ARMAGEDDON AVERTED: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000, By Stephen Kotkin, Oxford University Press: 246 pp., $25
For more than 10 years, the West has strutted about in celebration of its triumph over communism. Although the political direction Russia will take is still uncertain (will Russia ultimately return to authoritarianism or did President Putin's post-Sept. 11 meeting with President Bush in Crawford, Texas, signal Russia's permanent turn to democracy?), no one has seriously considered the risks posed by the Soviet empire's disintegration. Did it, indeed, open the door to a possible Armageddon?
In "Armageddon Averted," Stephen Kotkin suggests that the collapse of communism could have created a catastrophe of the highest order. What's more, he's surprised that it didn't. Kotkin expertly lays out the chilling prospect that "with the horrid example of much smaller Yugoslavia's catastrophic break-up right next door, one shudders to think of the manipulative wars, indeed the nuclear, chemical, or biological Armageddon that could have accompanied the Soviet collapse."
The necessity of the Soviet empire's implosion is rarely questioned. The abundance of books devoted to it often deal with the West's failure in shaping viable economic reforms for Russia. Other books, such as "Kapitalizm" by Rose Brady, glorified the young reformers in Boris Yeltsin's cabinet while Chrystia Freeland's "Sale of the Century" accused those same reformers of corruption and financial crimes.
Most of these, however, lack a broad framework, a signature style of "Armageddon Averted." Kotkin's previous book, "Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization," dealt with Russia's massive industrial production, examining its importance as a driving force for the economy and national life. In "Armageddon Averted," he ties Soviet industry to the revolution in world communication which began in the 1970s with computers (and which seemed to consign heavy industry and military production to the dustbin of history).
The Soviet Union's military-industrial "system had no mechanisms of self-correction" in the face of this economic challenge. Indeed, Moscow reacted to the changing world by falling into a recession in the early 1980s, fortunately followed by the open-minded Mikhail Gorbachev's ascendance to power in 1985.
It is a commonly held belief that perestroika and post-communism failed because, after 1985, economic prosperity assessments were made not with the Russian past, when "the Soviet population was better fed, better clothed and better educated ... but with the richest nations in the world." Privatization, for example, as run by Anatoly Chubais in the 1990s, was first seen as the only hope for Russian capitalism and then as the worst disaster since Stalin's purges. "The increasing public outcries over the need to guarantee property rights testified not only to the distance Russia still had to go, but also to how far it had come," Kotkin writes.
Kotkin skillfully combines historical analysis with an examination of the social psychology of leadership, following the fine example of Robert Tucker in his monumental three-volume study of Joseph Stalin. Kotkin explains how Gorbachev's commitment to improve his country along the lines of widely accepted global norms, rather than maintain the nation's closed nature, was a key factor in averting disaster.
There have been many notable books on Gorbachev, but Gorbachev's crucial role in the transition from socialism to capitalism was overshadowed by Yeltsin's outbursts and his monarchical-anarchical style of rule (one finds this in books by Lilia Shevtsova and Leon Aron). Kotkin reexamines the Gorbachev factor, taking into consideration all we have learned about the Soviet collapse over the last decade of post-communist transition.
The parade of independence among Soviet republics in the late 1980s and early '90s, as well as the liberation of Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution and, ultimately, the end of the Cold War, were not the result of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars budgets, which supposedly bankrupted the Soviet system as it desperately tried to catch up.
Kotkin asserts that, with a flair for "characteristically American self-promotion," officials of the Reagan and (first) Bush administrations were found to be "pirating credit for [the Soviet collapse]" even as Gorbachev's romanticism fueled a Soviet commitment to reform socialism. In fact, Gorbachev himself confirmed this notion in a recent conversation that I had with him, telling me that "Nicolae [Ceausescu, the communist Romanian dictator] said to me, 'We have to save Poland from Solidarnost.' But I couldn't do it. We were already withdrawing soldiers from Afghanistan. We did let the Czechoslovakians go. And as for the Berlin Wall, I would never have sent the troops there. We had to stop dictating to the world how to live their lives."
Kotkin echoes these sentiments: "For him [Gorbachev], amid the turmoil of perestroika, to have returned to Stalinist methods to preserve the system would have not only destroyed his international reputation but would have made a lie out of his whole inner life."
Gorbachev's personal affirmation of Kotkin's analysis is one of those almost unprecedented in Russia: an occasion when a historical figure unknowingly confirms the assessment of him by a historian. Reforming Soviet socialism, Kotkin explains, "meant breaking with anything that resembled Stalinism or Brezhnevism, including domestic military crackdown; even the men who belatedly attempted in August 1991 to salvage the Union chose not to mobilize more than a tiny fraction of their available might, which in any case they failed to use. In this light, perestroika should be judged as stunning success." (This is a useful reminder to those who complain that Russia is not doing well enough quickly enough.)
Kotkin tackles the question of institutional deficit, explaining why Russia's post-communist system was not corrupt as the West sees it, but " 'pre-corrupt,' a condition whereby everyone to varying degrees was a violator, but only the weak were targeted."
He compares the Russian situation with the United States experience: "Imagine Wall Street--corrupt as it is already--if regulations were nonexistent. Or American business if regulations functioned as a pretext for the petty to extract 'fines' and the powerful to crush competitors and those without connection." He concludes that "capitalism without government regulations or with random and manipulated government was not pretty: Russia, paradoxically, needed both far, far deeper economic liberalization, and much better government regulation."
Explaining this situation in post-Soviet Russia in a section wittily titled "Institutional kasha," Kotkin makes a compelling distinction between liberalism and democracy as it has developed in Russia: "Democratic but not liberal, it had a constitutionally all-powerful president [Yeltsin] with limited effective power. Indeed," he continues, "Russia had more than twenty presidents" in the various regions and republics that comprised the new Russian Federation. Russia's problem was that it tried to apply liberal freedoms at a time when its legal structures remained authoritarian. It was all too eager to become a capitalistic democracy, which ignited the removal of all institutional constraints beginning in 1991.
Meanwhile "liberalism," Kotkin reminds us, "entails not freedom from government but constant, rigorous officiating of the private sphere ... It means not just representative government but effective government, a geopolitical imperative for prosperity in the hierarchical world economy."
In fact, this contradiction between Russia's social and institutional landscape compelled Washington to shift " 'blame' for Russia's 'failure' " to a less politically sensitive organization, the International Monetary Fund. But, Kotkin explains, "Russia's was not, and could not have been, an engineered transition to the market. It was a chaotic, insider, mass plundering of the Soviet era, with substantial roots prior to 1991, and ramifications stretching far into the future."
Kotkin thoughtfully opposes the argument that Putin has brutally suppressed freedom of the press, pointing out that in fact "nowhere were the paradoxes of post-Soviet Russia more evident than in its media." In the last few years, leadership changes at NTV, a private television station, one of Russia's foremost anti-government champions, have been regarded as proof of Putin's dictatorial influence. What's omitted from such accusations, however, is that NTV took out loans for hundreds of millions of dollars from the Russian government and simply refused to pay them back. When "Putin's Kremlin forcibly pressed to have the loans paid," Kotkin writes, "they seemed to be trying to eliminate one of their chief critics, rather than upholding the sanctity of contracts, but in fact the two pursuits could not be separated."
Today with Russia's gross domestic product on the rise, a balanced budget, progress in tax and land reforms and Putin's unconditional support for the United States-led war against terrorism, old perceptions and animosities toward Russia are crumbling: Russia's growing role among the G-8 nations is a sign of this. In this light Kotkin's book is particularly important; not just for its account of Russia's averted Armageddon.
Written a year before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Kotkin's conclusion causes one to shiver as it focuses upon the United States: "Capitalism is an extremely dynamic source of endless creation, but also of destruction. Interconnections bring greater overall wealth but also heightened risks. And the USA--bearing a titanic national security establishment not demobilized after the Cold War, exhibiting a combustible mixture of arrogance and paranoia in response to perceived challenges to its global pretensions, and perversely disparaging of the very government institutions that provide its strength--makes for an additional wild card."