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29 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 17 (1995)
The Fall - Understanding the Collapse of the Soviet System

handle is hein.journals/sufflr29 and id is 35 raw text is: THE FALL-UNDERSTANDING THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM* Paul B. Stephan 1It The Soviet experiment posed our era's central political, moral, social, and economic problems. Soviet communism offered the prospect of a prosperous, just, and liberating society, an end to alienation in both the material and psychological sense, and a solution to fundamental economic and historical puzzles.' Resting on distinctive notions of orthodoxy, ra- tionality, and solidarity, communist ideology provided a blueprint for nothing less than the culmination of human progress. It promised that col- lective ownership of the means of production would supersede the institu- tion of private property and eliminate the hodgepodge of political and legal arrangements meant to sustain the domination and exploitation that private ownership engendered. Not much longer than a decade ago, more than a third of the world's population lived in states that proclaimed fealty to some variant of this philosophy Many figures outside those states, es- pecially those occupying positions of intellectual, if not political, influ- ence, expressed their interest in and enthusiasm for the experiment. An even greater number of Western social critics, repelled by the human costs * This Article is based on a speech Professor Stephan delivered in April 1995 as part of the Donahue Lecture Series. The Donahue Lecture Series is a program instituted by the Suffolk University Law Review to commemorate the Honorable Frank J. Donahue, former faculty member, trustee, and treasurer of Suffolk University. The Lecture Series serves as a tribute to Judge Donahue's accomplish- ments in encouraging academic excellence at Suffolk University Law School. Each lecture in the series is designed to address contemporary legal issues and expose the Suffolk University community to out- standing authorities in various fields of law. f Percy Brown, Jr. Professor, University of Virginia School of Law. I am indebted to Pamela Clark, Herbert Hausmaninger, John Jeffries, Glen Robinson, William Stuntz, and members of the audi- ence at the Donahue Lecture for their valuable comments and criticisms. Responsibility for errors and wrong-headed judgments remains solely mine. 1. A definitional point may be necessary. When I speak of communist countries and commu- nism, I mean those states that characterized themselves as socialist, where the means of production be- longed to the state and rewards went to workers undiluted by the claims of owners of capital, and aspired to achieve communism, a society in which scarcity had been abolished and all human wants were satisfied independent of the amount of labor expended by the individual. Thus, the label applies to a program, not to an achieved status. 2. The list of countries that had constitutional commitments to elimination of private ownership of the means of production includes Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Bulgaria, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Laos, Mongolia, Mozambique, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia. By 1988 some of these states had begun to relax their embrace of public ownership, although the constitutional changes did not come until later.

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