A Skeptic Who Was Surprised

“The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State… and Other Surprises,”
by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Reviewed by Stephanie Abbajay

"The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State…and Other Surprises" is, as anyone familiar with Jeanne Kirkpatrick's career would anticipate, more than just another compilation of the writings of a celebrity commentator.

Although her new book is indeed a collection of columns, it is highly personal, reading at times like a diary of the writer's thoughts. Above all, "Withering Away" is both a history of and reflection on a period of exceptional interest, the terminal phase of the Cold War. Like Mrs. Kirkpatrick herself, it is candid, direct and clear of purpose.

Each of the 100 or so entries it prefaced by remarks explaining what Mrs. Kirkpatrick was thinking when she wrote the piece, what the conventional wisdom was at the time and, admirably, whether time has proved her right or wrong. This gives the reader a two-for-one bonus: We get Mrs. Kirkpatrick then, and we get her now.

On the subject of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's success, for example, she admits, "I regard wishful thinking as especially dangerous in world politics….However, the wishful thinkers turned out to be more nearly right than I."

Although Mrs. Kirkpatrick left the United Nations, to which she had been Ronald Reagan's ambassador, in April 1985, she remained a major player, a candidate for high office and someone with a loyal following. Her columns carried much weight and often warranted responses from policymakers. Immediately after her column "New Thinking on Afghanistan" appeared in February 1988, for instance, she remembers receiving "a call from the State Department offering assurances that George Shultz was in fact taking the position I said he should."

Mrs. Kirkpatrick was never satisfied with half measures. She always pressed for more, and she often succeeded in defining the terms of the debate. Though she admits that, from the start, she was impressed with the bold new Soviet lender, her early essays on Mr. Gorbachev are cautious, skeptical and loaded with questions and challenges. (In this respect, she compares interestingly with another formidable lady, Margaret Thatcher, whose usual tough-mindedness is rarely in evidence when the Soviet president is the subject of discussion.)

As both Mr. Gorbachev's reign and the cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union progressed, Mrs. Kirkpatrick became more encouraging and optimistic but never too laudatory. When Mr. Gorbachev took a solid step toward loosening the totalitarian grip, he was applauded, but at the same time prodded to do even more. (Now that you've renounced force, what about free elections? Now that you have free elections, what about private property? Now that you have private property, what about a market economy? And so forth). It was not until the spring of 1989, Mrs. Kirkpatrick remembers, that she "firmly concluded that Gorbachev did…desire sweeping internal reforms."

The sharpest essays in "Withering Away" are those on the subject of arms control. One such is "Human Rights – The Essential Element" (January 1989), wherein her muted enthusiasm for arms control agreements (she'd rather have a double root canal) contrasts with the importance she attaches to human rights: "After all, INF and START reduce only the numbers of certain kinds of nuclear weapons. In this violent century, more millions of people have died at the hands of their own governments than in war."

Mrs. Kirkpatrick makes much of the fact that she did not predict the sweeping changes that would occur. In fact, this is an important theme of "Withering Away" and one of the lessons to be learned from the Cold War: Always expect change. In her brilliant, new closing essay, "Reflections on the New Soviet Union," she explains why nobody predicted the collapse of communism. Regime changes, she argues, almost always come from the bottom, from groups outside the apparatus. Given the very nature of totalitarian regimes (a stagnant top and a repressed bottom), everyone assumed that the Soviet Union and its empire were almost entirely resistant to change: "We never seriously considered the possibility that change would be initiated from the top." But that, of course, is what happened. "Mikhail Gorbachev changed the world," she writes, and proved everybody wrong.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick is able to move readers in conveying the importance of what we have witnessed – the great failure of communism to determine people's lives, the emptiness of Marxist myths, the futility of repressing the individual and, finally, the withering away of totalitarianism. Her gift for sharp articulation and her bold and lively approach to the subject makes "Withering Away" an exceptional contribution to the history of the last days of the Cold War.

Stephanie Abbajay is managing editor of the National Interest.