Late 1980s

The Late 1980s are presented as a period when the disintegration of Communist power was not only a matter of losing control of the state. Its decisive break could arrive earlier, at the moment people ceased to fear the rulers and stopped treating their threats as credible. The distinction makes political change visible as a shift in collective belief and action, not simply as a change in formal institutions.

The political break

In the book’s account of the last years of the 1980s, the Communists could still be formally in power while the threat sustaining their rule had already lost its force. People suddenly no longer took that threat seriously; even as actual confrontations with the police continued, it became clear that the political game was over. The interval between continued institutional control and the loss of authority is central: a regime’s apparent persistence does not mean that its hold on people remains intact.

This account distinguishes the material fact of losing state power from the moment that made the loss politically consequential. The decisive change is neither an invisible private feeling nor a substitute for institutional conflict. Rather, it alters how people respond to the existing order while its structures are still present. Political power can therefore be weakened before its visible apparatus disappears.

Contrast with the Soviet revolutionary transformation

The Late 1980s also stand in contrast to the account of Soviet society’s remaking between 1928 and 1933. The difficult but enthusiastic revolutionary years from 1917 to 1921 had placed society in a state of emergency, while the New Economic Policy consolidated Soviet state power without fundamentally changing the social texture for most peasants, artisans, and intellectuals. The drive launched in 1928, by contrast, directly targeted the composition of the social body: it sought to liquidate peasants as individual owners and replace the old intelligentsia, including teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians, with a new one.

The scale of that change is conveyed through Moscow. Someone who had left the city in 1914 and returned in 1924 would still have recognized its shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, the people in charge. Returning in 1934, after another decade, that same observer would have encountered a city whose social texture had changed so profoundly that it was no longer recognizable. Where the Late 1980s break is marked by the collapse of belief in a still-standing authority, the Soviet transformation is described through the forceful reconstruction of social life itself.

Revolution, reversal, and historical judgment

The chronology of Soviet transformation complicates any simple account of Stalinism as either an accidental deviation from the October Revolution or proof that the Communist project was inherently totalitarian. The book argues for holding together the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. In Sheila Fitzpatrick’s interpretation, the revolutionary sequence proper extended through collectivization and rapid industrialization, ending only in 1937, when the great purges were cut short and the Party nomenklatura stabilized into a new class.

The inward drive of the late 1920s is also connected to the revolution’s confinement within the Soviet Union. The hoped-for expansion of revolution abroad had failed; forcible industrialization and collectivization then turned the pressure inward, reshaping Soviet society in place of revolution’s outward spread. This account sets the later loss of Communist authority against an earlier history in which revolutionary energies were redirected into transforming the country itself. It presents neither period as a self-contained episode: each exposes a different tension between a political project and the social order that bears its consequences.

Political change and its material setting

The distinction between state power and the loss of fear fits the book’s wider insistence that political and economic processes cannot be reduced to one another. The political arena may appear to be a theater of shadows beside material socioeconomic processes, yet a change in political conviction can be crucial to transforming reality. The Late 1980s illustrate this claim through the gap between formal rule and the changed response to it: the institutions remained, but their authority no longer worked in the same way.

That account belongs to a broader analysis of modernity in which bureaucratic administration and capitalist self-revolutionizing are treated as distinct, incompatible dimensions of social life, rather than as phenomena that can be translated into a single explanatory language. The book does not identify the Late 1980s rupture with either dimension. Instead, it makes the period significant as a case in which the political meaning of an order changes while its visible structures have not yet caught up.