Evaluating the Demise of the Soviet Union

Editor's Introduction: The disintegration of the Soviet Union in late December 1991 was one of the most remarkable events of the twentieth century. The Cold War had ended two years earlier, in 1989, with the collapse of East European Communism, but the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991 made clear that the Cold War was truly over and that a new phase of international politics had begun. To be sure, the advent of the post–Cold War era did not mean that the whole nature of the global system had changed. Rivalries and severe tensions between great powers continued to arise after the demise of the Soviet Union (most acutely in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the brutal war that ensued), and numerous states in various parts of the world continued to use military force to pursue their objectives. In other respects as well, basic features of the Westphalian order were preserved. Nevertheless, the dissolution of the Soviet Union did ensure that the three defining features of the Cold War were gone for good and would almost certainly not return in combination at any point in the future: (1) a bipolar international system, with two superpowers that were (and were seen as) much stronger than all other countries; (2) a fundamental ideological clash pitting liberal capitalist democracy against Marxism-Leninism; and (3) the division of Europe, East Asia, and much of the rest of the world into broad spheres of influence of the two superpowers.The breakup of the Soviet Union was such a dramatic and consequential event—an event that once seemed totally implausible—that it was bound to inspire voluminous scholarship. Countless books and articles have appeared over the past three decades that collectively explore almost all aspects of the Soviet Union's demise, including the political, social, and economic factors that helped bring it about, the specific developments that contributed to the outcome, and the role of external actors and the external environment. This outpouring of scholarship has been hugely facilitated by the release of crucial archival evidence in Russia and most of the fourteen other countries that were once part of the USSR and by the publication of many important memoirs. Ironically, the quantity of primary sources that have become available is greater for the 1985–1991 period than for the 1965–1984 period. Scholars such as Archie Brown, William C. Taubman, Svetlana Savranskaya, Timothy J. Colton, Serhii Plokhii, Robert Service, Chris Miller, David Marples, and many others (including me) have been able to draw on the immense amount of archival evidence that has been released, greatly enriching their work.Vladislav Zubok, a well-known scholar of Soviet history and Soviet foreign policy, has now published his own lengthy account of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, with Yale University Press. His book, too, has benefited from the abundance of archival documents and memoirs he was able to pore over. Much of the story is familiar, and Zubok's interpretations in many cases overlap with those of other scholars, but in some instances his judgments diverge markedly from the arguments put forth by others. We asked five distinguished experts on the collapse of the Soviet Union, including one from Russia, one from Great Britain, one from Italy, and two from the United States, to offer appraisals of Zubok's book. Their assessments range from highly favorable (Ivan Kurilla) to highly unfavorable (Andrea Graziosi). We are publishing the five commentaries here seriatim along with an extended reply by Zubok.The book was published in late 2021, and four of the five commentaries arrived just before or just after Russian troops invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, launching a brutal war that has continued ever since. Although we permitted a few minor updates to take account of Russia's invasion, we decided that the forum stood up well on its own merits and did not need any further modification.— Mark KramerVladislav Zubok's account of the demise of the Soviet Union combines impressively thorough research with an absorbing narrative. His major study debunks several popular misconceptions of how the end of the Soviet Union came about. But Zubok's judgments, and the conclusions he draws from his research, need careful scrutiny. Some are much more convincing than others.The idea that the United States either sought or produced the breakup of the Soviet Union is one of the first misconceptions to be dismissed by Zubok for the nonsense it is, whether in U.S. triumphalist accounts or in Russian depictions of a long-term U.S. government conspiracy to destroy the Soviet state. In reality, U.S. policymakers—President George H. W. Bush, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Secretary of State James Baker—were alarmed about the possibility of “loose nukes” and civil war within a disintegrating USSR and did nothing to hasten the collapse of the Soviet state until, inadvertently, they gave an extra push to a process that was already far advanced. Bush told Mikhail Gorbachev in July 1991, “We don't seek economic catastrophe in the Soviet Union, and we know that the demise of the Soviet Union is not in our interests” (p. 252). It was only in late November of that year, by which time the breakup was already well under way, that Bush unintentionally added to its momentum by telling a delegation of Ukrainian-Americans that, if the referendum in Ukraine on 1 December resulted in a vote for separate statehood, the United States would recognize Ukrainian independence. This information, which was meant to be confidential, was immediately leaked to the press (p. 393). The disclosure probably contributed a bit to the overwhelming support for independence recorded in the referendum, but in the wake of all that had happened since the aborted hardline coup of August 1991, it was already clear which way that vote was going to turn out.Zubok is right, however, to insist there was nothing inevitable about the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Soviet state did not rely on coercion alone to keep ethnonationalism in check. Stability prior to the perestroika period was achieved with a sticks-and-carrots policy of severe punishment for nationalist deviation and upward-mobility prospects within each of the fifteen union republics for politically conformist members of the titular nationality who were willing to play by the rules of the Soviet game. What is also undeniably true, however, is that within the republics—and in some much more than others—there were suppressed or dormant national aspirations liable to spring rapidly to life if the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) ever displayed greater tolerance or, implausible though this seemed prior to the perestroika years, embraced political pluralism.Even within the most disaffected national groups in the USSR there was no expectation in 1985 that any General Secretary of the CPSU could or would initiate and promote pluralistic politics. In the Baltic states, where a desire for national sovereignty remained widespread, the nature of the Soviet system in the mid-1980s rendered that goal too remote and dangerous for active pursuit. But it turned out that the political climate was about to change dramatically. Gorbachev went on to promote, first, a notable liberalization and then a substantial democratization of the system, thereby raising expectations and providing some of the facilitating conditions for the breakup of the USSR. In Zubok's view, which I do not share, Gorbachev was foolish to do so, though Zubok is right that even the bold steps Gorbachev took did not mean that the breakup of the USSR was bound to follow. Gorbachev's favored option of seeking agreement among the republics to re-create the Union as a genuine, rather than largely formal, federation with extensive powers devolved to the republics was not doomed to failure, for it was far from preordained that his main antagonist would be a Russian leader seeking his republic's “independence” from a Union in which it had been the dominant component. Crucially, the central party-state authorities still had at their disposal all the instruments of coercion—the State Security Committee (KGB), the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), and the Soviet armed forces—capable of crushing the fissiparous movements, even after they had begun to act.On many key issues Zubok is convincing, often adding illuminating detail to what has already been published. Yet the book suffers from exaggeration of the degree of control the top leader in the rapidly changing Soviet political system could exert and from some misunderstandings. The implications of Zubok's overall argument also need to be brought out. He comes close to accepting that the best Russia could realistically have hoped for in the 1980s—and for how long thereafter?—was a more enlightened absolutism, such as that over which a longer-lived Yurii Andropov might have presided.Early in the book, Zubok writes: Scholars who sympathize with Gorbachev usually foreground his international policies and give short shrift to his domestic problems and failures, ascribing the latter to intractable historical and other factors, as well as to the resistance and treason of his enemies. This approach has been consistent in the books of Archie Brown, perhaps the most influential interpreter of Gorbachev's policies. (p. 5)Zubok's generalization could hardly survive a reading or re-reading of the political science and interdisciplinary journals and, more specifically, those that focused on the Soviet Union and the Communist world, such as Soviet Studies and its successor (Europe-Asia Studies), Problems of Communism (and Problems of Post-Communism), Studies in Comparative Communism (which became Communist and Post-Communist Studies), or Soviet Economy (which, despite its title, was as much concerned with Soviet politics as with the economy) and its continuation as Post-Soviet Affairs.Many of the writers who hold Gorbachev in high esteem have, in fact, been primarily concerned with his domestic achievements, especially the introduction of a wide range of freedoms and the substantial democratization of the Soviet political system. That is certainly true of my own books and articles, which have focused far more on internal Soviet politics than on foreign policy.1 Moreover, “treason” is the language of Gorbachev's enemies, not of the scholars who have written positively about his acceptance of freedom of speech and publication, elections with real choice, and political accountability. When the terms “treason” and “treasonous” occur, the words are from the mouths of those who mounted the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev—Vladimir Kryuchkov and Oleg Baklanov, in particular.2 Speaking for myself, I eschew the word “treason” and would not use it to describe either the actions of Boris Yeltsin or even the steps taken by the August 1991 putschists, although I do argue that Yeltsin's undermining of the USSR by claiming that Russian law had supremacy over Soviet law was contrary to Russia's long-term national interest, and this applies still more to the reactionary and incompetent putschists who, attempting to save the union and their own political skins, accelerated its dissolution. Zubok himself comes close to accusing Yeltsin of treason when he writes apropos of Yeltsin's support for Russian sovereignty vis-à-vis the Soviet federal authorities that “the leader of the largest republic in the USSR was in open sedition, and most of the educated Russians were backing him” (p. 187).Zubok compares Gorbachev to “the captain of a huge ship who suddenly decides to sail towards a distant Promised Land,” doing so “against the mood and instincts of his crew.” Moreover, the Soviet leader and his followers have no idea where they are heading, for they have no map and “their compass is broken” (p. 62). Although the metaphor has moved from air to sea, it is reminiscent of the speech by the Russian nationalist writer Yurii Bondarev at the Nineteenth CPSU Conference in 1988, in which he compared perestroika to a plane taking off without knowing either its destination or its landing place.3 The culpability of the pilot was clearly implied. Colorful figures of speech though these are, they add little to political understanding.Gorbachev was a remarkably open-minded political leader by any standards, not just in comparison with his Soviet predecessors, and his political thinking continued to evolve greatly during the period of less than seven years in which he was the final leader of the Soviet Union. Not only many of his specific policies but some of his ultimate goals changed during that period of systemic political change. If he had set out frankly in March or April 1985 what he wished to achieve domestically, it would have been a significant but relatively modest reform program involving revitalization of the Soviet economy, a widening of the limits of the possible within the existing Soviet political system, and some cultural liberalization. But starting in 1987, he gave higher priority to political transformation than to economic restructuring, partly because he had only a limited role in determining the policies of the USSR Council of Ministers and its component parts, a vast bureaucratic structure headed by Nikolai Ryzhkov from 1985 to 1990. Until late 1989 Gorbachev retained some confidence in Ryzhkov, whose ideas for reform were limited, technocratic, and often counterproductive. By then, however, realizing that bolder market-oriented steps were needed, Gorbachev invited Nikolai Petrakov, a pro-market economist and deputy director of the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute, to join his team of aides as economic adviser. Petrakov served throughout 1990, but, as the economy went from bad to worse and as the “nationalities problem” became more severe, Gorbachev hesitated to support a shift to market prices. Removing the subsidies on basic foodstuffs would have been liable to provoke still more popular discontent at a time when support for perestroika and its leader was plummeting.In retrospect, Gorbachev was probably right to conclude that in 1987–1988 it would have been “politically and economically the right time to undertake” more radical economic reforms—including price reform—and that he made a “strategic misstep” by not acting then.4 At that stage Gorbachev's domestic standing was still very high, and he was better placed to get away with inflicting on Soviet society economic pain for longer-term gain than he was by 1990–1991. But, as he has accurately noted, he faced strong opposition from Ryzhkov, from the Council of Ministers, and from within the CPSU Politburo.5 In the face of elite and societal opposition to marketizing reform, Gorbachev would have had to abandon his collegial leadership style within the Politburo, putting aside his preference for leading through persuasion and relying instead on every lever of power at the disposal of the party General Secretary.Firm views about destinations and maps for getting there are usually intellectual fantasies liable to be knocked off course when they come into contact with political reality, especially when we are talking about a revitalized society's response to relaxation within an authoritarian regime. Communist ideology was a prime example of political doctrine that envisaged a destination, with the leading and guiding role of the party providing the guarantees of reaching it. From that bundle of illusions Gorbachev was freeing himself and his country. Although he retained a lingering respect for Vladimir Lenin, he evolved into a socialist of a social democratic type—a type for which Lenin had nothing but scorn. This evolution was evident to Gorbachev's long-time interpreter and aide, Pavel Palazchenko, who in 2020, looking back at how complete a break Gorbachev made with traditional Soviet dogma in his speech to the United Nations (UN) in December 1988, aptly observed: “Re-reading that speech today, it is difficult to find in it even traces of ‘Marxism-Leninism.’”6To say, as Zubok does that Gorbachev was “the last true Leninist believer” (p. 21) is to underestimate the speed and profundity of his ideational evolution during the years in which he held the office of General Secretary. Zubok is much closer to the mark when he observes, “As Gorbachev evolved, ‘his Lenin’ evolved as well” (p. 21). As time went by, Gorbachev quoted Lenin less and less, and when he cited Lenin in the late 1980s it was after he had already rejected the essence of Leninism. For Zubok, Gorbachev's social democratic aspirations were “messianic” and detached from reality. Zubok writes, without foundation, that “Like Lenin,” Gorbachev “wanted to unleash forces of chaos in order to create a society that had never existed—a dangerous exercise in ideological messianism” (p. 427, emphasis added). Never existed in Russia, indeed, but a society that could be found in other parts of Northern Europe, presided over by pragmatic rather than messianic Scandinavians. More accurately, Zubok notes (and for him it is a paradox) that “Gorbachev consistently rejected methods and features that were at the core of Lenin's revolutionary success. He preferred speeches to action, parliamentary consensus to violence, and devolution to dictatorship” (p. 428). Not a bad set of preferences, one might think, though it is necessary to add that Gorbachev also took plenty of actions during his years in power and that speeches are themselves political actions, especially in a highly ideologized regime in which conceptual change was of great consequence.On that conceptual change, Zubok does not appear to be entirely conversant. His discussion of “socialist democracy” and “democratic socialism” is somewhat confused. He writes (p. 106) that by the end of 1989 and beginning of 1990, “the Politburo liberals feared a reactionary rollback and the end of ‘socialist democracy’” and that “most of the Party nomenklatura could never understand why Gorbachev kept devolving power, especially material power, to other actors, in the name of ‘socialist democracy’” (p. 158). The Soviet leader devolved power to other actors, especially actors in the republics, in response to political aspirations and pressures and in an attempt to hold the Union together without resorting to violent repression. To say that he did this in the name of “socialist democracy” is misleading. There was nothing new about that concept. Long before perestroika, “socialist democracy” was how Soviet leaders and ideologists described what supposedly prevailed in the USSR. Countless books and articles during the years under Leonid Brezhnev were published extolling it. What was new, and it counts as one of Gorbachev's major ideological heresies, was his embrace of a concept that sounded similar but was completely different: “democratic socialism.” This was the terminology—and it connoted the practice—of the democratic socialist parties of Western Europe (including, not least, those in Northern and Southern Europe—from Norway to Spain). The term distinguished their kind of socialism, for which the generic term is “social democracy,” from the highly undemocratic “socialism,” usually known as “Communism,” practiced in the Soviet Union and the Communist states of Eastern Europe.It is almost certainly wrong to believe, as Zubok speculates, that “Gorbachev's personal discovery of the need for ‘social democracy’ must have been nurtured in his conversations with his Czech friend Zdenĕk Mlynář” (p. 34). Gorbachev and Mlynář had numerous conversations as fellow students in the Law Faculty of Moscow University in the first half of the 1950s, but it was from Gorbachev that Mlynář, the more starry-eyed of the two at that time, learned more about the gap between doctrine and reality in the Soviet Union. By the time they next met in Stavropol in late 1967, Mlynář had become a Communist reformer. He spoke about some of the changes he hoped would soon occur in Czechoslovakia, but he was still far from being a social democrat. The two friends did not meet again until 1989, by which time the positions of both had independently evolved toward democratic socialism. In Mlynář’s case, the shock of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 had been a sharp stimulus to reassess previous beliefs, and his intellectual evolution continued during his years of political exile in Vienna after he became a founding signatory of Charter 77. Gorbachev's attraction to a democratic variant of socialism followed from closer acquaintance with the practice of democracy and a growing admiration for it. That was a product both of his repulsion from past Soviet totalitarian and authoritarian practice and of greater first-hand experience of pluralistic politics and freer societies on his visits abroad, together with his numerous conversations with democratic politicians. His rapport was especially close with two European social democrats he greatly liked and respected—Felipe González, whose fourteen years as Spain's prime minister included the whole of Gorbachev's years in power, and Willy Brandt, the former West German chancellor who, from 1976 to 1992, was president of the Socialist International, the organization of West European social democratic parties.After speaking at the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev met Ronald Reagan, whose final term as U.S. president was nearing an end. Reagan asked him about the progress of perestroika. Zubok believes that Gorbachev was embarrassed by the question because “there was no progress to report, only grave problems” (p. 50). But that statement is true only if you refuse to count as progress the rehabilitation of people unjustly killed or imprisoned in the past, if you see nothing progressive in the new tolerance, the new freedom of speech and burgeoning freedom of publication, and if political liberalization and the beginnings of democratization are judged exclusively on the basis of hindsight, accompanied by a belief that the breakup of the Soviet Union was such an unmitigated disaster that the wide range of new liberties pales into insignificance in comparison.Liberalizing and pluralizing a system that for almost seven decades had been at worst totalitarian and at best authoritarian inevitably brought a multitude of suppressed problems and grievances to the surface of political life. In those circumstances, keeping the ship of state on an even keel—to adapt Zubok's figure of speech—became an almost superhuman task. Undoubtedly, Gorbachev made many errors, not least some of his political appointments—and retentions. Easing out Ryzhkov was a prerequisite for earlier and more fundamental economic reform. But Zubok has unrealistic expectations of what any leader could have done after raising long-suppressed expectations. Better, he suggests, not to raise expectations in the first place, especially those of the various nationalities within the multinational Soviet state, and to be ready to use force to nip centrifugal tendencies in the bud. Zubok correctly notes Gorbachev's “visceral aversion to the use of force,” but he disapproves of it, writing: “An admirable moral quality in an individual, this was a huge political flaw in the leader of a country with a tragic history and facing a rising wave of toxic nationalism” (p. 105). There were, of course, alternative Soviet leaders who would have had no such inhibitions, and the big battalions were ready to fall into line (both figuratively and literally) behind them.The charges of “timidity” and “indecisiveness” brought by radical democrats in Russia and by some Western columnists against Gorbachev by the end of the 1980s, even though he had initiated and sustained political change beyond their wildest dreams in 1985, were ill-judged. Moreover, if Gorbachev had undertaken the crackdown Zubok believes was necessary, his political fate would have been in the hands of party and state apparatchiki who would not have forgiven him for undermining, to the extent he already had, their powers and immunity from accountability. Zubok argues that the signing of the Charter of Paris in November 1990 was “a perfect moment for Gorbachev to reach an understanding with Bush on the necessity of a crackdown against Yeltsin's unilateral separatism” (p. 172). Leaving aside legitimate doubts about whether congressional and public opinion in the United States would have allowed Bush to go along with such a policy, it would unquestionably have been damaging to democratization in the Soviet Union. For Gorbachev, that was reason enough to be reluctant to impose such a crackdown—but not for Zubok, who regards Gorbachev's pursuit of democracy as a misconceived project and, in his closing pages, seems to prefer even “a nomenklatura-style state capitalism” with “its institutions of power preserved” (p. 437). These institutions would presumably include those of the Communist Party, insofar as Zubok is critical of Gorbachev's downgrading and downsizing of the party apparatus.Zubok argues that Gorbachev made “a historic miscalculation” in late 1988 when he “moved to dismantle the Party apparatus as the only tool that could possibly keep reforms and the entire country under control” (p. 42). It is true that Gorbachev thereby lost what had hitherto been the CPSU General Secretary's principal lever for the implementation of policy throughout the country. But the party apparatus was also the force that could dilute and undermine the reforms and make sure that they did not too fundamentally disturb the status quo. Although Gorbachev, in March 1990, moved the highest position of power within the system from the office of General Secretary to the newly created Soviet presidency, the latter position lacked the levers for implementation of policy that had hitherto been in the hands of the party leader. Far from giving himself dictatorial powers, as some of his enemies both at home and abroad claimed, he had curtailed them. Zubok is largely correct when he describes Gorbachev as “a leader who had undermined his old power base, without creating a new one” (p. 155). Gorbachev had a far keener interest in democratic institution-building than did his chief rival, Yeltsin, not to speak of Yeltsin's appointed successor, Vladimir Putin, whose interest was in subverting the new democratic norms and institutions that had come into being. But political reform in a time of acute cross-pressures could hardly proceed other than by a process of trial and error. As problems mounted, Gorbachev's political enemies of various hues unwittingly combined to make sure that he ran out of time.Zubok writes that from March 1990, Gorbachev “presided over three institutions: the Politburo, the Presidential Council, and the Council of the Federation,” but “the main problem remained the same: it was not lack of power in Gorbachev's hands, but his lack of an idea what to use the power for—along with his principled refusal to use force” (p. 108, emphasis added). This is at odds with Zubok's more apt statement, quoted in my previous paragraph, that Gorbachev undermined his old power base without creating a new one. “Democratic centralism” within the CPSU had been abandoned in the run-up to the March 1989 election for the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, and top-down discipline within the party had thereby been lost. But the Presidential Council was no real substitute for the previously powerful Politburo, for it was essentially an advisory body and had neither executive powers nor subordinate institutions to carry out its wishes. The establishment of the Council of the Federation was an implicit acknowledgment of the extent to which power had shifted from the center to the republics. Gorbachev did, indeed, as Zubok notes, have the advantage of chairing all three bodies.Leaving aside the newly significant Soviet legislature, missing from Zubok's list of leading executive bodies is the Council of Ministers and the ministerial network. At no point did Gorbachev preside over the Council of Ministers (which in January 1991 was renamed the Cabinet of Ministers). Moreover, his power and influence within it was limited. The body was chaired in the period from Gorbachev's accession to leadership of the CPSU in March 1985 until the August 1991 coup first by Nikolay Tikhonov, then for more than five years by Ryzhkov, and from January 1991, when it was renamed the Cabinet of Ministers, by Valentin Pavlov. Accorded the grander title of prime minister, Pavlov conspired against Gorbachev at various points throughout that year and joined the coup plotters against him. The numerous industrial branch ministries were powerful bureaucratic agencies that acquired still more de facto autonomy as party supervision over them receded. The ministers who headed them were not Gorbachev appointees. He had the largest say only in the appointment of heads of the power ministries and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.7 Those who headed the siloviki were more responsive, especially during the final years of the Soviet Union's existence, to the mood and opinion within the institutions they oversaw than to the head of state. (A rare exception was Vadim Bakatin as minister of internal affairs from 1988 until Gorbachev gave way to conservative pressure and replaced him in late 1990.)Not surprisingly, when the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev occurred, its leading organizers included the chairman of the KGB, the minister of internal affairs, the minister of defense, and the CPSU secretary overseeing military industry, and it was supported by a majority of party officials and government ministers. If Gorbachev's acute political antennae had not induced him to make policy zigzags, with one step backward often preceding two steps forward, his overthr