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Lessons of the Fall: Revisiting the Collapse of the Soviet Union

REVIEW ESSAY
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
by Vladislav M. Zubok
Yale University Press, 2021, 560 pages

Russia has not been Communist for more than a generation. And yet, now that we are arguing about Russia again, it seems impossible to avoid arguing about Communism, too. When Russia was a basket case in the 1990s—shunned, stunned, and stagnant—there was little that Russians could say to the Western profes­sors and investors and philan­thropists who arrived in droves to lecture them about their own history. The Communist evil empire had been economically and morally out­competed by the free world, and would have to adapt to capitalism—things appeared that simple. But a decade of economic and political brigandage followed, then the rise of a nationalist president, Vladimir Putin, who won the nation’s gratitude for bringing the oligarchic mafia under a semblance of control, and finally a half-generation in which the United States and its European allies have taken a stance of truculent enmity towards Russia, often for domestic political reasons.

It is natural that Russians, and a few open-minded Westerners, should now be reexamining parts of the West’s triumphalist narrative. Not, one must stress, the narrative of the Soviet Union’s mid-twentieth-century terror. Although the Soviet victory over Nazism remains a cause of national celebration, Putin’s Russia has been anything but blind to Communism’s misdeeds. There is a new museum of the Gulag prison-camp system, and the works of twentieth-century dissidents, including those of the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, appear in school curricula.

What is being reexamined is the process by which the stumbling Soviet Union of the 1980s was defeated and dismantled. Was it a heroic revolution in which the prophetic reformer Mikhail Gorbachev led his people toward a nobler set of ideals? Or was Gorbachev a true-believing Communist who simply screwed up, taking 270 million Soviet citizens down with him?

Similar questions have arisen about the role of outside influences in the turnover: Did the United States help Russia once the revolution was underway? Did it exploit Russia and take advantage, geopolitically and economically, of its debility? These questions are of particular interest as the United States now finds itself occupying the geostrategic position that Russia did in the Cold War—as the more stagnant of two rival superpowers, economically dependent on its international rival, and constricting the freedom of speech of its domestic challengers.

The Soviet Union was not collapsing before the mid-1980s. A decade earlier, a neutral observer might even have said it was the United States that was in trouble. A wave of peasant revolutions in the Third World, the American defeat in Vietnam, stagflation, and skyrocketing prices for oil (which accounted for 80 percent of Soviet hard currency earnings1) all favored the USSR. It is true that Soviet industry was waste­ful, that its consumer products were second-rate, that military expenditures were taking twice as big a bite out of Soviet GDP as out of the American economy,2 and that Soviet infant mortality was rising. But the population was not restless and in no sense was the country dying. It was, to use Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin’s term, “lethargically stable.”3

A new book by University of London historian Vladislav M. Zubok explores these questions around how the Cold War really ended from a perspective that resembles Kotkin’s. Zubok argues that it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, and not the excesses they were intended to fix, that brought the whole project tumbling down.

Gorbachev’s Failed Reforms

Zubok does not deny that in the 1980s Russia was showing alarming symptoms of decline: In 1984, the Chernobyl nuclear plant near Kiev melted down. In 1985, a collapse in oil prices brought a 45 percent rise in foreign debt.4 But Gorbachev—forceful, moralistic, and shortsighted—compounded the state’s problems. He tried to cure Russian society of its attachment to alcohol through a near-prohibition on sales of booze, at a time when alcohol taxes accounted for a significant portion of government revenue. Neither his popularity nor the state’s budget balance ever fully recovered. He launched a “struggle to improve the quality of Soviet goods” that had the effect of pulling many popular consumer products out of a market starved for them. Although foreign media would soon be treating him as a messiah, domestically Gorbachev was in hot water from the get-go.

If there was a signature policy catastrophe of the Gorbachev era, one whose effects have echoed through the decades, it was the extraordinary Law on Socialist Enterprises of 1987, which Gorbachev, enamored of Leninist terminology, called a “collectivization.” It was nothing of the sort. Half-understanding how capitalism worked, Gorbachev authorized state administrators to create an “economy of socialist democracy.” Unbelievable though it seems, managers of state enterprises were permitted to establish their own banks, which they could then borrow from, and to establish joint companies with foreign partners.

This arrangement produced none of the innovation and entrepreneurial vigor that Gorbachev had envisioned. On the contrary, Russia’s business leaders had plenty of incentives to make profits, but none to invest them. Executives could sell state assets to themselves or their partners at artificially low, state-fixed prices, and then sell them on to third parties at the market price. Zubok, like Kotkin, uses the word “cannibalization”5 to describe the process. Kotkin notes that exporters “accumulated fortunes that were hidden abroad by using mechanisms that the KGB had developed to pay for industrial espionage.”6 That stands to reason, for in the early stages, who but the KGB knew how to set up a shell company in a tax haven? Who knew how to buy a mansion through a trust? Once the system was up and running, of course, Western investors graciously agreed to fill this advisory role.

The looting of Russian state enter­prises and national resources is commonly associated with the administration of Boris Yeltsin after 1991. But the mechanism for that looting was put in place by Mikhail Gorbachev. In our time, oceanographers’ videos posted online have allowed many people to watch an eight-hundred-pound octopus escape from a ship’s cargo hold through a hole the size of a quarter. The Law on Socialist Enterprises was like that quarter-sized hole. Through it, the octopus of the Soviet Union’s GNP escaped into Swiss bank accounts, American hedge funds, and London townhouses.

Zubok suggests that the looters, well-placed members of the so-called nomenklatura, may have understood this transfer as a kickback for not defending the Soviet state by means of a violent crackdown. “They demand from the democratic camp a tacit social contract,” wrote one brave Russian newspaper columnist in 1990. “You will allow us to retreat safely and with full pockets, and we will . . . not jail you and shoot at you.”7

Gorbachev and Yeltsin

At the heart of Zubok’s book is the few months in 1991 when Gorbachev’s entrenched Soviet government battled with Boris Yeltsin’s upstart Russian one over the future of the Soviet state. It is a narrow focus that will seem puzzling to one who has learned about the end of the Cold War only from American sources. For the West, the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marks the final, irredeemable collapse of an ideol­ogy. There is some truth to that. But there was more to the Soviet empire than its ideology.

Gorbachev was the product of a sudden generational change. The gerontocrats surrounding Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union until the eve of Gorbachev’s rise, might be thought of as a “Class of ’36.” These were the men who had, in their twenties, given their un­questioning loyalty to Stalin during the show trials and executions through which he purged the Soviet leadership class of any rivals to his rule. That generation of apparatchiks was both the means of Stalin’s repression and its end—a 100-percent-loyal cadre of followers. Generational solidarity steeled the Soviet leadership against anti-Communist uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s. But generations pass. When three Soviet leaders died in scarcely more than two years early in the Reagan administration, the much younger Gorbachev had his opening. He had come of age during the wave of reform that followed Stalin’s death. In fact, he and his generation were formed by Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956, in which Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s misdeeds before the Communist Party, in the same way that Brezhnev was formed by the Stalin purges.

There had always been a “reform” tendency within the Soviet high command, though it was not necessarily more open-minded than the hardline view. Gorbachev’s model was not Adam Smith but Lenin. At least until the 1980s, he did not look on Lenin the way Westerners do—as a Machiavellian theorist of state dynamics and practical Marxism who laid the groundwork for Stalin. Instead, Gorbachev saw Lenin as a martyr to Communist principle, a kind of Russian Lincoln. He read him constantly, kept volumes of his collected works on his desk, and according to one aide cited by Zubok, “would often pick one up in my presence and read aloud, comparing it to the present situation and extolling Lenin’s perspicacity.”8 Rarely did Gorbachev talk in terms that would be familiar to a Western European of any noncommunist tradi­tion. Yet circumstances made it possible for Western leaders to project a whole bundle of progressive commitments onto him—and even, as in the case of Margaret Thatcher, free market commitments.

Gorbachev was heavily influenced by his brilliant mentor and predecessor, the KGB leader Yuri Andropov, who understood the emerging global economy as a puzzle and a paradox for his country. In Zubok’s view, Andropov’s thinking about the modernization of the USSR resembled that of his contemporary, Deng Xiaoping, about China. On the one hand, the Soviet Union had always needed Western technology to advance. On the other hand, engaging with the global economy would excite a demand for consumer goods that would undermine the country’s finances. Gorbachev’s gift for mastering dossi­ers led the icy, data-driven Andropov to see him as a successor who might be up to mastering this challenge.

Gorbachev’s response to the calamity that surrounded him when he arrived in power was to read, reflect, and write. Not since Woodrow Wilson has any American leader drafted a history-shaping program in quite the solitary way Gorbachev did. The things he read at the time—from Solzhenitsyn’s portrait of the scheming Lenin to Marx’s more culturally focused Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (little read in Brezhnev’s Russia) to the secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939—shook him profoundly. He was a man of contradictions: incorruptible and blessed with a Khrushchevian common touch, but also (especially under the influence of his ambitious wife, Raisa) pretentious, vain, and unable to resist the trappings of privilege. Zubok describes early efforts to rescue the country as too often unmoored from practical realities:

One would expect that the General Secretary, bent on reforming the Soviet economy, would take with him on Western trips economists, planners, directors of military industries, bankers, and other technocrats. Instead, Gorbachev’s huge entourage consisted mostly of journalists, social scientists, writers, theatre directors, filmmakers, and other cultural figures.9

Ultimately, Gorbachev lacked his mentor’s ruthlessness and (in the Marxian sense) materialism. He attempted to reform the system at a moment when it was least capable of bearing it, and wound up with an arrangement in which his own political instincts, which remained Lenin­ist, gave him no bearings. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Deng Xiaoping’s son told a journalist, “My father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot.”10

Yeltsin felt the moral drift of Soviet society in a way that Gorbachev did not. He was a crude and brilliant rural glad-hander with a reputation for incorruptibility to match Gorbachev’s. He was no intellectual, but he was one of the great power politicians of the twentieth century. Gorbachev appointed him to the Politburo (the executive committee of the Communist Party) and soon rued his mistake.

As Communism collapsed, there arose a plethora of (often ephemeral) emergency congresses and committees and task forces. The detail Zubok provides about these grouplets and their day-to-day interactions in 1991 will make the nonspecialist’s eyes glaze over. But one institution deserves special notice—the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Congress of People’s Deputies—which Yeltsin, through sheer political instinct, transformed from a kind of citizens’ forum into the dynamic core of an alternative Soviet government. He established the position of president within the Congress, got himself elected to it, and then used it to delegitimize and undermine every institution on which Soviet power rested.

That “Russia” would come to be a factor in Soviet politics had not been obvious. But as Gorbachev undermined the central government, elites in the various national Soviet socialist republics (from Ukraine to Armenia to Kazakhstan) began invigorating their previously meaningless provincial institutions and clamored for autonomy and independence. One republic, and one republic alone, was lacking in such institu­tions: Russia. The Soviet state had been the Russian state. So as Gorbachev’s programs began to bite, and as reforms began to work through these small ethnic statelets, the ethnic Russians who constituted the Soviet majority sensed that they would need a state, too, if they wanted to avoid simply being looted amid the Gorbachevian upheaval. Ordinary citizens felt this, and a surprising number of intellectuals did as well. Their choice was between the crumbling Soviet monolith and the fledgling Russian nation.

The rise of Yeltsin’s Russia at the expense of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union is an example of one of the central paradoxes of contemporary politics. Often, the unintended effect of oversolicitousness towards minorities is to strengthen majority identities where such identities exist—and even to call them into existence where they had never existed before. Kemal Atatürk is styled the “father of the Turks” not out of sentimentality but because most people in that part of the world did not think of themselves as Turks in the early twentieth century. “Turkish” described the sociological remainder of the Ottoman empire after other peoples—Greeks, Armenians, Serbians, and so on—had declared their independence and risen up in revolt. The Turks came, not a moment too soon, to realize that they were in a postimperial world and that it was through ethnic identity that power would henceforth be exercised.

The process has been repeated again and again in our time: In India, where the 1949 constitution is built on the recognition of various castes and minorities, a previously undefined majority has in recent years ral­lied behind the Bharatiya Janata Party, condemned by the beneficiaries of the 1949 constitution as “Hindu nationalism.” In the United States, citizens who do not enjoy special consideration from the government under the 1964 Civil Rights Act (and its subsequent evolutions) probably made up the core of Donald Trump’s support, and have been condemned, on that account, as “white nationalists.” In Britain, the ability of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh voters to make their own local laws while English voters have no such prerogative has been known since the 1970s as the “West Lothian question.” One need only look at the “Brexit” referendum on leaving the European Union to see that the question is still a live one. Brexit was soundly defeated in Scotland and Ireland but passed by a landslide in those parts of England outside of London. Naturally, “leave” voters were accused of “English nationalism.” The rise of Russia around 1990 was the same sort of process.

Whatever its dynamic, Zubok believes it could have been blocked. In Gorbachev’s USSR, the Soviet deep state still had a number of tools at its disposal that, used with sufficient ruthlessness, might have arrested its collapse. The most significant of these tools was the Communist Party itself. Though it was deeply unpopular, Zubok writes, “the Party’s hierarchical organization of 15 million members included cells in every unit of the armed forces, the police, economic ministries, education institutions, and cultural organizations.”11 In a way, the more anarchic the Communist Party rendered day-to-day life in the USSR, the more decisive became the advantage of the party’s largely unbroken discipline.

In August 1991, KGB leader Vladimir Kryuchkov decided that the window for rescuing the country was closing. He ordered Gorbachev’s Black Sea dacha surrounded and the leader himself taken hostage. Co-conspirators, led by Gorbachev’s vice president Gennady Yannaev, announced a new government. The coup failed, but KGB morale held to the last. Of the five hundred agents Kryuchkov ordered into action against Gorbachev, only five disobeyed him. Zubok believes things might have ended differently had the plotters prevented the foreign press from reporting and treated Yeltsin’s shadow government as seri­ously as Gorbachev’s official one. When public resistance to the coup began to emerge, it emerged behind Yeltsin, not Gorbachev. In the aftermath, the state and its security apparatus were not dismantled; they were Russianized.

The West’s Role

Andropov had been right about the paradoxes of modernizing the Soviet Union. The technological prerequisites for participating in the global economy were expensive, and Gorbachev had little to trade for them. Thus the Soviets would have to borrow to reform. By September 1990, a month before he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Gorbachev was, according to one aide, “begging everyone for money.”12 He hoped to get as much as $75 billion—which was a pipe dream. IMF deputy Stanley Fischer thought $20–30 billion would suffice.13 In any event, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Saudi Arabia gave Gorbachev one or two billion apiece. Israel shut him out. American president George H. W. Bush was affably noncommittal in a way that would have signaled no to anyone who has ever tried to borrow money in an Anglo-Saxon country, but left Gorba­chev with the impression that a bailout was around the corner. Gorbachev would be unambiguously and unceremoniously rebuffed at a London conference in July 1991. A month later, the coup against him was under way.

Bush was faulted by European statesmen at the time. For a fraction of the $100 billion he spent blowing up Iraq in the first Gulf War, they reckoned, he could have given Gorbachev the flexibility to reform the Soviet Union in a more liberal direction. Bush did not see it that way. The Soviet Union had been his country’s mortal enemy for almost fifty years. As long as the Communist regime had so many nuclear weapons, was occupying Afghanistan, and was subsidizing U.S. enemies in Cuba and elsewhere, it would have been irresponsible to keep it alive. His treasury secretary Nicholas Brady was most forthright in enunciating administration doctrine. “What is involved is changing Soviet society so that it can’t afford a defense system,” Brady said. “A real reform program would turn them into a third-rate power, which is what we want.”14

Although Zubok is impatient with the American leadership of the time, his analysis vindicates Bush. The Soviet state had been capable of enduring even in the face of massive unpopularity and economic failure. Bush chose correctly—in the face not just of those progressives who were smitten with Gorbachev but also those Strangelovian ultras inher­ited from the Reagan administration who urged a more confrontational stance.

This is not to say American officials understood Russia. Whatever this desperate debtor nation was doing in the summer of 1991, it was not leaning on American “moral authority,” as Secretary of State James Baker asserted. Indeed, undue deference to that moral authority would wreck the relationship in the 1990s. Yeltsin’s Russia, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, was able to keep the country’s UN Security Council seat and its veto. But when it sought to join NATO as a way of stabilizing international relations, it was rebuffed by Bill Clinton. Any such overture to Russia would have complicated the eventual course the United States took—expanding both NATO and the alliance’s reach to impose American culture and “liberal values” wherever possible. After the American-led attack on Serbia in 1998, the course was set for a hardening of U.S.-Russian relations.

The United States continued to act as a capitalist superpower in the wake of the Cold War. But it also took on the Soviet Union’s Cold War role: it styled itself the carrier of an ideological revelation, a new anthropological reality, in the face of which no government, no matter how long-standing or democratic, has any legitimate right to perdure.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 1 (Spring 2022): 149–157.

Notes
1 Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; repr., 2008), 15.

2 Fred Halliday, “A Singular Collapse: The Soviet Union and Inter-State Competition,” Rethinking International Relations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1994), 199. The U.S. defense budget made up 5–10 percent of GDP; in the Soviet Union the figure was 10–20 percent, possibly peaking at 25 percent.

3 Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, 2.

4 Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 25.

5 Zubok, Collapse, 126; Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, 116–17.

6 Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, 125

7 Viktor Yaroshenko in Novyi Mir; quoted in Zubok, Collapse, 158.

8 Zubok, Collapse, 21.

9 Zubok, Collapse, 46.

10 Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 423; quoted in Zubok, Collapse, 60.

11 Zubok, Collapse, 224.

12 Zubok, Collapse, 145.

13 Zubok, Collapse, 249.

14 Zubok, Collapse, 239.


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