Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 | Stephen Kotkin

Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 | Stephen Kotkin | almost perfect

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Armageddon Averted...

	Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 Stephen Kotkin Oxford University Press, USA, 2003 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In the Cold War era that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, nobody envisaged that the collapse of the Soviet Union would come from within, still less that it would happen meekly, without global conflagration.
In this brilliantly compact, original, engaging book, Stephen Kotkin shows that the Soviet collapse resulted not from military competition but, ironically, from the dynamism of Communist ideology, the long-held dream for "socialism with a human face." The neo-liberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia never took place, nor could they have, given the Soviet-era inheritance in the social, political, and economic landscape. Kotkin takes us deep into post-Stalin Soviet society and institutions, into the everyday hopes and secret political intrigues that affected 285 million people, before and after 1991. He conveys the high drama of a superpower falling apart while armed to the teeth with millions of loyal troops and tens of thousands of weapons of mass destruction. Armageddon Averted vividly demonstrates the overriding importance of history, individual ambition, geopolitics, and institutions, and deftly draws out contemporary Russia's contradictory predicament.

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Book explains why the Soviet Union did not collapse amid a violent convulsion

The author's goal in this book, as he states in the introduction, is to explain why the Soviet Union did not erupt into a violent convulsion upon its collapse. Multi-ethnic empires rarely break apart without violent upheavel. Yet this one did. If your goal is to find out why this is happened this is a book you must read. Written by a leading scholar of the Soviet Union.

almost perfect

This is the best historical narrative I had ever read on the subject. It does jingle very well with my own recollections about this period. It is informative with a lot of details.

According to Mr.Kotkin the final stages of the collapse were two-fold: first commie-romantic-idiot Gorbachev destroyed whatever was remaining of the existing system while trying to improve it, and then the Soviet elite saw better prospects in joining Eltsin in finishing the system off instead of fighting for its meager spoils.

There are a few amusing/annoying/bizarre parts. First, Mr.Kotkin seems genuinely upset that the system did not even try to use its repressive powers to preserve itself. Second, the author simply could not make himself to accept Soviet elite's switch to Eltsin as a reasonable action. Third he often goes off into incoherent ramblings condemning all parties including his fellow sovietologists.

But again, the blemishes are minor and they are clearly separated from the presented narrative, which is simply superb in my view.

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Good book, but Kotkin Does Not Answer the Question

Kotkin attempts to answer how the Soviet Union and its empire could quickly and quietly implode - a bewildering topic indeed. He posits that Soviet leadership fossilized beginning with the drooling Brezhnev followed by other barely breathing leaders. He does an excellent job explaining how the disunion got started in Gorbachev's reforms, but fails to answer why no Soviet elites stopped him, or later, stopped Yeltsin.

When Gorbachev took over a moribund system, he had a real and abiding commitment to 'socialism with a human face'. He believed the Soviet system could be reformed and set about seriously pursuing reform through perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). As it turned out, Gorbachev was wrong, the system could not be reformed.

The interesting point here is why didn't Gorbachev or, if not him, a reactionary coup leader use the might of the Soviet army and the KGB to put down by force what could not be stopped by reason. It is understandable why Gorbachev let Eastern Europe go; the Russians could not afford the empire any longer, but why let the system fall apart at home without a fight?

Would state violence have worked? Maybe, maybe not, but why wasn't it tried? Kotkin explains why Gorbachev started the process much better than he explains the lack of forceful response by the elites before it was too late. The August 1991 coup led to Yeltsin's ascension and sealed Gorbachev's demise, but again, why did the generals order the troops to return to the barracks without shooting down the forces that were destroying the Soviet empire?

Kotkin does a great job in the first part of the book describing the ossification of the Soviet empire, the late Cold War, and Gorbachev's rise. Kotkin also originally disputes standard Western views of what the economic 'reform' really was and was not. He also does a decent job explaining why 'reform' didn't really work (the same elite who ran the socialist system was also in charge of dismantling it.) His description of the later period leading up to and under Putin is disjointed. All in all, a good book, but Kotkin never really explains why the Empire faded meekly away rather going out in a firestorm of violence.

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Good, Concise History of the Soviet Collapse

Stephen Kotkin's "Armageddon Averted" is a good, concise history of the Soviet collage from 1970-2000. Kotkin has two themes that he repeatedly touches on: 1) that the Soviet system collapsed from within and 2) that the collapse was remarkably peaceful. Kotkin's work is very good, although at only 200 pages, it is a cursory account of the Soviet collapse.

Kotkin focuses almost entirely on the Soviet system's inner workings. He describes how the Soviet system was destined to collapse from within and would have collapsed earlier had oil prices not increased in the 1970s, allowing the Soviet Union to continue to finance itself. Only with the coming of the new generation - Gorbachev - did anyone in the Soviet leadership have the courage to realize that the system must be changed. However, when Gorbachev tried to save the Soviet Union by liberalizing part of society, he set loose powers and forces and quickly lost control of the country.

It was at this point, Kotkin argues, that the real miracle occurred: while the Soviet Union had used military force to keep Hungary and Czechoslovakia in its sphere, and had an entire security apparatus that had perfected the police state, the Soviet dissolution was almost completely bloodless. The Soviet leadership (or reactionaries in the government) did not crack down on its own citizens, and neither did it lash out at the rest of the world in either a conventional world designed to foment nationalism nor launch a spiteful nuclear strike.

This is a very good book, but it is lacking on details. Kotkin's writes from the perspective of a textbook, making sweeping statements and broad generalizations without much supporting argument. The book also lacks any personal look at the fall of the Soviet Union (other than occasional anecdotes about the leadership), unlike the excellent (but very different) "Lenin's Tomb." Kotkin also completely dismisses any credit to the United States or any other foreign power or policy for the Soviet collapse. Despite these drawbacks, though, this is an excellent book for anyone interested in Soviet/Russian history, modern history, or political science and foreign policy.

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A good summary

Mr. Kotkin is an excellent historian with a number of fine works on Russia and the USSR under his belt. In this one he offers a post-mortem on the terminal decline of the Soviet Union.

While it's refreshing to read a work that criticizes American cold war triumphalism and chest-pounding, it's important to evaluate all the causes. It seems that Mr. Kotkin is too narrowly focusing on internal and systemic factors, at the expense of external pressures and the interconnections between them.

There is, in my view, a direct link between the Reagan-era external crusade to destroy socialism and the USSR as a political-military power, on one hand; and on the other Yeltsin's internal coup-de-grace. It is not unreasonable to see Yeltsin as the Reaganites' point-man within Russia, finishing from within the demolition begun outside the walls.

That the Soviet elite would join the bandwagon, rather than fight for the system, is also not as stange as Mr. Kotkin seems to think. After all, these apparatchiki only joined the Party in this late period for what they could get out of it; and if they saw greater profit in turning against it they yet acted accorded to their actual values. Too much is made of ideology, when the USSR in the 1980s was the last place you could find elites who took Communism seriously. In fact, the vindictive anti-Communism of the 1990s seems in direct proportion to the ideological cheek-kissing necessary to ride the Soviet gravy train.

Thus the de-Communization process can be depicted as stealing milk from a cow, under Brezhnev, and selling it on the side; to legalization of the milk theft and its market profits, under Gorbachev; to the final selling off and butchering the cow under Yeltsin, with milk profits reinvested in oil and in Western money markets. The bureaucrats-turned-capitalists are acting entirely in character throughout.

As for the contention that the reforms "didn't work" because the bureaucrats became the new bourgeoisie, one must ask - did not work for whom? They worked for whom they were intended to work. And a bourgeoisie is always created from pre-existing classes, like the landed gentry-turned-speculators in 18th century England.

Though this is still a good review of the decline of the USSR, it puzzles over too many obvious questions, with the answers right before one. Mr. Kotkin lifts up the rock to see what's underneath, but there's no trick - nothing was hidden.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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