August 30, 2006
The Fall of the Soviet Union Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST Alex Burns wrote AmericanHeritage.com’s lead article yesterday on the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. It made me remember sitting in a living room in Cambridge, England, in the company of people who had grown up under Stalinist governments in Eastern Europe, watching first the news of the coup against Gorbachev and then its failure, when Boris Yeltsin rallied the Russian people in defense of their fledgling democracy. My Eastern European friends were much less astonished by the coup than by the civil courage of the people who thwarted it. We toasted the Russian people with the only Soviet alcohol we could find, a bottle of genuinely vile Georgian wine, the worst beverage I have ever tasted. It tasted like a thin molasses blended with gasoline. The toasts were in no way ironic.
I still remember my Eastern European friends’ morbid certainty that tyranny had again been effectively restored, and their combination of exhilaration and stark incredulity when democracy triumphed and swept away the Communist party. They had a weary confidence that nothing could change. That university was filled with very brave people who had been dissidents in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland and who knew in their bones that the world had frozen fast in the mid-1940s. Its unfreezing remains the most astonishing event of my lifetime, but I am struck by how little it remains in our consciousness and, all things considered, how comparatively slight was its impact at the time.
For the first 40 years of my life the balance of terror was omnipresent, and mutual destruction a never wholly forgotten possibility, for international politics seemed in one aspect utterly immobile: Almost no one could imagine a world that was not divided into hostile camps, each forever holding the other in check. We now live in apprehension of the development of the first Iranian nuclear weapon, which, if it appears, will for many years be unable to reach an American city unless smuggled in aboard a freighter. The Soviet Union, of course, possessed many thousands of such weapons; a fair number of the ones to be delivered by submarine-launched ballistic missile would have required perhaps seven minutes to reach their targets. Those weapons still exist, although we no longer much fear them. For now, we truly fear only lunatics who seem to detest modernity—not (mostly) rational actors with a scientific worldview plus control of a state possessing an apparently modern industrial economy, and for that reason extremely formidable. The disappearance of that kind of military threat, however, is scarcely the whole of it.
One of the courses I teach is on the postwar political novel in America. Some of the books deal with race, and my students understand those books, in many cases effortlessly. The books dealing with Communism are almost incomprehensible to many of them, the ones dealing with the political morality of the Cold War being especially baffling. The ones dealing with mutual assured destruction—Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is the greatest of them—depend on assumptions that must now be reconstructed as laboriously as the ones that underpin a difficult text from Greco-Roman antiquity. The sadness of a novel like Robert Stone’s A Flag For Sunrise, an allegory of Cold War El Salvador, is similarly inaccessible. The literature of the Cold War makes no immediate sense to my students; the tragedies and ironies of my world are not, for now, any part of theirs, but it is not reasonable to be surprised by such a thing. It may be more truly surprising that most of my colleagues do not seem to remember those ironies and tragedies. And I am chastened to realize that if not for Alex’s column, I would not have given a moment’s thought yesterday to those intensely dramatic, world-transforming events.
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