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'Be Not Afraid'
| Article
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10899 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
2,558 Words |
| Author
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J. Michael Waller
J. Michael Waller is vice president of the American Foreign
Policy Council in Washington, D.C., and executive editor of
Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. |
THE FINAL REVOLUTION
The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism
George Weigel
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992
272 pp., $22.50
THE END OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE
The Triumph of the Nations
Helene Carrere d'Encausse, translated by Franklin Philip
New York: Basic Books, 1993
292 pp. , $23.00
The pope? How many divisions has the pope?" George Weigel addresses Stalin's mocking questions in The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, arguing that the pope's divisions were the single greatest force that destroyed the Stalinist empire without firing a shot. Perhaps the most thoughtful presentation of the collapse of communism written in English, The Final Revolution is an uplifting account of, in Weigel's words, "when the good guys win, cleanly and against great odds" [see "the Collapse of communism," p. 368.]
For Weigel, a noted author and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, the final revolution, which transcends mere politics, begins as a moral and cultural revolution, "the human turn to the good, to the truly human--and, ultimately, to God, who alone can make all things new." Having interviewed the people who made them, Weigel argues that the central and eastern European political revolutions of 1989 and the Russian revolution of 1991 were built upon a final revolution led by men armed not with guns but with ideals; culture, religious faith, and the goodness of humanity. His marvelously researched work fills a yawning gap in the range of literature chronicling the collapse of communism.
Many factors--political, economic, military, and social--contributed to the collapse, yet they do not explain why the 1989 revolutions in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were nonviolent, sustained, unusually broad-based among social classes and between secular and religious institutions--and effective. Weigel gives these factors their due but maintains that the political revolutions required a more fundamental base. Hence the role of the church.
Clerical and lay leaders and members of the
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