The Dynamics of Diffusion in the Soviet Bloc and the Impact on Regime Survival

Abstract

This book explains why some communist regimes collapsed, whereas others – China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam – withstood the revolutionary upheavals of 1989–1991. To understand why these five communist regimes survived when so many others perished, we need to examine the factors and processes that led to the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union but did not end communist rule elsewhere. One crucial element in the downfall of communist regimes was the process of international “diffusion,” a topic I will be exploring in this chapter. The chapter begins by briefly explaining why the spillover of political change and turmoil from one country into another played such an important role in the collapse of the Soviet and allied communist regimes. The chapter then specifies how the concept of “diffusion” has been elaborated by scholars of varying perspectives (realist, liberalist, constructivist) and applied to various geographic and temporal contexts, not just to the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991. Using this framework, the chapter distills several points about the process of diffusion that linked the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Mongolia in the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. The concluding section explains why this process did not destabilize the resilient communist regimes. The Chinese regime did experience significant effects of diffusion in the spring of 1989 with the emergence of the Tiananmen Square protests, but the threat to the regime’s survival was abruptly eliminated in early June 1989 when the Chinese Politburo ordered troops to open fire on serried crowds of demonstrators, killing vast numbers. If the Chinese authorities had not brutally crushed the Tiananmen Square unrest, diffusion from the Soviet bloc might well have extended further, potentially undermining some of the resilient communist regimes. The decisive crackdown in Beijing not only solidified Chinese communist rule but also kept the process from subverting any of the other communist regimes outside the Soviet orbit.