Boris Yeltsin was not a great man. But he did influence history. Two decades ago cracks were beginning to show in the Soviet system. It was not foreordained, however, that it would spin apart at the time and in the way that it did. Yeltsin made a difference.
The same was true of China after the 1976 death of Mao Zedong. China had long suffered from Mao initiatives such as the Great Leap Forward and the Great Cultural Revolution. Unifying memories of the civil war against the nationalists and resistance to Japanese occupation were fading. The economy was stagnant. People remained poor. Something had to change.
However, it did not have to change the way it did in 1978 with the dramatic reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping. The depth and breadth of the changes this tough little Communist fostered in China were perhaps the most important historical phenomenon in the last half of the 20th century. Their effects still reverberate around the world.
Yeltsin, or any other Soviet leader, probably would not have taken bold steps if not for the example of a decade of dynamic change in China.
Most scholarly historians reject historical determinism – the idea that just because events unfold in a certain way, they had to evolve that way. Most also hate “the great man theory” – the idea that history is driven by exceptional individuals like Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte or Winston Churchill.
But while there is much that is fortuitous in history, both for good and ill, individuals play a role. Boris Yeltsin may have been an opportunistic political hack, but his August 1991 decision to mount a tank with a bullhorn in opposition to a conservative coup impelled a collapse of the Communist regime and the Soviet empire far more rapid and extensive than anyone anticipated.
Brazil’s Getulio Vargas and Argentina’s Juan Peron both introduced labor laws and other government institutions modeled on Italian fascism. At the time these measures seemed a humane “third way” between the extremes of communism and unfettered capitalism. Few foresaw how these well-intended institutions eventually would weigh down economic growth.
Mississippi Congressman John Rankin now is remembered as a particularly racist Southern segregationist. But without his leadership, the GI Bill probably would not have passed toward the end of World War II. Many noted college presidents and prominent politicians opposed the measure. Six decades later it is hard to identify any legislation that transformed our society and economy more broadly or positively.
The course of history and the development of institutions are not completely random. There is such a thing as “historical forces.” But societies do come to forks in roads, where the future is hidden around some bend. Individuals like Yeltsin, Deng and Rankin make choices, wittingly or unwittingly, that steer their nations down one fork and not another. The economic consequences can be enormous.
© 2007 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.