This paper was written before the fall of the USSR, during the final days of perestroika, when there was still a great deal of optimism in many sectors of the left and some expectation among mainstream Sovietologists that "reform Communism" might transform the USSR from an authoritarian welfare state into something resembling the kind of working-class rule that revolutionary socialists have long espoused, or perhaps into a social-democratic welfare state, which seems to have been, at least initially Gorbachev's goal. Although old and somewhat overtaken my events, I think the main argument of the paper was prescient and provides a still accurate and valuable guide to the trajectory of reform Soviet to post-Soviet society, which identified the main internal determinants of the transition of the USSR to a resurgent authoritarian Russian Federation. This is also illuminating for the paths taken by other former "communist" societies in the ex-Bloc and formerly constituent Republics of the USSR. This paper, after distinguishing sharply between the Stalinist system that perestroika and democratization were trying to reform and the ideal of a self-governed socialism found, among other places, in Marx, but by no means exclusively there, cast cold water on these hopes. I argued that support for any sort of socialism had lost the support of the crucial strata of the Soviet intelligentsia and the leading members of the apparat outside Gorbachev's own narrow circle (and to a large extent within it), and that these groups were firmly committed to neoliberalism, of which they had a view even more utopian than the most romantic Bolsheviks had had of Communism in 1917. I argued that this was this significant because these elements controlled the ideological machinery and, in the case of the apparat, the political and literal machinery, the productive assets, the "commanding heights" of Soviet society in transition. I then considered the degree of working class organized support for socialism, and then argued that this was considerable and significant, a view shared at the time with some alarm by conservative sources such as The Economist and with more optimism than was justified by people like myself on the socialist left. I also raised the concern of a transition to a nonsocialist and undemocratic sort of authoritarianism as a reaction to the popular support, as I took it to be, for socialism. I entertained, too briefly, the prospect of disintegration along nationalist lines. As history as shown, I was wholly right that the reform process had undermined, or expressed the forces that undermined, any prospect for "reform Communism" along the lines of the Prague Spring, identified the main fault lines and forces that led the USSR to collapse into what is now Putin's authoritarian nationalism, and at least hinted at the breakup of the USSR itself. I was wrongly optimistic about the state of organization of the left. After almost a quarter century, reviewing the paper for the first time in decades, I still think it is worth reading
