Welcome to Foreign Affairs Summer Reads. For the next three months, we’re sharing some of our favorite essays from the archives that explore the historical echoes of today’s challenges—and the limits of what history can teach us. We start this week with Charles King’s 2020 essay on the work of Andrei Amalrik, a Soviet dissident who predicted the Soviet Union’s collapse two decades before it happened. “To know how great powers end,” King wrote, “one could do worse than study the last one that actually did.”
In 1970, Amalrik smuggled his essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” out of the country. Not only did he warn that the Soviet system was on a path to self-destruction at a time when such views were not in vogue, King argued, but Amalrik also identified “a more general political syndrome: the process through which a great power succumbs to self-delusion.” He traced decline to how such a country “handles multiple internal crises—the faltering of the institutions of domestic order, the craftiness of unmoored and venal politicians, the first tremors of systemic illegitimacy.” Amalrik grasped that in powerful states people tend to assume that stability will prevail. But “every society has its own rock bottom,” King wrote, “obscured by darkness until impact is imminent.”
Amalrik did not get everything right. But today, thinking through worst-case scenarios, as he did, could help reveal “the difficult, power-altering choices that need to be made now—those that will make politics more responsive to social change and one’s country more worthy of its time on the historical stage,” King wrote. People would have to ask themselves: “How much longer should we stay? What do we put in the suitcase? Here or there, how can I be of use?” Ultimately, “In life, as in politics, the antidote to hopelessness isn’t hope,” King concluded. “It’s planning.”
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