| Summary/Abstract |
Ideology is generally considered as one of the key reasons, if not the main one, for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio asserts that "the catastrophe of historical communism" was not caused by a systemic crisis or a military defeat, but the fact that "in a seemingly irreversible way, the greatest political Utopia in history ... has been completely upturned into its exact opposite." "Sociologized" interpretations of the ideological crisis portray it as the de-legitimization of Soviet power through its own practices (inequality, corruption, nepotism, etc.), which turned the moral principles and goals the country had declared into their grotesque semblance. More "belletristic" interpretations blame it on "the troubadours of perestroika," who exposed the "lies" of communism and opened the eyes of millions of people deceived by the system (Leon Aron's book Roads to the Temple is a classic example). In any case, the crisis of ideology that undermined the Soviet regime was manifested in various ways: 1) as a process that disavowed "Marxism-Leninism" (as an ill-fated Utopian experiment and "the opium of the people"); 2) as a catharsis that leads from the "world of lies" to the "world of truth" (even though Bobbio describes the latter as just another kind of Utopia--that of a free market economy and democratic capitalism); 3) as a pivotal event that brought former communist countries onto the path of progressive and "civilized" development.
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