| This dissertation examines how and why Marxist-Leninist states lost their revolutionary momentum and fell into crisis during the 1960s. The states' problem was rooted in Marxism-Leninism's inherent commitment to conflicting types of social action. Their essential institutions--the Party of "professional revolutionaries" and the overfulfilled central plan--relied on both charismatic and rational-legal modes of authority to function effectively. The states' ultimate goals--to triumph over the West and construct a communist society--demanded that they foment both revolutionary change and solidary stability. What the Marxist-Leninist elites had to do was find a balance between continuity and change in their policies. They needed to simultaneously preserve the balance of charismatic and rational-legal authority in the institutions and adapt them to meet emerging developmental challenges in a way that fostered progress toward the ultimate goals. Taken together, these criteria for the successful evolution of a Marxist-Leninist state are defined as "revolutionary stability." It was during the late 1950s and 1960s that the contradictions inherent to "revolutionary stability" manifested themselves fully and created a dilemma for the Soviet bloc states that proved to be unresolvable.;After developing this conceptual framework, the dissertation examines, with the benefit of recently accessible archival and interview data, the East German reform effort of the 1960s, which was led by Walter Ulbricht. While the conventional wisdom holds Ulbricht to be an unimaginative Stalinist or a pragmatic technocrat, the new conceptual framework and data combine to portray him as an innovative Marxist-Leninist revolutionary. What Ulbricht did with this reform was pursue "revolutionary stability" further than any Soviet bloc leader ever would; by 1970, his final year in power, he was implementing policies designed to both promote the revolutionary change necessary to overtake the West economically and expand solidary stability to an international level through cooperation with the West German working class.;While this new image of Ulbricht will be of interest to historians, it is, paradoxically, his very uniqueness that makes him valuable to social scientists searching for a more general explanation about why Marxist-Leninist states could not reform and lost their revolutionary momentum. Unlike Khrushchev, the market socialists, or the neo-Stalinists, Ulbricht failed by loyally pursuing "revolutionary stability." His strategy, in other words, generated institutional and political resistance because it exposed the contradictions inherent to the Marxist-Leninist agenda. This demonstrates that the Soviet bloc elites were cowed into neo-Stalinist immobilism not just by the specter of market-socialist "revisionism," but also by the political implications of their own ideology. |
