56. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, p. 192.
57. Ferenc Feher, “The Language of Resistance: ‘Critical Marxism’ versus ‘Marxism-Leninism’ in Hungary,” in The Road to Disillusion, ed. Taras, pp. 41-56.
58. Oskar Gruenwald, The Yugoslav Search for Man: Marxism Humanism in Contemporary Yugoslavia (South Hadley, Mass.: J. F. Bergin, 1983). One moment when critical thought in the West united with the revisionist spirit in the East to advocate humanist Marxism was the volume edited by Erich Fromm in 1965 and entitled Socialist Humanism (London: Allen Lane and Penguin Press, 1967). It included thirty-five contributions by Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers, which indicated the animus of the sixties to offer a humanist interpretation of Marx liberated from the hegemonic Soviet grip.
59. Kolakowski, Main Currents, vol. 3; Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe.
60. Horvath, “’The Solzhenitsyn Effect,’” pp. 895-96. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, Utopia (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010).
61. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 10. Marwick defined this concept as “the belief that the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society.”
62. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), p. 401.
63. Agnes Heller, “The Year 1968 and Its Results: An East European Perspective,” in Promises of 1968, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 155-63.
64. V. Zubok’s account about the generation of “Zhivago’s children” shows how, by the end of the sixties, Russian intelligentsia began losing any hope of reforming Soviet-style Communism. The Sinyavski-Deniel trial and publication of Natalia Gorbanevskaya’s Chronicle of Current Events (which Peter Reddaway called “the journal of an embryonic civil liberties union”) signaled the shift to searching for an alternative discourse about democracy among Soviet intellectuals. Another side effect of 1968 was the “the reinvention of Russia” (Y. Brudny). See Zubok, Zhivago’s Children; Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Peter Reddaway, ed., Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the Soviet Union, with a foreword by Julius Telesin (London : J. Cape, 1972).
65. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, p. 296.
66. V. Cerniayev quoted in Victor Zaslavsky, “The Prague Spring: Resistance and Surrender of the PCI,” in Promises of 1968, ed. Tismaneanu, p. 406.
67. Judt, Postwar, p. 447.
68. Paul Auster, “The Accidental Rebel,” New York Times, April 23, 2008; Jeffrey Herf, “1968 and the Terrorist Aftermath in West Germany,” in Promises of 1968, ed. Tismaneanu, p. 363.
69. Judt, Postwar, p. 449. Wallerstein offered a different reading of 1968. Rather than seeing it as the beginning of the end of revolutionary or radical mass politics, Wallerstein understood it as the starting point of the globalization and generalization of antisystemic movements: the “rainbow coalition” applied to “trans-zonal cooperation”—the only way in which a “desirable transformation of the capitalist world-economy is possible.” However, his conviction that these movements were situated outside rather within (as in Judt’s and other authors’ analysis) was the real source of his frustration: “a fully coherent alternative strategy” did not appear. Wallerstein was correct in stating that “the real importance of the Revolution of 1968 is less its critique of the past than the questions it raised about the future.” But, as the upheavals of 1989 (the publication year of his article) demonstrated, the sixties affected the re-creation of the center rather than the re-enforcement and reinvention of the extremes. See Immanuel Wallerstein and Sharon Zukin, “1968, Revolution in the World-System: Theses and Queries,” Theory and Society 18, no. 4 (July 1989): 442-48. To paraphrase Marwick, the social movement that developed in the aftermath of the sixties did not confront their societies but rather permeated and transformed them.
70. Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Cornelius Castoriadis, La breche: Premieres reflexions sur les evenements (Paris: Fayard, 1968).
71. Charles Maier, “Conclusion: 1968—Did It Matter?” in Promises of 1968, ed. Tismaneanu, p. 423.
72. See Paul Berman’s introduction in A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
73. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics; Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992; paperback with new afterword, 1993).
74. English, Russia and the Idea of the West, p. 100.
75. Ibid., pp. 108-9.
76. Ibid., p. 114.
77. I am rephrasing Alain Besancon’s evaluation of Gorbachev’s project of reform from his article “Breaking the Spell,” in Can the Soviet System Survive Reform? Seven Colloquies about the State of Soviet Socialism Seventy Years after the Bolshevik Revolution, ed. George R. Urban (London: Pinter, 1989). The journal Slavic Review reignited this discussion through the publication, in Autumn 2004, of Stephen F. Cohen’s piece “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” along with replies from Archie Brown, Mark Kramer, Stephen Hanson, Karen Dawisha, and Georgi Derluguian.
78. Quoted in Silvio Pons, “Western Communists, Gorbachev, and the 1989 Revolutions,” Journal of European History 18 (2009): 366.
79. Vladimir Kontorovich, “The Economic Fallacy,” in National Interest 31 (Spring 1993):35-45.
80. Stephen E. Hanson, “Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?” in The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Daniel Chirot (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), p. 54. See also Stephen E. Hanson, Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
81. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, p. 335.
82. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 27. Mark Kramer, who develops Kotkin’s point of view, strengthens his argument on Gorbachev’s refusal to continue muddling through of the stagnation years by quoting a telling statement made by Islam Karimov during a Politburo meeting in January 1991: “Back in 1985, Mikhail Sergeevich, if I may say so, you didn’t have to launch perestroika…. Everything would have continued as it was, and you would have thrived, and we would have thrived. And no catastrophes of any sort would have occurred.” Mark Kramer, “The Reform of the Soviet System and the Demise of the Soviet State,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 505-12.
83. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Bodley Head, 2009), p. 598.
84. For a synthetic analysis of the various trends of thinking that were born in post-Stalinist USSR and which resulted by the end of 1980s in the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as state ideology, see Archie Brown, ed., The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
85. Robert English, “The Sociology of New Thinking: Elites, Identity Change, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 43-80.
86. Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (London: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also his previous research on Gorbachev and the aftermath of perestroika: Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova, eds., Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin:
