|
At last available in English and newly
updated, this prophetic work, a bestseller in France, is
required reading for those who want to understand the breakup
of the last empire on earth.
The End of the Soviet Empire shows
in detail how the rise of nationalism in the former republics
stripped the mantle of legitimacy from the Communist Party
and led inevitably to the revolution of 1991. Accustomed
to its official "vanguard" role, the Party assumed
it could renew Soviet society by decree, through glasnost
and perestroika, ignoring the profound nationalist feeling
that was inexorably eating through the bonds of political
union. D'Encausse, whom Le Monde has called the "czarina
of Sovietologists," trenchantly describes the obliviousness
of Gorbachev and the entire Party apparatus to the rumblings
of this political volcano beneath their feet.
The result, d'Encausse argues, was that
the party became -- except as a repressive agent of force
-- virtually irrelevant to the future plans of the native
leaders of the resurgent republics. In region after region,
political allegiance and power flowed from the Party to
the popular fronts, which rapidly created new civil societies.
The monolith of the Soviet Union simply ceased to exist,
and the Second Revolution began.
Helene Carrere d'Encausse was one of the
few scholars to recognize the gathering power of this movement.
Undistracted by the political acrobatics of Gorbachev and
the dramatic rise of Yeltsin, she saw that outside the glare
of international publicity, a genuinely popular revolution
was quickly sweeping all the apparent leaders into that
time-honored Marxist receptacle -- the dustbin of history.
The End of the Soviet Empire is intellectual analysis
and drama of the highest order.
Helene Carrere d'Encausse, the third
woman ever elected to the Academie Francaise, is a Professor
at the Institut des Sciences Politiques. She is the author
of ten other books.
|
