查看文章

There is considerable irony in the current search for the causes of th rapid political changes sweeping the communist world after 1988. I retrospect, it is not hard to single out a number of macrosocietal trends that led eventually to regime change: economic stagnation and consumer deprivation, deeply eroded commitment to official ideology an the growth of widespread cynicism, the corruption and weakening o the apparatus of rule, and the gradual enlargement of autonomous, self-organized spheres of social and intellectual life. It is ironic, how ever, that each of these macrosocietal developments, now the corner stones of emerging explanations of rapid political change, were onl recently treated as evidence of the remarkable comparative stability communist regimes throughout the world in the last half-century. Economic inefficiency, consumer deprivation, and housing shortage were well evident in these societies …