1. Shlapentockh, Vladimir, “Aleksandr i Mikhail Gorbachev” (Alexander and Mikhail Gorbachev), Vremia i my (Time and ourselves) 14 (Spring 1987), p. 123.Google Scholar

2. In this article, “Russia” will refer both to Russia of the pre-Bolshevik period and to the Soviet Union.

3. See, for instance, Michel Oksenberg and Bruce Dickson, “The Origins, Process, and Outcomes of Great Political Reform: A Framework of Analysis,” manuscript, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1990; Trimberger, Ellen Kay, Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1978Google Scholar); and Huntington, Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

4. See, especially, Almond, Gabriel and Mundt, Robert J., “Crisis, Choice, and Change: Some Tentative Conclusions,” in Almond, Gabriel, Flanagan, Scott C., and Mundt, Robert J., eds., Crises, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 619–50.Google Scholar

5. See Bunce, Valerie, Do New Leaders Make a Difference? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. See, especially, Crummey, Robert O., ed., Reform in Russia and the USSR (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989Google Scholar). Also see Lewin, Moshe, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988Google Scholar); and Yanov, Alexander, The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981Google Scholar). I have chosen to focus on only four of these cases—that is, Nicholas I and Alexander II, Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev-two reasons. First, since my concern was with the process of domestic and international change, I had to limit the cases analyzed. Second, these four cases provide an optimal match, thereby lending themselves to the kinds of controls necessary for the analysis undertaken here.

7. On international developments during these two periods, see, especially, Seton-Watson, Hugh, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967Google Scholar); Jelavich, Barbara, A Century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814–1914, (Philadelphia, Penn.: J. B. Lippincott, 1964)Google Scholar; Hobsbawn, E. J., Industry and Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 1968Google Scholar); Dehio, Ludwig, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962Google Scholar); Binkley, Robert C., Realism and Nationalism, 1852–1871 (New York: Harper and Row, 1935Google Scholar); Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987Google Scholar); Rosecrance, Richard, Action and Reaction in World Politics (Boston: Little Brown, 1963Google Scholar); and Caddis, John Lewis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International Order,” International Security 10 (Spring 1986), pp. 99–142.Google Scholar

8. Jervis, Robert, “Security Regimes,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), pp. 357–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. See, especially, Pintner, Walter, “The Burden of Defense in Imperial Russia, 1725–1914,” The Russian Review, vol. 43, 1984, pp. 231–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Of course, the United States and its allies in the twentieth century were somewhat—but only somewhat—slower to see Russian decline than their counter-parts in the nineteenth century. This was, first, because of the superior information available in the case of Nicholas I; that is, the easy calculation of power when confrontations among the great powers were direct, as in the case of the Crimean War. However, one could argue that the indirect jousting typical of the long peace of both the nineteenth century and the post–World War II period worked against recognition of Russian decline. Second, there is the impact of bipolarity, which tends, among other things, to lead each of the two powers to follow a rational strategy of overestimating the strength of the other. That so much of what constitutes power could also constitute weakness (for instance, Soviet control over Eastern Europe) merely adds to the difficulties of calculating Russian power.

10. See, for instance, Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1898Google Scholar); Lincoln, W. Bruce, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1989Google Scholar); McNeill, William, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982Google Scholar); Pintner, Walter, “Reformability in the Age of Reform and Counterreform, 1855–1894,” in Crummey, , ed., Reform in Russia and the USSR, pp. 86–99Google Scholar; Gorbachev, Mikhail, “Doklad General'nogo Ts. K. KPSS M. S. Gorbacheva” (“Speech of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU M. S. Gorbachev”), Pravda, 26 04 1989, p. 1Google Scholar; and Colton, Timothy, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988).Google Scholar

11. See, for instance, Wettig, Gerhard, Changes in Soviet Policy Towards the West (London: Pinter, 1991Google Scholar); Bunce, Valerie, “The Empire Strikes Back: The Evolution of the Eastern Bloc from a Soviet Asset to a Soviet Liability,” International Organization 39 (Winter 1985), pp. 1–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colton, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union; and Evangelista, Matthew, Innovation and the Arms Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

12. See, especially, Binkley, Realism and Nationalism; and Rosecrance, Action and Reaction in World Politics.

13. See Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians; Yaney, George, “Law, Society, and the Domestic Regime in Russia in Historical Perspective,” American Political Science Review 59 (06 1965), pp. 379–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wortman, Richard S., The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Schwartz, Donald, “Autocracy in Nineteenth Century Russia,” in Heper, Metin, ed., The State and Public Bureaucracies: A Comparative Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987).Google Scholar

14. Leroy-Beaulieu, , The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, p. 58.Google Scholar

15. “The Drama in the Time of Troubles,” Canadian American Slavic Studies 59 (Spring 1965), pp. 1–65.Google Scholar

16. See Crisp, Olga, Studies in the Russian Economy Before 1914 (London: University of London Press, 1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and MacNeill, The Pursuit of Power.

17. Quoted in Kennedy, , The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 177.Google Scholar

18. Schwartz, “Autocracy in Nineteenth Century Russia,” p. 110.

19. For analyses of these factors, see, for example, Rieber, Alfred, “Alexander II: A Revisionist View,” Journal of Modem History 43 (03 1971), pp. 42–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Popov, Gavriil, “Fasad i kukhia velikoi reformy” (“Facade and reality of the great reforms”), EKO (1987), pp. 145–75Google Scholar; Shlapentokh, Vladimir, “Alexandr i Mikhail Gorbachev,” Vremia i mi, 97 (1987), pp. 104–23Google Scholar; McCauley, Martin and Waldron, Peter, The Emergence of the Modem Russian State, 1855–1881 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Orlovski, Daniel T., The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of International Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Lincoln, W. Bruce, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

20. See Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon.

21. See Lincoln, W. Bruce, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russian Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1882 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University PressGoogle Scholar). For the Gorbachev case, see, for instance, Colton, Timothy, “Gorbachev and the Politics of System Renewal,” in Crummey, , ed., Reform in Russia and the USSR, pp. 207–42Google Scholar; Griffiths, Franklyn, “Attempted Learning: Soviet Policy Toward the United States in the Brezhnev Era,” in Breslauer, George and Tetlock, Philip, eds., Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), pp. 630–83Google Scholar; and Robert Levgold, “Soviet Learning in the 1980s,” in ibid., pp. 684–734.

22. On the Gorbachev case, see, especially, Hough, Jerry, Russia and the West: The Politics of Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).Google Scholar

23. On these reforms, see, for instance, Field, Daniel, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976Google Scholar); Lincoln, The Great Reforms; Pearson, Thomas S., Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local Government, 1861–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Pintner, Walter M. and Rowney, Don Karl, eds., Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Starr, S. Frederick, Decentralization and Self-government in Russia, 1830–1870 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972Google Scholar); J. Hough, Russia and the West; Colton, “Gorbachev and the Politics of System Renewal’; Shevtsova, Lilia, “Politika i ideologiia: of monologa vlasti k obshchestvennomy dialogi” (“Politics and ideology: from a monologue of power to a social dialogue”), in Bogomolov, Oleg, ed., Perestroika: glasnost, demokratia, sotsializm (Restructuring: publicity, democracy, socialism) (Moscow: Progress, 1989Google Scholar); and Bunce, Valerie, “The Soviet Union Under Gorbachev: Ending Stalinism and Ending the Cold War,” International Journal (Canada) 46 (Spring 1991), pp. 220–41.Google Scholar

24. Laue, Theodore Von, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), p. 11.Google Scholar

25. See, especially, Hough, Jerry, “Gorbachev's Endgame,” World Policy Journal 7 (Fall 1990), pp. 639–72.Google Scholar For the Alexandrine case, see Rieber, Alfred, ed., The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariantinskii, 1857–1864 (Paris: Mouton, 1966).Google Scholar

26. See, for instance, Bogomolov, Oleg, “Meniaiushchiitsiia oblik sotsializma” (“The changing appearance of socialism”), Kommunist 11 (07 1989), pp. 33–42.Google Scholar

27. See, for instance, White, Stephen, Gorbachev in Power, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1992Google Scholar); Urban, Michael, More Power to the Soviets: The Democratic Revolution in Russia (Brookfield, III.: Edward Elgar, 1990Google Scholar); Brown, Archie, “Reconstructing the Soviet Political System,” in Brumberg, Abraham, ed., Chronicle of a Revolution: A Western–Soviet Inquiry into Perestroika (New York: Pantheon, 1990), pp. 31–49Google Scholar; Moses, Joel, “Democratic Reform in the Gorbachev Era: Dimensions of Reform in the Soviet Union,” The Russian Review 48 (Fall 1989), pp. 235–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. See, especially, Breslauer, George, “Linking Gorbachev's Domestic and Foreign Policies,” Journal of International Affairs 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 267–82Google Scholar; and Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire.

29. See, especially, V. Zakharova, “Samoderzhavie in reformi 60-kh godov XIX veka v Rossii,” presented at a conference on the Great Reforms at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 15 May 1989.

30. Also important for the unification of Germany in both cases were changes in the power and engagement of the dominant international power of the two periods; that is, Britain and later, the United States. Britain was already showing signs of downward mobility in the international system and, at the time of German unification, was preoccupied with domestic reforms. Similarly, the United States was not the formidable international power it once was by the 1980s.

31. The differences can be summarized as follows. First, while the Alexandrine reforms involved some changes in Russian foreign policy (for instance, the alliance with Prussia, a reduction in Russian expansionism, and a withdrawal—until the Balkan Wars—from active engagement in European military affairs), these reforms did not in any way involve a fundamental “rethinking” of the Russian role in the international system. By contrast, “new thinking” under Gorbachev was revolutionary in its reconception of the Soviet role in the international system and of the roles and interests of states, more generally, in the international system. Second, Gorbachev's reforms went much further with respect to liberalization of politics. Finally, as is now obvious, the impact of the Gorbachev reforms was much greater, given the end of the cold war, the breakup of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet state.

32. There are a variety of competing understandings of the concept of civil society in recent analyses of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. Suffice it to note here that civil society is usually understood in those contexts to mean: (1) enhanced capacity for voicing opposition to the state and (2) growth of citizen activities that lie outside the direct control of the state. However, it is important to note that civil society as a concept also implies the capacity of society to organize itself, define its interests, and express those interests. In this sense, civil society is quite weak even in the postcommunist regimes. See, for instance, Ekiert, Grzegorz, “Democratizing Process in East-Central Europe: A Theoretical Reconsideration,” British Journal of Political Science 21 (Spring 1991), pp. 285–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Dahl, Robert, Polyarchy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

34. Quoted in Lincoln, , The Great Reforms, p. 53.Google Scholar

35. See, especially, John Bushnell, “Miliutin and the Balkan War: Military Reform Versus Military Performance,” presented at the conference on the Great Reforms at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 15 May 1989.

36. See Hough, Russia and the West.

37. See, for instance, Mearsheimer, John, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War,” International Security 15 (Summer, 1990), pp. 5–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snyder, Jack, “Averting Anarchy in the New Europe,” International Security 14 (Spring 1990), pp. 5–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evera, Stephen Van, “Primed for Peace: Europe After the Cold War,” International Security 15 (Winter 1990/1991), pp. 7–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Goldgeier, James and McFaul, Michael, “A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post–Cold War Era,” International Organization 46 (Spring 1992), pp. 467–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar What is problematic in these debates, in my view, is, first, the failure to draw the appropriate historical analogies (for instance, Mearsheimer's version of the nineteenth century versus mine); and second, the failure to recognize that recent developments in the international system reflect not the structure of the newly emerging order but rather the continuing process of the disintegration of the cold war order and the fact of conjoined domestic and international transitions.

38. There is a third question as well: why the more exaggerated effects, domestic and international, of the Gorbachev reforms? The answer (which, due to space limitations, cannot be elaborated in this article) has to do with the differences in Russia in the nineteenth-century case versus the more recent case—in particular, the degree to which urbanization, industrialization, and literacy plus the achievement of superpower status had the effects of “exaggerating” the goals of the reform and their reach at home and abroad. Nevertheless, this argument should not obscure the central implication of the analysis presented here; that is, that the differences were ones of degree and not kind. For example, in the nineteenth-century case, although the reforms sought to revise tsarism substantially they did not seek to replace it with a system operating on the basis of a different logic; the reforms weakened the hold of the state on the society and on the empire but did not destroy either of those; and the reforms contributed to a shift in the distribution of power on the European continent but did not end the post-Napoleonic international order.

39. See, for instance, Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon; Yanov, Alexander, “The Drama in the Time of Troubles,” Canadian/American Slavic Studies 59 (Spring 1965), pp. 1–59Google Scholar; and, more generally, Crummey, Reform in Russia and the USSR.

40. See, especially, Deudney, Daniel and Ikenberry, John, “Soviet Reforms and the End of the Cold War: Explaining Large-scale Historical Change,” Review of International Studies 17 (Summer 1991), pp. 225–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas Risse-Kappen, “The End of the Cold War and Theories of Change in International Relations,” presented at a conference entitled “Transformation of the International System and International Relations Theory” at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 18 and 19 October 1991; Friedrich Kratochwil, “The Embarrassment of Change,” presented at the same conference; Gaddis, John Lewis, “Forecasting in International Relations: The End of the Cold War as a Case Study,” in Tetlock, Philip E., Husbands, Jo L., Jervis, Robert, Stern, Paul C., and Tilly, Charles, eds., Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War (Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming); Cumings, Bruce, “The Seventy Years Crisis and the Logic of Trilateralism in the ‘New World Order’,” in Loriaux, Michael and Woo, Jung-En, eds., International Political Economy of the 1990s (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, forthcoming).Google Scholar

41. See, for instance, Gaddis, “The Long Peace”; and the excellent reviews of this literature by Kaysen, Carl in his article, “Is War Obsolete?” International Security 14 (Spring 1991), pp. 42–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. See, for instance, Rosecrance, Action and Reaction in World Politics; and Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Particularly surprising, of course, is the failure to emphasize the role of domestic change in international politics, given not just the case addressed in this article but also the continuing international reverberations from the French Revolution. However, there is one case where the peaceful side of the nineteenth century is examined; see Rock, Stephen R., Why Peace Breaks Out: Great Power Rapprochement in Historical Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989Google Scholar). Rock's analysis concentrates, however, on the “second” long peace of the nineteenth century; that is, after German unification in the nineteenth century.

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44. The discussion below draws heavily upon the following analyses of the Russian and Soviet state: Bunce, Valerie, “Two “tiered Stalinism: A Self-destructive order,” in Poznanski, Kazimierz, ed., Constructing Capitalism: The Reemergence of Civil Society and Liberal Economy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, forthcomingGoogle Scholar); Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians; Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon; McCauley and Waldron, The Emergence of the Modem Russian State; Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform; Rowney, Don, Transition to Technocracy: The Structural Origins of the Soviet Administrative State (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989Google Scholar); Schwartz, , “Autocracy in Nineteenth Century Russia”; Snyder, Jack, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambitions (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990Google Scholar); Raeff, Marc, Peter the Great Changes Russia (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1972Google Scholar); Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness; Yaney, , “Law, Society, and the Domestic Regime in Russia in Historical Perspective”; Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962Google Scholar); and William Rosenberg, “On the Problem of Reform in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Crummey, Reform in Russia and the USSR.

45. See, in particular, Csanadi, Maria, “Beyond the Image: The Case of Hungary,” Social Research 5 (Summer 1990), pp. 103–28.Google Scholar

46. Yaney, “Law, Society, and the Domestic Regime in Russia in Historical Perspective,” p. 389.

47. Hankiss, Elemer, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

48. On the tsarist case, see, especially, Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy Before 1914; and Owen, Thomas C., “Entrepreneurs and the Structure of Enterprise in Russia, 1800–1880,” in Guroff, Gregory and Carstenser, Fred V., eds., Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983Google Scholar). However, as will be noted below, there were evident limits on state control. This was especially the case in economics. See Peter Gatrell, The Economic Foundations of Imperial Russia, 1861–1914, Working Papers in Economic and Social History, University of Manchester, Manchester, England, January 1992. Similar arguments have been made about the Soviet economy, prompting some to argue that planners only pretended to plan.

49. Schwartz, “Autocracy in Nineteenth Century Russia,” pp. 118–19.

50. Leroy-Beaulieu, , The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, p. 61.Google Scholar

51. See, especially, “Korrenoi vopros perestroiki: beseda s akademikom T. Zaslavskoi” (Basic question of perestroika: a conversation with academician T. Zaslavskaya), Izvestiia, 4 06 1988, p. 3.Google Scholar

52. I have borrowed the term “shortcuts” from Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon.

53. Alexandr Herzen, quoted in McCauley, and Waldron, , The Emergence of the Modem Russian State, p. 141.Google Scholar

54. See, especially, MacNeill, The Pursuit of Power.

55. Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years Crisis (London: MacMillan, 1949).Google Scholar

56. I have left out of this list still another seeming puzzle of the Gorbachev reforms; that is, the peaceful character of domestic systemic transformation. However, we must remember that there is even a nineteenth-century parallel here; namely, the peaceful character of the abolition of serfdom. After all, at precisely the same time that Russia freed its slaves (and serfdom was primarily about slavery), so did the United States. In the latter case, of course, an extraordinarily bloody civil war ensued.

57. See, for instance, Baldwin, David, “Power Analysis and World Politics: New Trends and Old Tendencies,” World Politics 31 (01 1979), pp. 161–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hart, Jeffrey, “Three Approaches to the Measurement of Power in International Relations” International Organization 30 (04 1976), pp. 299–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Maoz, Zeev, “Power, Capabilities, and Paradoxical Conflict,” World Politics 41 (01 1989), pp. 239–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58. Of course, to understand developments in the nineteenth century, we cannot look only at domestic developments in Russia. Domestic developments in other countries also helped to shape that and later centuries. For example, there is the impact of the French revolution on international change in the nineteenth century (and after), and there is also the impact of British domestic reform (1867) on German unification.