Review of Armageddon
Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 by Stephen
Kotkin
(Oxford
University Press, £16.99), Tribune, 4 January 2002
The
demise of the Soviet Union and its model of "socialism" remains one
of the greatest puzzles of late-20th-century history.
Even
as late as 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took power, Soviet communism appeared
to be a permanent feature of world politics. It had its problems, of course.
All the economies of the Soviet bloc were performing sluggishly. In
east-central Europe, the whole system had quite obviously lost what little
popular legitimacy it might once have enjoyed. And Moscow was embroiled in a
bloody conflict in Afghanistan from which there seemed to be no escape.
But
the collapse of the whole shebang was implausible. The single-party police
states of the Soviet bloc appeared robust enough to face down any conceivable
challenge, and the capacity of the Soviet military was awesome. Few analysts
saw the system's economic problems as potentially catastrophic. Unpleasant it
might have been, but "actually existing
socialism" was here to stay.
So
where did it all go wrong? For Stephen Kotkin, an American academic, the only
way to begin to answer that question is to take an extremely long-term view.
His short book (245 pages including footnotes, illustrations and index) argues
that the Soviet collapse cannot be understood unless it is put into two
contexts: the inability of the Soviet model to match in any way the performance
of the capitalist welfare-state democracies after 1945; and the deep-rooted
conviction of Gorbachev and his supporters of the possibility of what the
reform communists in Czechoslovakia in 1968 had called "socialism with a
human face".
In
essence, his case is that Gorbachev's belief that the system could be reformed
in a humanistic way without being massively destabilised was a gigantic
mistake. "Hesitant for ideological reasons to support full-bore
capitalism", Gorbachev underestimated until it was too late the extent of
the malaise afflicting the Soviet economy, a giant rust belt that had been kept
going since the early 1970s only by unsustainable subsidies from oil exports.
Meanwhile,
his policy of glasnost seriously
undermined popular acquiescence in the regime by destroying its legitimising
historical myths and allowing almost unlimited access to Western consumer
culture (though not the consumer goods). Faced with growing conservative
opposition inside the Communist Party, he made the fatal mistake of sidelining
the party, the only organisation that truly held the Soviet Union together, in
the name of 1917-style direct Soviet democracy. After he let east-central
Europe go in 1989 without even token resistance, the whole edifice was doomed.
All
this is a persuasive counter to the argument often heard on the western Left
that Gorbachev's reform strategy would have worked had it only been given more
time and lots of Western support. Kotkin is also right to emphasise the extent
to which the disastrous economic performance of post-Soviet Russia since 1991
is the result less of "shock therapy" or privatisation than of its
Soviet inheritance, "a socio-economic landscape dominated by white
elephants that consumed labour, energy and raw materials with little regard for
costs or output quality" and "unfettered state officials whose
larceny helped cashier the Soviet system".
Armageddon
Averted is least convincing in its emphasis on idealism as the underlying
motive of Gorbachev and his comrades: raw interest in self-preservation on the
part of an elite that recognised its time was up was far more important. But
this is an excellent accessible account of an extraordinary turn of events that
changed our world far more profoundly than September 11 2001.