Reflections: Gorbachev, Communism and Reform

Abstract

The ‘communism’ that collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991 was Leninism. The word ‘communism’ has little analytical content and we should distinguish Lenin and his legacy firmly from both Marxism and socialism. Lenin had a revolutionary impact on the Marxism and socialism of late nineteenth-century Europe; he changed them into something hardly recognisable from a European point of view yet familiar in the context of native Russian radicalism. Some people in Lenin’s own time, Rosa Luxemburg for example, saw this;² yet it is astonishing that today the words ‘communism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘Marxism’ may still be treated as interchangeable. Marxism and the European social democracy that evolved from it and other ancestors are traditions quite distinct from Leninism; they may or may not have something to offer, but that is unaffected by the collapse of Leninism.

‘He did not know how to give us sausage, but he knew how to give us freedom. Whoever thinks the first is more important will probably end up without either the one or the other.’

(Komsomol’skay a pray da, December 1991)¹