“How a great power falls apart: Decline is invisible from the inside” This article covers the work of Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik, who, uniquely among his peers, recognized the system was headed for self-destruction. 🧵
foreignaffairs.com/articles/russi…
Countries decay only in retrospect. The “comfort cult” is seductive. As a result, when a terminal crisis comes, it is likely to be unexpected, confusing, and catastrophic, with the causes so seemingly trivial... that no one can quite believe it has come to this.
A blueprint for analytic alienation: start with the most unlikely outcome you can fathom and then work backward from the what-if to the here’s-why. The point is to jolt oneself out of the assumption of linear change.
He was concerned with how a great power handles multiple internal crises - the faltering of the institutions of domestic order, the craftiness of unmoored and venal politicians, the first tremors of systemic illegitimacy.
A way to think about political cleavages - observe which portions of society are most threatened by change and which seek to hasten it, and then imagine how states might manage the differences between the two.
Society was becoming more complicated, more riven with difference, more demanding of the state but less convinced that the state could deliver. What was left was a political system far weaker than anyone was able to recognize.
No one ever thinks their society is on the precipice. “Everybody is angered by the great inequalities in wealth, the low wages, the austere housing conditions, the lack of essential consumer goods.”
Great powers set themselves apart from the world, and imagine themselves immune to the ills affecting other places and systems. “This isolation has created for all… an almost surrealistic picture of the world and of their place in it.”
“Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.”
Amalrik identified four drivers of this process in the Soviet Union: 1. Moral weariness from interventionist, never-ending warfare. 2. Economic hardship a prolonged military conflict might produce, 3. A government increasingly intolerant of public discontent...
and 4. An elite that calculated that it could best guarantee its own future by jettisoning its relationship with the capital.
“Soviet rockets have reached Venus,” Amalrik wrote toward the end of his 1970 essay, “while in the village where I live potatoes are still dug by hand.”
In working systematically through the potential causes of the worst outcome imaginable, one might get smarter about the difficult, power-altering choices that need to be made now - those that will make politics more responsive to social change.
In life, as in politics, the antidote to hopelessness isn’t hope. It’s planning.
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