Friday 4 January 2002

DECLINE AND FALL


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.