BOOKS
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of the Soviet Union, he would make it possible for the system
to
survive,
in a more modern and benign incarnation.
Several dispositions made it difficult to anticipate the collapse of
Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union . Those involved
with foreign policy - including of course the Bush administration and the
State Department - preferred, as always, stability and the familiar; they did
not like to think of a world without the Soviet Union and of the practical
problems this would create . The various critics of the United States, and
those who believed in the 1110ral equivalence of the superpowers, were
reluctant to envisage the demise of the Soviet Union and the political
systems it supported, since this would have vindicated the United States,
capitalism, and Western forms of government. In turn, the critics of the
Soviet system, myself included, who regarded it as both morally repug–
nant and a threat, could not conceive of an "evil emp ire" so weak as to
be on the verge of disintegration. Detractors of Communist systems be–
lieved that the malfunctioning and failures of these societies were irre le–
vant to their survival, at any rate in the foreseeable future, and that they
could continue to stifle discontent, or at least prevent it from taking polit–
ically consequential forms.
East Ellropean Alternat;fles
by Elemer Hankiss, a professor of political
science at the University of Budapest and Director of Research at the
Institute of SocioloS'Y of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, addresses
the almost total lack of conceptual or psychological preparedness in the
West for the collapse of the Communist systems, and the continued con–
fusion as to what this means for past assessmcnts. Hankiss is among the
elite of Hungarian intellectuals and social scientists who survived thc
Kadar decades with a remarkably Westernized outlook. In 1987 and 1988,
he was a Fcllow at the Woodrow Wilson Intcrnational Center for
Scholars in Washington DC, working on a comparative study of East
European and Western-type societies. Between 1991 and 1992, he
headed Hungarian Tclevision, a position from which he was suspendcd
by the government, under right-wing political pressure.
While political systems modeled after the Soviet one were initially
imposed on Eastern Europe in a fairly uniform fashion, therc was consid–
erable diversity in the processes leading to thc removal of the Soviet influ–
ences and institutions. Eastern Europeans, and Hungarians in particular,
disagree as to how important Soviet internal change was for developments
in Eastern Europe. However, it is safe to say that the former satellites of
the Soviet Union would not have unraveled without Soviet acquiescence.
Still, the explanation of these developments cannot be derived solely from
the disintegration of the Soviet center. Hungary is a good case in point,
and Hankiss documents with an abundance of data the indigenous sources
