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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Stephen Hanson points out that there is little to no agreement among contemporary scholars concerning either the predictability of the Soviet collapse or its underlying causes; between the untenable determinism Cohen rightly attacks and Cohen’s own extreme “possibilism” are many quite sensible intermediate positions. Once this is recognized, the real question becomes at what point, exacdy, were Gorbachev's reforms of the Soviet system likely to lead to change of the system itself? But to answer that question requires both a more precise, contextual definition of “reform” and a more holistic understanding of the Soviet “system” than Cohen provides here.
1 See, for example, Collins, Randall, “Prediction in Macrosociology: The Case of the Soviet Collapse,” American Journal of Sociology 100, no. 6 (May 1995): 1552–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kalyvas, Stathis N., “The Decay and Breakdown of Communist One-Party Systems,” AnnualReview of Political Science 2 (June 1999): 323–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Steven Fish, M., Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1995), 8 Google Scholar (emphasis in the original).
3 Beissinger, Mark R., Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 3–4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 McFaul, Michael, “Evaluating Yeltsin and His Revolution,” in Kuchins, Andrew C., ed., Russia after the Fall (Washington, D.C., 2002), 26–27 Google Scholar.
5 See, for example, Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization; and Walker, Edward W., Dissolution:Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Lanham, Md., 2003)Google Scholar.
6 See, for example, Collins, , “Prediction in Macrosociology“; and Valerie Bunce, “Two-Tiered Stalinism: A Self-Destructive Order,” in Poznanski, Kazimierz, ed., ConstructingCapitalism: The Reemergence of Civil Society and Liberal Economy in the Post- Communist World (Boulder, Colo., 1992),29–46 Google Scholar.
7 Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.J., 1955)Google Scholar.
8 Gorbachev, Mikhail, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York, 1987), 49 Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., 51.
10 For a fuller analysis, see Hanson, Stephen E., Time and Revolution: Marxism and theDesign of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar.
11 Solnick, Steven L., Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).Google Scholar
12 See the analysis of revolutionary crises in works such as Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China(Cambridge, Eng., 1979); Goldstone, Jack A., Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar; and Tilly, Charles, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar. For an insightful application of such theories to the USSR, see Goldstone, Jack A., “The Soviet Union: Revolution and Transformation,” in Dogan, Mattei and Higley, John, eds., Elites, Crises, and the Originsof Regimes (Lanham, Md., 1998)Google Scholar.
13 Malia, Martin (“Z”), “To the Stalin Mausoleum,” Daedalus 119, no. 1 (1990): 295–344 Google Scholar.
14 Hanson, Stephen E., “Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?” in Chirot, Daniel, ed., The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989 (Seattle, 1991), 54 Google Scholar.
