4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception: Difference between revisions

'''Timur Kuran''': or hungry, the, the show trials of of Stalin, this is the kind of thing the Gulag. people would talk about, you know, refer to Solzhenitsyn's book, when you actually looked at these societies that were some of them in which there were, there was no gulag and the prison population was smaller than the prison population at the time in the United States as a proportion. Czechoslovakia is a good example. So the wasn't Czechoslovakia wasn't a place that we associate with show trials. Yes, there was we think of 1968 when Soviet tanks came rolling in, but even after that you didn't have major trials, you didn't have huge numbers of people disappearing. So what is it that kept Czechoslovakia communist society, and what kept it a communist society is the people who hated the system, pretended to approve of the system and turned against dissidents, the very few dissidents who had the courage to say, this is a system that is not going to last forever. It's an inefficient system. It hasn't brought us freedom. The state hasn't withered away, it's gotten bigger, it's more important in our in our life, and they would turn against them. What sustained communism all across the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites was preference falsification. Now what this meant was that the system was extremely unstable. People were falsifying their preferences because other people were doing so. I was even though I was against communism, and you were against communism, we both supported the system because the other was. Now this is a system where if one of us, decides for whatever reason that we're going to call a spade a spade and say this system doesn't work, I don't like it. I go out in the street and I start demonstrating a lot of other people are going to follow. So what happened is, ultimately, the when some demonstrations began, and it happened to be the demonstration started in, in East Germany, these demonstrations started growing every week, more and more people found themselves in themselves the courage to say what they believed and to come out against the regime. The regime itself didn't want to overreact. There were discussions in the Politburo. Some people said we better crack down right now or this is going to get out of hand. Other people said, Well, if we crack down now and some people die that can, the negative effects could be greater their winter is coming pretty soon it will be harder it will be people will be more reluctant to go out in the In the street, let's let this pass let's not overreact. Before they knew it the Berlin Wall was was down and that created a domino effect. Nobody foresaw that. And it's quite significant that among the people who who missed this were the dissidents, the the East European dissidents, who were the only people and I include in this all the top experts, CIA experts, the top academics studying Eastern Europe, almost a little understood what was holding the system together. Václav Havel wrote a book called The Power of the Powerless, and its main message was this society that hates communism holds within it, the power to topple it. Even he missed this even