Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987–1991 by Leon Aron (review)

Abstract

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 930 Serbia under control and were carrying out exactly the measures demanded in the post-Ranković order. A good explanation for why they were so abruptly forced out in 1972 has never really been given — but none is forthcoming in this study, either. Dr Haug does suggest that quite a number of apparently arbitrary decisions, including this one, were made by Tito personally. It is easy to believe this was indeed the case, but she does not really attempt to find an underlying rationale to his choices at various key junctures. Similarly, the volume deals at length with the constitutional revisions of the 1960s and ’70s, but why they were initiated at all is never directly confronted. In particular, why decisions to give enterprises more autonomy and market forces greater sway in the economy also entailed transferring huge swathes of regulatory power to republic governments is never examined. But it was precisely the use (or abuse) of just such powers by the republics that sabotaged economic reform everywhere, exacerbating the economic problems the reforms were designed to address. In this regard, perhaps the volume’s most serious shortcoming is its failure to take serious account of Yugoslavia’s postwar economic performance, a factor inextricably interwoven with national and regional disagreements at every stage. Insofar as the attraction of socialism in a country like Yugoslavia was precisely its promise of rapid economic development and diminishing regional inequalities, the Communist Party’s initial claim that socialism ‘solved’ the national question was not so obviously implausible. And indeed, even in Yugoslavia, national tensions remained manageable as long as the economy was growing. In the final analysis, it was socialism as an economic and political order that failed, and it was this failure that forced the national question back on to centre stage, where a party whose raison d’etre was preserving an unsustainable economic order predictably proved incapable of dealing with it. Given the challenges and complexities of the subject Dr Haug chose to examine, separating economic issues from national and ideological ones in understandable; it is also, however, unfortunate and means a critical component of the story she seeks to tell is missing. Department of Political Science EllenT.Comisso University of California, San Diego Aron, Leon. Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987–1991. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2012. xii + 483 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£40.00. Leon Aron has brilliantly recreated the atmosphere and aspirations of the perestroika years. Written with deep erudition, subtlety and elegance, we are transported into another era. Reading the moving testimonies and the vignettes of Soviet degradation, the reader can experience how from 1987 the REVIEWS 931 Soviet Union endured a period of searing self-examination. The long-repressed truths about the Soviet past and present inadequacies burst into a fantastic literary fireball that illuminated, and in the end consumed, its world. Aron brings to vivid life the spate of publications, debates and appeals that lasted to the collapse of the system in 1991. This is literally a work of monumental proportions, sculpting a testimony to the courage of the truth-seekers of the Soviet epoch. For Aron, the glasnost´ unleashed by Mikhail Gorbachev after becoming General Secretary in 1985 was a genuine cultural transformation comparable to the American or French revolutions. He locates the work effectively in the larger literature on revolutions, but stresses not the structural or other conditions that provoked the breakdown of the old system but the ‘metaphysical’ aspects, the ideas and aspirations that shaped a generation. He makes good use of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on the French Revolution, and this is appropriate. Tocqueville really was the prophet and the mentor of the revolutions against Communism, above all in his studies of civil society. However, Aron does not focus on popular mobilization and civic movements of this period, instead providing a forensic examination of the public sphere. He is right to note that rarely ‘was Russia as honest with itself as in the years between 1987 and 1989’ (p. 2); and we could say that seldom has any society opened itself...