The collapse of the Soviet Union was a constituent element of my growing up, and its consequences are very much a part of the world we are living through now. The standard explanation that I was told growing up (and have recently come across again in a book that references this period) was that Regan’s willingness to outspend the Soviets on the military was what led to their collapse. Steven Kotkin, in his book Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000, one of the most prominent historians of the Soviet period, has a different, and more nuanced view.
As the title of the book indicates, the collapse of the Soviet Union began over a decade before Regan came to power. It was clear to the Soviet leadership by the early 70s that they could not compete economically with the West, but more importantly, that their industrial, centrally-planned economic system was falling apart. Through the early 80s, the old-guard of the Soviet leadership did its best to hold the parts together, retaining the repressive system that had ‘worked well’ until then. Michail Gorbachev thought he could do better. His hope was that through renewal, greater local autonomy, and more transparency, the communist system could revitalize itself. He was, quite astonishingly, an idealist. The irony is that his approach only hastened The Soviet Union’s collapse. His plan was to grant more autonomy to the states to generate more local, responsive decision making, and this required that the central government be weakened. But the result was that the more autonomous republics worked to separate themselves entirely from the Soviet Union, rather than use their new found independence to renew and join the system more closely. And along with a weakened central governing body, there was far less power to keep the now-rebellious states in line. The result was that the ‘union’ could not hold itself together.
What’s perhaps most astounding, and which we take for granted today, is how quietly the Soviet Union collapsed. It did not devolve into civil war as Yugoslavia did (though you could say that today’s war between Russia and Ukraine is a late blooming post-Soviet civil war); it did not result in the central government using its vast military and intelligence structures to put down revolt, which it was certainly capable of; and it did not result in nuclear weapons falling into the ‘wrong’ hand (i.e. non-state actors). It did result in a decade of relative chaos, the privatization of the state at cheap prices, a lot of corruption, and very little democracy. But given the much worse options on the table, this seems a relatively positive outcome.
Kotkin is an engaging writer for a historian, and the story he has to tell is different from received wisdom. There was a lot of detail about the machinations that led to the collapse that I couldn’t retain, but enjoyed the journey nonetheless.
Just Because I Liked It:
- We famously talk about the ‘shift to the right’ – but why does it happen? Here’s one theory.