Perestroika Radicals: The Origins and Ideology of the Soviet New Left

Abstract

Sympathetic Western journalists present the reforms in the Soviet Union in terms of misguided socialists finally seeing the light, i.e. the capitalist free market. A Soviet columnist responded tartly to an especially self-congratulatory New York Times editorial along these lines by pointing out that the importation of the Thatcherite "economic miracle" into his country would translate on a per capita basis into almost twenty million unemployed and a few million homeless. These polemics rarely rise above a trivial contest for ideological debating points. But when set alongside each other, they provide a fine illustration of the world-historical fact that the Soviet reform drama is only a nationally specific manifestation of a protracted general crisis of industrial civilization in both its capitalist and statist variants.

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