Collapse from Inside-Out or Outside-In?

Abstract

Collapse from Inside-Out or Outside-In? Mark R. Beissinger (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). You know you are old when the events that you lived through and wrote about in your youth become the domain of historians. The collapse of the Soviet Union has now entered that realm, and Vladislav Zubok's monumental tome is the most detailed study yet of elite politics during the Soviet collapse. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the subject. Let me start by noting that there is a fundamental difference between writing a political history, as Zubok has done, and writing a historically sensitive social scientific inquiry, as I aspired to do in my own study two decades ago.1 My purpose was not to provide a full-fledged historical interpretation of the politics of the time. Rather, I sought to shed light on previously unaccentuated aspects of the collapse: to explicate the enormous transformations in identities that occurred, how those transformations related to one another, the ways that they affected Russians, the relationship between what happened on the street and what took place in government offices, and how the seemingly impossible in 1987 (the breakup of the USSR) could become the seemingly inevitable by 1991. I did this with purposes of theory building in mind, not as an encompassing historical explanation. In the social sciences, we do not have the luxury of talking about "perfect storms," as Zubok does in this book; we are tasked instead with analyzing the dynamics of storms in general—how they function and how they behave. Since the publication of my study, a trove of new information has become available. Zubok has been indefatigable in tracking these down and [End Page 847] deserves much credit for doing so. He has scoured the archives, delved into diaries and memoirs, and interviewed many of the key decision makers and their aides (including their US counterparts). I am in awe of the sheer volume of material he has digested, and indeed Zubok treats us to a cornucopia of new details on what occurred behind the scenes. We learn, for instance, of the opulence of Mikhail Gorbachev's villa, how much George Bush's judgments flowed from his personal attachment to Gorbachev, how Dmitrii Iazov thought he could fix the "Lithuanian problem" in less than a week, the details of the back-and-forth over economic reform in 1990, the intense bickering and relentless tug-of-war for control between Boris Yeltsin and Gorbachev, Yeltsin's ubiquitous drinking (hardly a surprise), the frustrations of Gorbachev's aides and ministers over his constant prevarication, and many other insights. We even discover that Yeltsin learned of the August 1991 coup while watching television in his underwear—though what the relevance of that detail is (and who else learned about the coup in their underwear), I cannot say. The book aims to rethink the inevitability of Soviet collapse. I could not agree more with that aim. It was the central theme of my own work.2 The language of the "perfect storm" aside, Zubok does put forward an argument about the collapse: it was not nationalism that broke the Soviet Union into national pieces but personalities, the dismantlement of the party apparatus, and ill-advised economic reforms. The collapse occurred from the inside-out. My differences with Zubok are differences of interpretation, emphasis, and perspective: his ascription of the collapse primarily to personalities; his predominant focus on change from the inside-out rather than appreciating the key role also played by change from the outside-in; his excessive attention to 1991 rather than to what preceded it; and his overemphasis, in my opinion, on the economic determinants of collapse. These are issues about which reasonable scholars can disagree. What Zubok substitutes for structural determination is near-complete indeterminacy. The collapse, as he describes it, was largely dependent on the whims and follies of two personalities: Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The structure-agency problem that animates so much social scientific thinking [End Page...