Grand Strategy Annex

28th October 2014

Post with 5 notes

The continuing political repercussions of the fall of the Soviet Union

In his State of the Nation address of 25 April 2005, Vladimir Putin famously said of the fall of the Soviet Union that:

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Putin isn’t the only repressive autocrat who rues the demise of the Soviet Union and Soviet Civilization. Several sources have claimed that it is almost an obsession within China’s Politburo that the Chinese Communist Party not go the way of the Soviet leadership. They are worried, and rightfully so.

Somewhere several years ago, in a source I can’t recall, I read that younger members of the Chinese Communist Party are set to study cases of uprisings against authoritarian regimes and to dissect them for lessons that might be learned. In this spirit we read in a recent CSIS report, Decoding China’s Emerging “Great Power” Strategy in Asia by Christopher K. Johnson:

“China’s leaders understand far better than any outside observer possibly can the many risks to the party’s continued grip on power. From their ceaseless preoccupation with reexamining the roots of the fall of the Soviet Union to the many indications that they deeply mistrust their own people, China’s leaders are in some ways more inward looking than ever before.”

And in Hong Kong crisis exposes impossible contradiction of China’s economic growth we read this attributed to British diplomat George Walden:

“Xi Jinping has a horror of what happened to the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. If things get seriously out of hand, he may mobilise ‘patriotic compatriots’ (Beijing-controlled agitators) on the streets. In the end he will bring out the troops, if he has to.”

Similar accounts appear in many sources. Xi himself was quoted to this effect in China’s new President Xi Jinping: A man with a dream,

“Why must we stand firm on the party’s leadership over the military? Because that’s the lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Soviet Union, where the military was depoliticized, separated from the party and nationalized, the party was disarmed. When the country came to crisis point, a big party was gone just like that. Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than we (Communist Party of China) do, but nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”

What Xi Jinping is here asserting is the centrality of a one-party army to a one-party state. One wonders if Xi Jinping and his communist party cohorts have also been studying the lessons of Latin American dictatorships of the past century. At one time, Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay was the longest-serving dictator in South America, and his rule had its foundation in the same one-party principle as advocated by Xi.

Stroessner’s regime was described in this way in Stronismo, Post-Stronismo, and the Prospects for Democratization in Paraguay by Diego Abente (Working Paper #119, March 1989; notice that his report dates from the same time as the Tiananmen protests and the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union):

“…the partisanization of the Armed Forces that followed in the wake of the revolution of 1947 ensured the emergence of a one-party army and the use of the repressive apparatus of the state to sustain the regime.”

We must learn to see the Chinese response to the Umbrella Revolution in this context. Xi, as quoted above, said, “nobody was man enough to stand up and resist,” and for Xi it appears that “manning up” means something like sending in the tanks, so that we must understand the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 as being continuous with the Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and with any future intervention by the Chinese central government in Hong Kong. And in order to make sure that the soldiers do what the party wants them to do, and not what the people want them to do, the army must remain firmly under party control.

While this sounds pretty straight-forward in terms of standard operating procedure for repressive states, it is worthwhile to pause over the use the fall of the Soviet Union as an example. While in Putin’s sense, this was a geopolitical catastrophe, and many Russians suffered terribly in the transition, it could have been far worse. In Romania, where Nicolae Ceaușescu kept a private army, the Securitate, separate from the regular army, the post-communist transition was among the bloodiest in the Eastern Bloc.

If some Soviet strongman had been man enough to stand up for the Soviet Union, as Xi seems to imagine should have happened, the carnage in Russia would likely have been far worse than Romania, and very possibly a replay in reverse of the civil war between Whites and Reds that established the rule of the communist party in Russia. It doesn’t take much in the way of political insight to see the potential for a large scale disaster that would have been a much greater geopolitical catastrophe than the fall of the Soviet Union as it did in fact unravel.

I have observed in The Chinese Conception of Human Rights that the Chinese leadership likes to present their utilitarian conception of human rights as an alternative to the western conception of human rights, arguing that they have done more good for the greatest number than would be possible given the western conception of human rights. There is a superficial plausibility to this argument, but it is in rare cases like the fall of the Soviet Union where we see the disastrous possibilities of this utilitarian conception of human rights. No matter what gains for human well being come about as a result of the closed social system of a one-party state, as the leadership in Beijing believes themselves to have secured for the Chinese people, when this closed political system is eventually and inevitably confronted by stresses that it cannot absorb, all of these claimed advances come undone. If a strongman stands up to defend the teetering system, the transition is even worse, and the setback dealt to society even more devastating.

Tagged: Diego AbenteAlfredo StroessnerXi JinpingChinaUmbrella RevolutionSoviet Unioncommunist party