Revolutionary Reform, Stillborn Revolution

Abstract

Revolutionary Reform, Stillborn Revolution Michael David-Fox (bio) Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. xv + 576 pp., illus., maps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0300268171, $25 (paper). Vladislav Zubok's Collapse sets a new standard for understanding and debating the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book takes the form of an unprecedentedly rich and detailed narrative of political decision making, with a focus on three major areas. The most sustained is domestic high politics, and the treatment is notable for its unprecedented depth on Mikhail Gorbachev and the rival Boris Yeltsin "team." The second, in keeping with Zubok's distinguished contributions to the history of Soviet foreign policy, is international diplomacy, with particular reference to the key factor of late Soviet interactions with the US superpower under US Secretary of State James Baker and President George H. W. Bush. The third is "the decisive and implacable role" (9) of economics and finance. This includes an account of the disastrous macroeconomic consequences of banking reform starting in 1987, which destabilized the unique Soviet system of beznal (cashless) accounting between the Soviet state and its enterprises. Fateful decisions and missteps in each of these areas by Gorbachev, the work's antihero, converged in what became the USSR's final death spiral. Zubok not only shows that the last Soviet leader was a true believer in his "socialist choice," something that has been emphasized before. He demonstrates that Gorbachev's reform program was seriously, even bizarrely, formulated under the influence of Vladimir Lenin—or, more accurately, Gorbachev's own reading of the Bolshevik revolutionary. Lenin's influence can be boiled down to Gorbachev's admiration for Lenin's world-historical risk taking, encapsulated in the political credo of on s'engage, et puis on voit. In his 1923 "On Revolution," Lenin translated Napoleon's aphorism as "first [End Page 839] engage in a serious battle and then see what happens."1 Zubok's unforgettable portrait of the last Soviet leader paints Gorbachev as a "bizarre political animal, who misunderstood power" (210). In the study's tripartite focus and its explanation of Gorbachev, the narrative deploys the extensive use of interviews and about 50 published memoirs and diaries. Among many others, it weaves in the critical, not infrequently incredulous voice of Gorbachev's top foreign policy aide Anatolii Cherniaev. Both the painstakingly detailed chronological narrative and personal sources on the highest levels of decision making in Moscow bring us deep into the choices and calculations that informed the crucial turning points in perestroika's several stages. In other words, the entire organization of the book serves to emphasize the contingency of a converging series of gambles, missteps, and misunderstandings for which Gorbachev was responsible. The introduction, which in a fine-grained narrative history serves an outsized role in laying out the interpretive agenda, treats in succession the major factors that the existing literature has emphasized in explaining 1991, downplaying those Zubok does not consider causally decisive: first, the waning popular power of Soviet ideology; and second, the "imperial" or non-Russian national factor. In their place, Zubok puts forward a new variation on the "great man" theory of history. In a self-inflicted blow, Gorbachev radicalized what had been manageable vulnerabilities into an insurmountable set of catastrophes. The corollary to this is the controversial thesis that as late as 1990 the USSR might have been preserved. I have used the term "radicalized" deliberately, because in the study Gorbachev's agenda and, at times, the outcome that ended in state dissolution is portrayed as "revolutionary." In sum, the book's depth and its fantastic new material both serve its provocative case for contingency. But does Zubok portray the trees with such vivid, fine-grained detail that he has obscured the forest? The relationship between structure and agency is the theoretical point of entry into the modern human sciences writ large. Any approach to it will be implicit in a work of narrative history. It is also inherently interpretive—it can never be simply proven right or wrong. At the same time, it is more than plausible to...