Between past and future

The collapse of communism was so surprising and consequential that it made a profound impression even on the critical observer. Cautious predictions about a potential collapse of the Soviet Union forecast not a sudden and complete disintegration of the country, but a stable pattern of decay. The Cold War was so deeply rooted in the life-worlds of contemporaries that it is difficult to resist the impression that 1989 was a decisive rupture point. For some, the end of communism was tantamount to the event that marked the ‘end of the short twentieth century’, if not ‘the end of history’. For others, Soviet communism arguably could be qualified as a historical chapter with a clearly definable beginning, a ‘middle’, and an end. Unlike what the French Revolution or Napoleon's empire bequeathed to posterity in terms of symbols, institutions, ideas, and memories, however, the Soviet empire's collapse left nothing behind but a tabula rasa, as its principles, codes, institutions, and history became superseded.

While there has been serious disagreement about the degree to which political organisation after communism would be influenced by legacies of the past, there has been tacit agreement about analytically disconnecting the old order from the new for two central reasons.