unreformability thesis

After witnessing the collapse of 1989–1991, many Western Sovietologists and commentators had a ready answer: the Soviet system had been unreformable and was therefore doomed by its own irreparable defects. The Italian historian Giuseppe Boffa recorded in his analysis of perestroika's failure that the "thesis about the unreformability of the USSR" spread widely both inside and outside the Soviet Union after the fact. The Russian historian Aleksandr Semyonov places it within the totalitarian paradigm, formed amid Cold War ideological debate, in which the Soviet collapse appears as the inevitable outcome of a state built on erroneous principles. From the characterization of the regime as an ideocracy and as a dictatorship of a minority (the nomenklatura) over the majority follows the conclusion that it was fundamentally unreformable and unable to adapt to the arms race and the information society. Martin Malia and Richard Pipes are named as its leading exponents.

In a 2004 article Stephen F. Cohen named this position the "nonreformability thesis" and sorted its supporting arguments into four modes. The first holds that the Soviet Union's "original sins," its aberrant ideology, illegitimate origin and committed crimes, turned it into an eternal evil stripped of any capacity for development. The second holds that the Soviet end itself proves unreformability, which Cohen likens to assuming that every death results from an incurable disease, and criticizes as retrospective determinism that reads history backwards from the outcome. The third holds that the system would not have accepted reform, resting on the premise that a monolithic nomenklatura would never have permitted any change threatening its privileges. The fourth holds that the Soviet system and democracy were mutually exclusive.

Cohen's rebuttal begins by asking how each component of the system actually responded between 1985 and 1991. The official ideology, the party and its dictatorship, the nationwide network of soviets, the monopolistic state economy and the union of republics all turned out to be remarkably reformable. The major political and economic reforms of 1985–1990 were proposed, debated and ratified by the highest nomenklatura bodies: the Politburo, the Central Committee, the All-Union Party Conference and two party congresses. Those bodies even voted to abolish the practice that guaranteed their nomenklatura supremacy, the appointment of all key posts, in favour of elections. Cohen also rejected the depiction of 1991 as an "anti-Soviet revolution from below." Opinion surveys showed that the overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens, around 80 percent, still opposed market capitalism and supported the system's basic values: state ownership, state regulation of the market, price controls, guaranteed employment, and free education and health care. In the March 1991 referendum, which covered 93 percent of the Soviet population, 76.4 percent voted to preserve the Union.

Boffa saw this determinism as anything but neutral. A deterministic reading of Soviet history lends a positive assessment to the harshest conservative positions, such as those of Brezhnev or Suslov, who themselves believed that once any change began the whole of Soviet society would collapse, and who rejected reform on precisely that conviction. Boffa argued that outcomes are not foreordained but the product of choices made by actors at particular moments. Against the thesis of inevitability, five scholars responded to Cohen's article, and the debate continues.