STEPHEN MILLER
83
repressive state, but that poor people lived better there than in the cap–
italist West because health care was free and there was an abundant sup–
ply of doctors. Working for the
RFE/RL,
I knew otherwise, for scholars
from
RFEI
RL's Research Institute wou ld write about many of the fail–
ings of Soviet society-its miserable health care system and its terrible
neglect of the environment.
In 1989 I wrote a piece attacking anti-anti-communists which
appeared in
Commentary.
Certain that the Soviet Union was here to
stay, many anti-anti-communist scholars said the Soviet Union's politics
could best be understood by appropriating the terms of political scien–
tists to describe regimes in the West-e.g., interest-group pluralism-or
by using the methodologies of anthropology or sociology. They also
argued that those who said that the Soviet Union might collapse were
blinded by their Cold War attitudes. I agreed with them that the USSR
had changed a great deal from the time of Stalin-that was obvious to
all Sovietologists-but I didn't agree that the Soviet Union was a stable
country and that communism could be reformed. Yet I believed it would
take a long time before communist regimes would collapse. I wrote that
"real change in Communist countries is likely to take a long time."
I was wrong. On November 9, 1989, three months after my article
appeared, the Berlin Wall came down. Most observers were wrong
about the fate of communism in Eastern Europe, but the Reaganites
were, so to speak, less wrong, for their assessment of life under com–
munism was more accurate. They said that Leninist communism could
be reformed only on the margins, and they were right. Leninist commu–
nism-sometimes called socialism-was an economic disaster. Or, as a
Polish worker put it, "Forty years of socialism and there's still no toilet
paper!"
In my view the Bush Administration's realist approach to the Soviet
Union was not very different from the view of anti-anti-communists.
Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, made no secret of their
admiration for Gorbachev, and seemed to hope that reform communism
would work. Bush, I suspect, would never have spoken of "an evil
empire." In fact, in a speech before the Ukrainian parliament-called by
its detractors the Chicken Kiev speech-Bush suggested that the empire
should be maintained; he told the delegates that the Soviet Union was
worth saving and that they should endorse a treaty committing them to
the Union. What was the alternative for Ukraine? According to Bush, it
was a "suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred. "
But there were differences between the realists and the anti-anti-com–
munists. One way to think about the three currents of thought is to
