I have a copy of the book he mentions, it's tiny, a pamphlet really.
January 26, 2007 The Soviet Union, the U.S. and Russia: Opportunities Lost Washington Profile
www.washprofile.org
An interview with Stephen F. Cohen, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and author of several books, including Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.
Washington Profile: There have been several prominent theories proposed as to why the Soviet Union collapsed. In your extensive research on the subject, what is the conclusion that you have reached?
Stephen Cohen: It is fresh in my mind because I just published a little book in Moscow in Russian on this question. I call this book:
"Why did the Soviet Union end?" The publisher called it: "Vopros voprosov, pochemu ne stalo Sovetskogo Soyuza." I don't use the word collapse because I think that prejudges an explanation. If you say collapse, it implies an analogy with the end of tsarism in 1917, because we always say tsarism collapsed. And it suggests that the system collapsed because of some internal and irreparable, inevitable factors or defects. So I simply ask, 'Why did it end?' And as I went through the literature, I was astonished to discover that there are somewhere, depending on how you define them, six to10 rather different explanations of why the Soviet Union ended. You find this many in both the Western scholarly literature and the Russian serious literature, scholarly or journalistic. I go through, in this little book of mine, each of the six which I believe to be the most prominent. In order to explain the end of the Soviet Union, as historians will be trying to do not only on this fifteenth anniversary, but probably for the next 100 or 200 years, you need to take into account three factors.
The participating factor was Gorbachev's political and economic reforms that began in 1985 and reached their peak at about 1990 in a form of a rather extensive democratization of the former Communist system. Essentially by 1990 Gorbachev had dismantled the communist political system, what used to be called the totalitarian system (I didn't use that word, but we know what we mean by it). He had loosened state control of the economy. That made possible other factors to come into play. Some people, for example, say the Soviet Union ended because of nationalism or the Soviet Union ended because of popular unrest. But none of these factors would have come into play, probably not even today, had it not been for Gorbachev's reforms. Then came the second factor, and that was the emergence of Boris Yeltsin by about 1989, 1990. Now you had something rather unusual in history, but not unusual in Russian history where leaders have played special roles: you had a conflict between two Russian leaders, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, between two men of extraordinary political will. I define it as Gorbachev's extraordinary will to reform and Yeltsin's extraordinary will for power. This conflict created the possibility that Yeltsin could go to Belovezh Forest on December 8 and abolish the Soviet Union in order to be rid completely of Gorbachev, and to beat him completely by abolishing his presidency and his country. But then that leaves a third question and a third factor. Yeltsin didn't control an army, he didn't even have a political party. How would he be able to abolish what was still a nuclear super power of what was still nearly 350 million people, in the face of the Soviet elite, particularly the state nomenklatura, not necessarily the party, that had based its position on this state. Why did they permit Yeltsin to do this? And here I think would be the third factor, that, the high nomenklatura that might have stopped Yeltsin had been too busy privatizing the wealth of the state to care about defending it. The struggle over property actually did not begin until after the end of the Soviet Union, but early on in the late 1980s. But by 1990 and 1991, main members of the high elite, ministerial elite, even the army elite, certainly the party elite, were seizing state property for themselves, so while they were stripping the state's assets, they had no interest in defending it, so they simply stepped aside and allowed the political struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev to unfold, and it unfolded in the end of the Soviet Union.
Etc.: http://www.russiaprofile.org/cdi/2007/1/26/5107.wbp
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