From Communism to Democracy?

Abstract

In the event, it has proved much easier to dismantle communist rule than to construct a democratic political system in its place. With all its faults, the Soviet system had lasted more than two generations: by the time of the 1989 census more than 90 per cent of the population had been born since the October revolution, 70 per cent since the Second World War (Itogi, 1992). It was a regime that had ‘won the war’, with Communist Party members in the front line; more than two million lost their own lives (Pospelov et al., 1970, p. 643). It had eliminated illiteracy (or at least it claimed to have done so: the 1989 census found that over four million, mostly elderly, were still unable to read and write — Narodnoe, 1991, p. 209). Levels of education had risen remarkably; the proportion with a higher education, in particular, doubled during the 1960s and had doubled again by the end of the 1980s. The circulation of daily newspapers, another indicator of ‘modernity’, was among the highest in the world. Once a rural society, more than two-thirds were living in cities by the 1970s, and more than a third were working in industry. It was, indeed, one of the explanations for the end of communist rule that it had been outgrown by the complexity of Soviet society as a result of the changes that the party itself had sponsored.