Understanding Communist Collapse and Resilience

Abstract

In 1989 communist regimes from Berlin to Ulaanbaatar began to fall like dominoes. In the aftermath, social scientists produced many explanations for the fall of communism. Nevertheless, given the momentous and multicausal nature of the 1989 events, the question of why some communist regimes collapsed is still open to new interpretations. But 1989 is also notable for what did not happen. Several communist regimes survived the fall of the Berlin Wall: communist parties still rule in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and North Korea. Thus, attention to the “nonevents” of 1989 allows us to ask a broader question – namely, why do some communist regimes survive the forces of contagion, even as others fall? By focusing on the survival of some communist regimes and the collapse of others, we can approach the general problem of authoritarian regime resilience. Some authoritarian regimes are relatively short-lived, experiencing frequent breakdowns as a result of coups or revolutions. However, the regimes that underwent turmoil in 1989 had enjoyed very long average life spans. Regardless of whether they survived the watershed of 1989, all these regimes had been resilient . They had previously weathered serious domestic and international crises that had not brought them down (for example, de-Stalinization in Eastern Europe or the Cultural Revolution in China). What are the factors that explain such resilience? Why were these regimes capable of maintaining power? Given that some regimes failed and others survived, were there systematic differences among the survivors and the nonsurvivors that explain these divergent outcomes?