Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Way Things Looked from Kyiv

Abstract

Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Way Things Looked from Kyiv Serhy Yekelchyk (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). Like Vladislav M. Zubok, I have a vivid recollection of my immediate reaction to the news of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The August 1991 coup left a particularly strong imprint on my memory. At the time I was an aspirant with an almost-completed dissertation draft, and my first thought was that "they" would force me to rewrite most of the text or write a new thesis on a Soviet-style topic. But my thought about "them" came complete with the notion of "us," the members of Ukraine's generation of the late 1980s and early 1990s—students and young professionals for whom the notion of political freedom had become fused with the conscious choice of Ukrainian culture as an anti-imperial identity marker. I knew that this imagined community would not give up and allow the authorities to go back to the bleak days of the late Soviet period. The student hunger strike on the Maidan in October 1990 had proved that by forcing the resignation of Vitaly Masol, the chairman of the Ukrainian SSR's Council of Ministers. The different memories of 1991 do not suggest that one particular memory was right and the other was not. Instead, all of them highlight the fact that the end of the Soviet Union was a complex event produced by multiple social and political processes that unfolded simultaneously, the resulting dynamic differing depending on the region. The optics of a Russian contemporary could differ from that of a Ukrainian one, and the full picture would emerge only when these two optics (and many more) were reconciled. Just as the perceptions of the fall of the Soviet superpower differed in 1991, so do its subsequent interpretations—depending on their [End Page 853] focus. In this sense, Zubok's gripping and extremely well-researched account concentrating on the actions (or lack thereof) undertaken by the central authorities reads particularly well in concert with studies emphasizing the agency of mass movements in the non-Russian republics, such as Ronald G. Suny's The Revenge of the Past, Mark Beissinger's Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, and Serhii Plokhy's The Last Empire.1 Among the many contributions of this book, the most important one is Zubok's detailed inquiry into the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and his motivation for starting the fateful reforms in the first place. It is true that the constitutional structure of the Soviet Union made the Union republics natural default foci of loyalty, if the center were to weaken and Soviet policies made ethnicity a powerful idiom of dissent.2 It is also correct to say that many republics, especially in the so-called Soviet West, experienced national mobilization outside the USSR during the interwar period and, as Soviet republics during the postwar period, developed a significant tradition of political dissent that was articulated in terms of ethnic identity and national rights, even if these activities were largely suppressed by the early 1980s.3 Still, it was Gorbachev's series of political decisions that created a discursive and, later, political space for reclaiming the republics' sovereignty—even if he believed these measures to be unavoidable. We might view them differently, perhaps as being forced by growing popular disillusionment with the viability of the informal late Soviet "social contract," but this does not detract from their importance. Zubok argues that the origins of Gorbachev's reforms should be sought in his commitment to Leninism. He produces an impressive list of evidence ranging from Gorbachev's own statements to the memoirs of those closest to him. It is difficult not to agree with Zubok on this, but I would like to propose an amendment aimed at considering this term in the intellectual context of the late Soviet period. There was simply no other way to ground any [End Page 854] reforms in theory other than to present them as a...