The year is 1983. It’s two years before Mikhail Gorbachev will come to power in the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan is president of the U.S., the Cold War is again heating up, I am in high school, and most policy experts and academics speak of the USSR as if it is, if not eternal, then at least destined to be around for a very long time.
Gorbachev was one of the most significant political figures of the second half of the 20th century. He became general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1985 following the death of Konstantin Chernenko. Gorbachev was the extraordinary communist leader who recognized the Soviet system, characterized by a centralized planned economy and an absence of political freedom or democracy, was not working and embarked on a risky path of reform.
While the comparison between the U.S. today and the USSR in the early 1980s should not be overstated, it would be equally wrong to think the U.S. is the bastion of stability and democracy that it could claim to be even a decade ago.
His reforms included “glasnost” (openness), which brought about a slightly more open and freer political environment, and “perestroika” (restructuring), which sought to alter the economics of the country and introduce some market-based elements.
The system proved too brittle for change, and the result was the end of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s resignation in 1991. While he was lauded in the West for helping to end the Cold War (in part because of the reforms he ushered in), views about him in Russia were quite different. For many in Moscow, not least Vladimir Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a travesty that needed to be undone. Putin’s aggressive war on Ukraine, which is now in its seventh month, is, in part, an effort to put back together what Gorbachev’s reforms broke apart.
The final days of the Soviet Union might seem like something far away from the U.S. and almost ancient history for anybody under 40 years old, but Gorbachev’s death on Tuesday highlights essential lessons that are very relevant to the U.S. today. The key to those lessons is just how briefly Gorbachev was in power, a reminder of how temporary political systems can be.
By 1993, two years after the end of Gorbachev’s time leading the USSR, Bill Clinton was in the White House, and the Soviet Union was no more. I was in graduate school, and the consensus in academic and policy circles was that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been inevitable. The journey from unimaginable to inevitable, with regard to the end of the Soviet Union, had taken only a decade.
When I started spending time in the former Soviet countries in 2002, I frequently met middle-age people who had been blindsided by the end of the Soviet Union and had not been able to build new lives. Many of those people had lived through a decade of economic duress as industries and factories shut down. It was not unusual to see people who had trained as engineers and scientists working low-paying jobs in hotels. What Western academics agreed had been inevitable still seemed unimaginable to the people who lived through it.
Following Gorbachev’s resignation, Boris Yeltsin had took over as president of Russia and steered the country through a decade of acute economic crisis. For many people, standards of living plummeted as unemployment was rampant and currency devaluation was a massive problem. The transition from a planned Soviet economy to a free (and freewheeling) one created a handful of wealthy people but impoverished millions. The tough times of the 1990s led to the authoritarian Putinist regime, in which democratic reforms have been rolled back but the economy is stronger than it was in the 1990s.
Indeed, those six years when Gorbachev was in power, from 1985 to 1991, were thus a period of extraordinarily rapid change for the communist bloc and the world more generally, as the system that had defined international relations for over 40 years quickly collapsed.
The relevance of all of this to the U.S. is that over the last seven years, we have seen more political instability, threats of violence, talk of Civil War, political polarization and efforts to undermine key democratic institutions than at any other time in modern American history.
While the comparison between the U.S. today and the USSR in the early 1980s should not be overstated, it would be equally wrong to think the U.S. is the bastion of stability and democracy that it could claim to be even a decade ago.
Our political institutions and civil society are much stronger than those of the late Soviet Union, but that is not a guarantee that our democracy will survive.
The possibility that American democracy could come to an end or that the U.S. could fall into irrevocable disunity and instability has not been this significant since the Civil War. The U.S., as Kamala Harris said when she accepted the nomination to be Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020, is at an “inflection point.”
Our political institutions and civil society are much stronger than those of the late Soviet Union, but that is not a guarantee that our democracy will survive. The speed with which the Soviet collapse went from unimaginable to a fait accompli to seen as inevitable should, at the very least, remind Americans of the fragility of our democracy.
It is certainly possible that within a few years, polarization in the U.S. will naturally decrease, the Republican Party will break with Donald Trump, and we will find ways to reform institutions like the Supreme Court, the Electoral College and the Senate, which are preventing much-needed reform. Still, one would have to be extremely pollyannaish to look at where we are now and think those outcomes are likely.
What seems to be a more probable, albeit gloomier, scenario is that the GOP continues to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections it loses; a Supreme Court that does not reflect the views of the American people continues to exercise more power; and mass shootings, harassment and threats against judges and elected officials and other forms of political violence increase. In this scenario, American democracy would continue to wobble, and it could ultimately collapse into civil conflict and widespread political violence.
And 20, 10 or perhaps fewer years from now, scholars could be discussing not how American democracy crumbled but why it was inevitable. The building blocks of that argument are already apparent: an attempted insurrection, ongoing loyalty to Trump (and political leaders he has backed), continued efforts to undermine faith in elections, and the deepening of racial and other divisions.
The collapse of the Soviet Union brought an end to a brutal and repressive system, but it also brought instability and massive economic setbacks to a large part of the world. The time to do everything we can to ensure that does not happen in the U.S. is now.