"When the Soviet Union fell apart three decades ago, Western leaders were at first deeply worried about the sudden disintegration of a vast, nuclear-armed state, foreseeing new threats and dangers. Soon enough, they came to understand the collapse in a different way -- as the triumph of liberal values over dictatorship. For Vladimir Putin, by contrast, it was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." At least no one disputes its momentous significance.
Naturally, the literature on the Soviet breakup is vast. It includes incisive chronicles by historians such Serhii Plokhii and Stephen Kotkin and by diplomats such as Jack Matlock, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow. There are also biographical studies of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader and the central figure in this drama. With "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union," the Moscow-born historian Vladislav Zubok, a professor at the London School of Economics, adds his voice to the chorus of narrative and analysis. He uses archival material -- along with interviews and memoirs -- to construct a compelling account.
Mr. Zubok sees the Soviet collapse as resulting, in part, from the legacy of Soviet crimes and misrule as well as from a kind of institutional rigor mortis: the inability of a militarily powerful state to adjust to the modern world of economic innovation. He also sees the liberalizing reforms of Mr. Gorbachev, so welcomed and heralded at the time, as a major source of economic and political unrest.
In 1985, when Mr. Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the U.S.S.R.'s economy was weak by Western standards -- "wasteful" and "ruinous," as Mr. Zubok puts it. But it provided food and housing sufficient to sustain the population. The new leadership could have muddled through, just as Leonid Brezhnev had done in the two decades before. But mindful of how far the Soviet Union had fallen behind the West, Mr. Gorbachev decided on "a revolutionary gamble" and initiated far-reaching political and economic changes. It didn't take long before perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) ran aground. The system Mr. Gorbachev inherited was too weak to withstand the shock of reform.
Mr. Zubok reminds us that Mr. Gorbachev set out to "dismantle the system of governance that Stalin had built," and so he did. Once the regime stopped arresting human-rights activists, released political prisoners, permitted long-censored books to be published and allowed sensitive historical questions to be discussed, the emotional rush of intellectual and creative freedom could not be contained. Another factor in this transformational shift was the newly granted right to travel to the West, where visits to abundantly supplied supermarkets shocked Soviet tourists.
Mr. Gorbachev coupled such changes inside the Soviet Union with a willingness to encourage change in Eastern Europe as well. By the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall was no more, Germany was on the verge of unification, and the Soviet satellite states had seen the end of their Moscow-imposed regimes. Mr. Gorbachev's prestige, particularly in the West, reached unprecedented heights when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for helping to end the Cold War. Still, the Soviet Union remained a unitary state under the control of the Communist Party, which embarked on further structural reform.
But by then it was clear that Mr. Gorbachev couldn't match his determination to honor democratic values with a clear-eyed plan to move the country to a market-oriented economy. Mr. Zubok reminds us of one economic plan after another from this period that was supposed to do the trick:the Law on Socialist Enterprises; the 500-Day Plan; the Grand Bargain. None of these efforts to liberalize the economy proved effective. Meanwhile, as Mr. Zubok notes, perestroika "exposed the Soviet Union to the demons of economic chaos, political populism, and nationalism."
Tensions had already begun to bubble over into communal violence in Kazakhstan in 1986 and between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in 1988. In the Baltic republics, the desire for outright independence grew ever more urgent. And in early 1989, Mr. Gorbachev permitted relatively free Soviet elections to choose the members of a new parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies. It quickly featured speeches by principled critics like Andrei Sakharov, who denounced the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and called for an end to the Communist Party's domination of Soviet life. Mr. Gorbachev was soon regarded as a "sorcerer's apprentice," a leader "unable to regain control of the destructive forces he had unleashed," Mr. Zubok writes. As the economy faltered, the gratitude of Soviet citizens turned into sullen anger.
Around the same time, Boris Yeltsin, who had been a senior Communist Party official until his abrupt ouster in 1987, was able to stage a comeback and emerge as a leading political figure in the Russian Federation. His ambition to supplant Mr. Gorbachev became an additional force in the country's breakup. In spite of his heavy drinking, Yelstin proved to be a credible alternative to Mr. Gorbachev. It was Yeltsin who stood up to the coup plotters in August 1991 when they tried in vain to overthrow Mr. Gorbachev and return the Soviet Union to the control of the army and KGB. The coup failed miserably, leaving Mr. Gorbachev isolated and Yeltsin in charge. Still, both men hoped to preserve at least the Slavic republics -- Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia -- within a unified state. But by December, with a referendum in Ukraine that overwhelmingly voted for independence, neither Boris Yeltsin nor Mikhail Gorbachev could hold back the collapse. As Mr. Zubok writes near the end of his masterly analysis, "the Soviet Union fell victim to a perfect storm and a hapless captain." By the close of December 1991, the Soviet Union was gone -- consigned, to borrow a phrase from Leon Trotsky, to the ash heap of history." [1]
O my Goodness... The Soviet Union was destroyed not by Vytautas Landsbergis, playing Čiurlionis' piano works, but by referendum in Ukraine. Who could know?
1. The Shock Of Reform
Rubenstein, Joshua. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 18 Nov 2021: A.17.
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