSR)
March 22, 1993... WHY DO I believe that Brezhnev and his colleagues have seen the writing on the wall, and know that the message it conveys is exactly the same, word for word, as the original slogan that gave us the metaphor? Why...do I believe that a new...

1917 and the revisionists. (Sovietologists)
March 22, 1993... IN THE 1970s and 1980s self-proclaimed "revisionists" in the field of Soviet history took over many of the leading university chairs in the United States, England, and Germany, and by means of patronage more appropriate to politics than...

A fatal logic. (Sovietologists and the collapse of communism in the former USSR)
March 22, 1993... THE GREATEST surprise of the end of the twentieth century has been the suddenness and completeness of the Soviet system's collapse. After three quarters of a century of communist expansion, and forty-five years of Cold War contest for global...

The pluralist image. (evaluation of the inability of Sovietologists to predict the collapse of communism in the former USSR)
March 22, 1993... THAT GORBACHEV would choose policies that would accelerate the Soviet Union's demise was unpredictable. Unpredictable too was the timing of the final collapse. But that the Soviet system was decaying, that its structure prevented its...

Sovietology: notes for a post-morterm.
March 22, 1993... AFTER MIKHAIL Gorbachev's ascension to power, considerable effort went into predicting the Soviet future. This concern spread from the op-ed pages and congressional hearings to infect the furthest corners of the discipline of Sovietology....

My cold war. (Irving Kristol, political philosopher, intellectual)
March 22, 1993... THIS PAST FALL, in what used to be East Berlin, I attended a commemorative conference on "The Cold War and After." It was sponsored by the late, lamented Encounter magazine, which had been founded in London in 1953 by Stephen Spencer and...