Post by kungfuzu on Jul 26, 2022 13:45:27 GMT -8
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, by Vladislav M. Zubok
As stated in its title, “Collapse" deals with the fall of the USSR, but the author credits the fall of the Soviet Union to causes other than one of the standard academic reasons. He lists these as:
1. The superiority of the US and its policies in the Cold War had made the USSR retreat and surrender.
2. Gorbachev’s glasnost had discredited both communist ideology and doomed the Soviet system to failure.
3. The Soviet Union had died because it economy imploded.
4. The movements for national independence had led to the implosion of the “last empire.”
The author further states another purported reason for the Soviet fall was that “the most powerful Soviet elites had opposed Gorbachev’s reforms and thereby inadvertently caused the demise of the USSR.”
To this the author argues “that none of those causes, when taken separately, could have destroyed the Soviet Union.” He looks, primarily, into the internal factors for the fall of the USSR and believes that “international factors became crucial for the shaping the behavior of the Soviet elites and counter-elites, but only after the Soviet Union had entered its terminal crisis.”
I knew the author was qualified the moment I read the very un-Marxist/un-Hegelian statement,
“History is never a sequence of inevitabilities, and the Soviet demise was no exception: it was full of contingencies. Unpredictability and uncertainty are fundamental features of human, state, and world affairs. Social movements and ideological currents are not rational, and political wills propel history in unexpected directions. Finally, there are accidents that have huge consequences.”
From that point, I paid very close attention to what Zubok had to say.
In an extremely abridged form, I take the author’s premise to be that since, the 1960s, at the latest, many leaders of the USSR knew the economic system needed adjusting, but the country was headed by hardcore geriatric goons, (much like ours is today-my comment) who were unable or unwilling to move. It was ex-KGB head Yuri Andropov who finally started to put things in motion, but he died before much could be done. Yet, he had positioned Mikhail Gorbachev to replace him as General Secretary of the Party and head of the Union, after those offices had been, for a brief stint, occupied by a real corpse named Chernenko.
Gorbachev was Andropov’s “fair-haired boy.” A well-educated, attractive and fluent party member who could give the party a different face than that of the familiar corpses of Brezhnev, Gromyko, and Chernenko or monsters like Stalin.
In the end, Gorbachev was not up to the task. Zubok maintains that Gorbachev was truly a Neo-Leninist who viewed things through that warped prism. He actually believed the USSR could be reformed along idealistic Leninist lines. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, such a thing was impossible. Yet that did not mean the USSR had to fall. Rather it was Gorbachev’s lack of knowledge on economics, instituting of poorly thought out half policies, flip-flopping and dithering which allowed the USSR to crumble. Gorbachev, it appears to me, was a typical intellectual who built castles in the air, had trouble discerning reality from theory and found it hard to make decisions and stick with then when he encountered any type of resistance. In the end, people considered Gorbachev little more than a destructive windbag. He dismantled the system, without having created anything to replace it. People today forget, but at the time, this was very dangerous. With nuclear bombs across several different republics, and other weapons spread around the union much could have gone wrong. The world is lucky that nothing did.
Of course, the author deals with Boris Yeltsin and numerous other characters in this story. Yeltsin’s rivalry with Gorbachev probably insured that there was more division and suffering among the people than was necessary. Yeltsin certainly failed badly after getting rid of Gorbachev.
Foreign dealings with the USSR are also touched on, particularly those of the USA and Germany. One might be surprised to read how solicitous and both countries were to the USSR, especially to Gorbachev. But in the end, the neither could or would rescue Gorbachev and his dream of a Union of Republics, which left much autonomy to the various republics, but maintained a control on defense, monetary policy and a couple of other points.
The center could not hold and many of the old Soviet Republics spun off from the USSR in fits of nationalism. The actual demise came as an anti-climax. The leaders of four of the five Soviets, (the fifth no longer existed) which had called the USSR into existence decided to call it out of existence some seventy years later. It was done on a spur of the moment idea.
I am, no doubt, doing the book an injustice with my very general review, but if the reader is interested in details, I can do no more than recommend he take the time to read it. There are just over 400 pages of information which will be new to even the most ardent history buff interested in that period. If reading over 400 pages of such detailed material does not appeal to you, I highly recommend you to take the time to read the Introduction and Conclusion. In those 22 pages one will find much wisdom and food for thought.
As stated in its title, “Collapse" deals with the fall of the USSR, but the author credits the fall of the Soviet Union to causes other than one of the standard academic reasons. He lists these as:
1. The superiority of the US and its policies in the Cold War had made the USSR retreat and surrender.
2. Gorbachev’s glasnost had discredited both communist ideology and doomed the Soviet system to failure.
3. The Soviet Union had died because it economy imploded.
4. The movements for national independence had led to the implosion of the “last empire.”
The author further states another purported reason for the Soviet fall was that “the most powerful Soviet elites had opposed Gorbachev’s reforms and thereby inadvertently caused the demise of the USSR.”
To this the author argues “that none of those causes, when taken separately, could have destroyed the Soviet Union.” He looks, primarily, into the internal factors for the fall of the USSR and believes that “international factors became crucial for the shaping the behavior of the Soviet elites and counter-elites, but only after the Soviet Union had entered its terminal crisis.”
I knew the author was qualified the moment I read the very un-Marxist/un-Hegelian statement,
“History is never a sequence of inevitabilities, and the Soviet demise was no exception: it was full of contingencies. Unpredictability and uncertainty are fundamental features of human, state, and world affairs. Social movements and ideological currents are not rational, and political wills propel history in unexpected directions. Finally, there are accidents that have huge consequences.”
From that point, I paid very close attention to what Zubok had to say.
In an extremely abridged form, I take the author’s premise to be that since, the 1960s, at the latest, many leaders of the USSR knew the economic system needed adjusting, but the country was headed by hardcore geriatric goons, (much like ours is today-my comment) who were unable or unwilling to move. It was ex-KGB head Yuri Andropov who finally started to put things in motion, but he died before much could be done. Yet, he had positioned Mikhail Gorbachev to replace him as General Secretary of the Party and head of the Union, after those offices had been, for a brief stint, occupied by a real corpse named Chernenko.
Gorbachev was Andropov’s “fair-haired boy.” A well-educated, attractive and fluent party member who could give the party a different face than that of the familiar corpses of Brezhnev, Gromyko, and Chernenko or monsters like Stalin.
In the end, Gorbachev was not up to the task. Zubok maintains that Gorbachev was truly a Neo-Leninist who viewed things through that warped prism. He actually believed the USSR could be reformed along idealistic Leninist lines. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, such a thing was impossible. Yet that did not mean the USSR had to fall. Rather it was Gorbachev’s lack of knowledge on economics, instituting of poorly thought out half policies, flip-flopping and dithering which allowed the USSR to crumble. Gorbachev, it appears to me, was a typical intellectual who built castles in the air, had trouble discerning reality from theory and found it hard to make decisions and stick with then when he encountered any type of resistance. In the end, people considered Gorbachev little more than a destructive windbag. He dismantled the system, without having created anything to replace it. People today forget, but at the time, this was very dangerous. With nuclear bombs across several different republics, and other weapons spread around the union much could have gone wrong. The world is lucky that nothing did.
Of course, the author deals with Boris Yeltsin and numerous other characters in this story. Yeltsin’s rivalry with Gorbachev probably insured that there was more division and suffering among the people than was necessary. Yeltsin certainly failed badly after getting rid of Gorbachev.
Foreign dealings with the USSR are also touched on, particularly those of the USA and Germany. One might be surprised to read how solicitous and both countries were to the USSR, especially to Gorbachev. But in the end, the neither could or would rescue Gorbachev and his dream of a Union of Republics, which left much autonomy to the various republics, but maintained a control on defense, monetary policy and a couple of other points.
The center could not hold and many of the old Soviet Republics spun off from the USSR in fits of nationalism. The actual demise came as an anti-climax. The leaders of four of the five Soviets, (the fifth no longer existed) which had called the USSR into existence decided to call it out of existence some seventy years later. It was done on a spur of the moment idea.
I am, no doubt, doing the book an injustice with my very general review, but if the reader is interested in details, I can do no more than recommend he take the time to read it. There are just over 400 pages of information which will be new to even the most ardent history buff interested in that period. If reading over 400 pages of such detailed material does not appeal to you, I highly recommend you to take the time to read the Introduction and Conclusion. In those 22 pages one will find much wisdom and food for thought.