#4
New York Times
January 20, 2002
book review
'Armageddon Averted': Who Lost the Soviet Union?
By ORLANDO FIGES

ARMAGEDDON AVERTED
The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000.
By Stephen Kotkin.
Illustrated. 245 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $25.

By any reckoning, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was one of the most astonishing events in modern history. The largest and most threatening empire in the world, with five million soldiers in Soviet garrisons from Budapest to Vladivostok, fell apart and ceased to exist, its leaders abdicating under pressure from crowds of unarmed people in the streets, with barely a shot fired. The whole thing unraveled in just six years, between 1985 and 1991, and it all took place so unexpectedly that 10 years later we are still unable to make sense of it -- or of the societies it left behind.

It is probably too early for a comprehensive history of this huge event -- and despite its ambitious title, that is not what Stephen Kotkin's interesting book of essays really is. Kotkin is the director of Russian studies at Princeton University and a highly regarded specialist on Soviet industrial history. His central interest in ''Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000'' is the breakdown of the planned economy and the institutional problems that were left for the transition to a market system after 1991. The focus on political and economic institutions is a fruitful one. It enables Kotkin to highlight some long-term structural factors of the Soviet collapse and its aftermath.

He begins with the oil crisis of the early 1970's. As a major oil producer, Kotkin argues, the Soviet Union was protected from the crisis. It was not forced, as the West was, to reform its industrial economy, which thus became as old and decrepit as the Soviet leadership. Things changed only in the 1980's, when the decline in Soviet oil production and in world oil prices exposed the extent of the economic crisis to reformist leaders like Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Gorbachev was the child of a rapidly developing society. Born in 1931, he was old enough to be indoctrinated in the Bolshevik ideals of the Russian Revolution; the ideals he held as a young man in the Khrushchev era became the raison d'etre of his political personality. Yet, as Kotkin underlines, Gorbachev was also part of a new generation of better educated, more sophisticated and independent-thinking Soviet leaders, compared with the older generation of Stalinists.

The Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly rural society in the 1930's to one in which, by the 70's, the urban population outnumbered the rural one by almost two to one. Millions of people were acquiring television sets, where Western programs gave a glimpse of material life in the capitalist world. Well-dressed Western tourists appeared in growing numbers on Moscow's streets. And technologies like shortwave radios and tape recorders made it harder for the K.G.B. to seal off the Soviet population from capitalist culture and the ideas of the West. People were becoming increasingly aware that the Soviet Union was lagging far behind the living standards of the West. The regime's propaganda was a lie.

It is questionable whether this consumer consciousness ever really became a democratic pressure for political reform, as Kotkin appears to suggest. But it is plausible that the K.G.B. and the Kremlin leaders, who regularly watched the Western news media and were highly sensitive to the propaganda war, responded to their own perception of it as a threat. Reformists like Yuri V. Andropov, the K.G.B. chief who became party leader, and then Gorbachev, his protege, toned down their anti-Western rhetoric and began to call for the adoption of more advanced and technocratic (Western) methods to rescue the Soviet economy.

But Gorbachev's reforms were undermined by structural contradictions in the economy and the one-party state, as Kotkin demonstrates, although it is unclear whether he believes the system was reformable at all. It proved impossible to combine the stimuli of the free market with the basic structures of a planned economy, just as it was unrealistic to infuse democratic elements in the one-party state. Above all, the Soviet Union was undone by its own state structure as a federation of 15 national republics -- Russia the biggest of them all.

Once Boris N. Yeltsin was returned by a popular vote to the presidency of Russia, the Soviet Union and Gorbachev, who had never been democratically elected to its presidency, became undermined. The structure of the union allowed the Communist elites in the non-Russian republics to abandon Gorbachev and the Soviet Union when the Kremlin became threatened by popular protests in 1991, and to re-emerge as the ''democratic'' leaders of the breakaway republics that joined Russia in the Commonwealth of Independent States. The old party bosses of some Soviet republics -- Leonid M. Kravchuk in Ukraine or Nursultan A. Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan -- manipulated nationalist feeling against Moscow to consolidate their power in an independent state. As Kotkin puts it, ''the larger truth about 1991 was that the 'triumph' of democracy involved a bid for power by Russian republic officials, joined at various points by patriots and opportunists from the all-Union elite -- a process paralleled in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other national components of the Union.''

This political maneuvering had important consequences for the transition to capitalist democracy in Russia and the other former Soviet states after 1991. The Soviet apparatchiks of the second and third tier, who had been the most upwardly mobile in the 1980's, emerged in the 90's as the business and political leaders of the new post-Soviet states. They picked up jobs and became millionaires as the directors of the newly privatized utilities and banks. They amassed private fortunes by import-export scams, corrupt sales of Soviet industries and private purchases of real estate at knockdown prices from their old allies in city hall.

Viktor S. Chernomyrdin personified this new relationship between government and business. As a minister for gas under Gorbachev, he hived off the most efficient installations of his ministry and used them to create a company, Gazprom, which was privatized in 1994. Thanks to the tax breaks and the favored treatment it received from Chernomyrdin during the six years when he was the prime minister of Russia (1992-98), Gazprom became a huge conglomerate, buying up a whole range of other industries (including much of the country's news media) and exerting a major influence on the country's politics.

With examples like this it is easy to see the force of Kotkin's argument that Russia's problem since 1991 has been a ''problem of institutions'' and not ''some supposed 'cultural' deficiency or peculiarity'' -- like the common Western prejudice that the Russians are inclined to criminality.

Today Russia's problems are the weakness of its legal institutions, its need for better organs of financial regulation, the unaccountability of its executive and the inability of its government to collect taxes. But institutions are not everything. There are also problems of morality -- criminality, drunkenness, indifference and inactivity -- that influence people's attitudes to work, to politics, to society.

This relates to a broader criticism of Kotkin's work. ''Averting Armageddon'' plays down the importance of two vital factors in the Soviet collapse. One is the role of ideology -- or more specifically the way in which it lost all meaning to the apparatchiks who deserted Gorbachev in 1989-91. Gorbachev was the last of the believers in the Communist ideal -- but his party comrades, for the most part, had long ceased to believe. Their ideology had become little more than an empty slogan, a means of entry to the special shops reserved for the Soviet elite. This fact is essential if we are to understand why so few Communists were prepared to fight for the Soviet regime. The August putsch of 1991 was doomed from the start by the inertia of the middle and the upper ranks of the party. The plotters' leader, poor old Gennadi I. Yanayev, was aware of this when, his hands in an alcoholic tremble, he read out to the world's press a declaration of emergency.

The other factor is human agency -- or more specifically Gorbachev. He may have started out as a Communist reformer, but there must have been a moment (for he tells us there was one) when he realized the need to dismantle the regime without a violent backlash from the hard-liners. His political maneuverings were intended to avoid a civil war or a crackdown against Eastern Europe that might have led to a disastrous loss of life. He was a sort of political Columbus -- setting out with high ideals to find one thing and achieving something better by discarding them. He is a hero of our times.

Orlando Figes is a professor of history at Birkbeck College and the author of ''A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.''