The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

Implicit in the unfettered free market doctrine around which American liberal capitalism was constructed was the assertion that society would be based on the dual freedoms of social libertarianism and the open market. By the same token, unlike the Soviet Union, the American ideology celebrated the US’s small, decentralised state apparatus.¹⁹

Moreover, the extended cold war between the USSR and the US, culminating in the perceived triumph of one and the total collapse of the other, has seemed to confirm the notion that they stood at opposite (and conflicting) ends of the socio-political, economic and cultural spectrum. For example, Conquest recently gave a triumphalist interview published in The Financial Times entitled, “I Told You I Was Right”.²⁰ Conquest’s assumptions were the dominant theory throughout the cold war years and have remained in ascendance not only in specialist areas but also in wider epistemological fields, such as the social sciences and modern philosophy. The most famous example must surely be Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Published in 1992, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama argued that communism’s “failure” proved that American-style liberal capitalism was indisputably the best socio-political-economic and cultural system mankind could ever hope to develop and that now this had been “proved” there would be no more “changes” or “experiments”. In other words, Fukuyama argued that capitalism’s triumph over communism represented the end of history.²¹ Even Noam Chomsky apparently subscribes to elements of Conquest’s view. In his recent publication, On Democracy and Education (2003), Chomsky declares that in the USSR “what people may [have thought was] not terribly important: What count[ed] [was] what they did. They must obey, and this obedience [was] secured by force.”²²

One of the effects of this conventional wisdom is to impose a priori a binary structure on the way in which all aspects of the two establishments are read. The Soviet Union, especially during the 1930s, is depicted as “totalitarian”.²³