Are there Prospects for Change in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe?
Are there Prospects for Change in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe?

Summary/Abstract: Social agents of revolutionary change are not visible on the Soviet horizon. And if they were, it is anybody’s guess what direction their action would take. In principle, one cannot exclude the possibility that in cataclysmic times, the model of the Great Republic could gain momentum in certain regions of the U.S.S.R. as well. So could, unfortunately, new brands of conservatism and fundamentalism, whose ascendancy would inevitably be accompanied by massacres. Not even the bleak perspective can be excluded that the Great Eastern Empire, even after a victorious revolution, would remain imperialist and hostile to democracy or liberalism, to the same extent it is now. Yet Kant advised us to make a firm distinction between what we can know, what we should do and what we can hope for. We can hope that the idea of the Great Republic will set root in Eastern soil, but we simply cannot know whether indeed it is going to be so.

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