The Gorbachev Era in Historical Context

Abstract

We still tend unconsciously to look on history as a unilinear process leading from a lower, inferior level to something higher and better. To be sure, the utilitarian notion of progress as occurring almost automatically, independently of human will, and bringing about 'the greatest good of the greatest number', has been discredited. The wars and crises of our century, along with the obvious danger of unrestrained technological advances, have put paid to such simple and comforting notions. In an age of nuclear weaponry, guerrilla warfare, famine in the 'Third World' and mass unemployment in the 'First', we are less confident than our forefathers in the power of human reason or the universal validity of our current economic arrangements. It may therefore be apposite to recall the ancient Greek view that history moves in a cyclical pattern and to abandon our Europocentric way of looking at the world. Other civilizations, notably in Asia, have followed different paths of development from ours. Only in recent times have they been drawn into the world economy and exposed to the shock of Western-style 'modernization'. These influences meet stout resistance from 'nativist' elements that preach adherence to these countries' real or presumed traditions. The Islamic world, China and India all offer instructive examples of cultures that have preserved a remarkable continuity over the centuries in the ordering of their political and social affairs, to say nothing of their customs and belief systems. In the case of Russia we are dealing with an Eurasian empire, straddling two continents, whose ?lite became superficially western ized as recently as the eighteenth century but whose peasant masses continued to preserve, right up to and beyond the fall of the tsarist regime, much of their old Orthodox, communitarian culture with its Byzantine roots. Let us also remember that from the fifteenth