BOOKS
Hungary and Its Communists
Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet
Communism. By Paul Hollander. Yale University Press.
$35.00.
Blacklisted: A Journalist's Life. By Paul Lendvai. St. Martin's Press.
$39·5°·
PAUL HOLLANDER BELONGS to the generation which lived for years
under Communism and was puzzled by the power of its attraction on
many Westerners and equally by the suddenness of its collapse. The
more critical spirits among them felt all along the huge discrepancy
between its idealistic goals and the dismal reality of life under Commu–
nism, the disunity of theory and practice. But these fatal shortcomings
seemed at the time not to have a great impact on most of its believers in
West and East. And then suddenly and unexpectedly the whole edifice
collapsed-and it wasn't because of a lost war (as in the case of fas–
cism). Afghanistan was, in retrospect, not more than a series of annoy–
ing flea bites. Nor did it happen as the result of an acute economic crisis;
true, there was such a crisis but it was endemic, rather than a decisive
political factor in the short run. Communist regimes such as China and
North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, despite their mostly dismal economic
record do, after all, continue to exist, whereas the Soviet Union and
Eastern European satellites collapsed.
The collapse occurred, above all, because the leaders of these regimes
lost the self-confidence they and their predecessors had once shown. Or
to be more precise, because they thought that while their regimes were
deficient in various aspects, they could be reformed. The fact that the
Soviet Union was run for many years by an ineffectual gerontocracy did
not help either. However, China has also been run by groups of old and
very old leaders without fatally undermining the regime. But for Gor–
bachev's misguided optimism concerning the chances of reform, the
regime could probably have lasted ten, perhaps even twenty more years.
Underlying the psychological crisis was the loss of self-confidence
among many members of the
nomenklatura
which set in during the
1970S
and which, at first, was hardly noticed in the West. The deeper
reasons for this development have hardly been studied, partly because it
