Reagan Didn't Do It. - Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 - book review

Armageddon Averted
The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000
Stephen Kotkin
Oxford University Press, $27.50, 235 pp.

Lest we become distracted by the specter of global terrorism with an Islamist face, the continuing threat of Saddam Hussein, or the plethora of civil wars deepening political instability in dozens of weakening nation-states, the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin has written the scholarly equivalent of a murder mystery about a historical and geopolitical matter of even greater significance: Who--or what--killed the Soviet Union, and why did it go so quietly?

As the 1980s opened, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, buoyed by the discovery and export of Siberian oil, had low foreign debt and an excellent credit rating. The Soviet citizenry enjoyed full employment and a stable regime.

Why, then, did Mikhail Gorbachev, upon being named general secretary of the Communist Party and head of the Soviet government in 1985, attempt to democratize the party, revive the radical-democratic system of soviets (councils), and reform the planned economy? Why, further, did he inaugurate an era of glasnost, or "openness," which, in the accumulation of media exposes, amounted to a public acknowledgment that the Communist government for decades had systematically repressed its people and mismanaged the economy?

Most significant, why did the Soviet elite--a formidable bastion of power numbering more than 2 million members of the party, state bureaucracy, military, and KGB--allow Gorbachev to preside over the loss of Eastern Europe and the eventual secession of the Soviet republics? After all, the Soviet system still commanded the largest, most powerful military in history, replete with a vast storehouse of chemical and biological weapons, and enough nuclear weapons to destroy or blackmail the world.

Kotkin's analysis of the Soviet collapse is primarily in terms of structure and ideology. He discounts as "grossly inflated" the influence of democratizing social movements, supposed cultural deficiencies, "imagined" nationalism, evil oligarchs, and Western pressure. Rather, the interpretive key to the great puzzle is found in the rise to power of a post-Stalinist, Khrushchev generation of Soviet leaders, represented most powerfully by Gorbachev, who were romantic idealists intent on reviving "socialism with a human face."

Perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost were the instruments of this revival. Perestroika sought to replace the centralized planned economy with a market-friendly variant that would be competitive with the West and transcend the superpower confrontation. In 1987-88, Gorbachev shepherded through the politburo a series of far-reaching laws designed to stimulate "autonomy" and cooperation among industrial firms to maximize "profit" and reduce "loss" (novel concepts in the managed economy). He opened the way for small-scale, service-sector "cooperatives," encouraged citizens to form associations outside the Communist Party, and allowed workers to elect factory managers. Coaxing Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush to accept steep reductions in nuclear arsenals, Gorbachev channeled funds once targeted for the military into economic reconstruction and wooed Western investment. Glasnost opened the system to self-scrutiny, stimulating democratic reforms within the party such as the creation of the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989.

Gorbachev and his comrades did not foresee, or desire, the collapse of the Soviet system, which followed rapidly upon the first stages of perestroika and glasnost. But the disintegration was inevitable, as seems clear in hindsight.

Kotkin demonstrates that the attempted pace of reform as well as expectations for its success were entirely unrealistic, especially in light of the halfway measures Gorbachev undertook to realize his goals. The institutions and dynamics of the planned economy, particularly its rust belt of inefficient industrial plants ("ten time zones of antiquated heavy industry") staffed by workers accustomed to meeting quantifiable goals rather than developing innovative products, constituted an insurmountable obstacle to reform.

Perestroika under Gorbachev, accordingly, was an "economic halfway house." The general secretary was forced to rely on recalcitrant bureaucrats to implement an improbable decentralization that would entail a significant loss of their authority. In addition, when Gorbachev stopped short of permitting real-market prices to dictate winners and losers in the new "reformed" economy, he inadvertently undermined progress toward business autonomy and the cultivation of a psychology of profit and loss. "Going halfway towards the benefits of market criteria," Kotkin observes, "turned out to be no way."

The unintended consequences of the hasty privatization of industry were no less disastrous. The system imploded as officials cannibalized the Soviet infrastructure, selling off technologies, goods, and export licenses to the highest bidder. Strictly speaking, Kotkin points out, this was not corruption, "which presupposes the prevalence of rule-regulated behavior, so that violators are identified and prosecuted. Rather, this was 'pre-corrupt,' a condition whereby everyone to varying degrees was a violator, but only the weak were targeted."