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Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000

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In a relatively short book, Stephen Kotkin brilliantly brings to light the economic and socio-political factors that led to the death of the Soviet Union, and how, unlike the violent demise of the former Yugoslavia, Gorbachev and other progressives in the Soviet government managed to turn the possible apocalyptic death of the Soviet experiment into a relatively peaceful half-transition to a market economy. Kotkin also explores how that transition crippled the pseudo-prosperity of the Soviet republics(though he focues primarily on the Russian SSR and the East European neo-states, with only moderate mentioning of the effects of the collapse to the Soviet Socialist Republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus).

Professor Kotkin also exposes in an eye-opening view the failures of Perestroika(Gorbachevian Soviet Reform) and Glasnost(openness), and how Gorbachev attempted to steer the USSR's reform policies to reflect the true ideas of enlightened socialism. In addition, his description of the extent of corruption in post-Soviet Russia also makes you see how ineffective Russia's economic system really is.

The book is a definitive description of the twilight time of the USSR, and is a must-read for those who wish to expand their knowledge of Soviet-era market reforms, and also for anyone who is outright curious about Soviet-era economic and political history.

In Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, historian Stephen Kotkin demonstrates a profound knowledge of the political and economic structures and institutions that have shaped Soviet and post-Soviet history over the past several decades. This excellent little book makes two provocative arguments that contradict the conventional wisdom concerning the demise of the Soviet regime and its aftermath.

Kotkin's first argument is that what has passed for "reform" since 1991 has been the ongoing structural and institutional decay of the old system. Obsolete, inefficient factories are no more productive now than they were during Soviet times; government officials, well-connected insiders, and factory managers continue to bilk the country of its treasure; and presidential perquisites rival those of former politiboro members. With no rule of law, no system of credit, a weak legal system, and a national bank that speculates on its own currency and hides funds in offshore accounts, the reforms of the post-Soviet era are a myth. Indeed, in a de facto sense, the old system is still in its death throes.

The second part of Kotkin's argument concerns the end of Soviet rule in 1991. Kotkin believes that the Soviet regime could have muddled along for several years after 1991 without imploding. It still had a large and powerful military with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons at its disposal. It wasn't the brilliance of American foreign policy or economic decline that caused the regime to fall when it did. Instead, in a paradoxical sense, it was Gorbachev's belief in the humanistic nature of socialism that did in the system. Socialism was supposed to be fair and just, ensuring a decent quality of life for the Soviet people, a dream that Gorbachev tried to deliver. His ideological convictions led him to try to reform a system that could not be reformed. His policy of "glasnost" or openness made even more apparent to the public the failings of the system. And, because he believed that socialism was based on humanistic principles, he refused to resort to violence on a large scale to hold the Union together.

While this is a brilliant little book, some important issues could have been more extensively explored. A greater exploration of the influences underpinning Gorbachev's ideological convictions would have been helpful. What books did he read? Why did he see the good in the system when so many others did not? Other than believing in the inherent goodness of socialism, were there additional factors that fueled Gorbachev's decision to allow the Soviet Union to disintegrate relatively peacefully? For example, some may argue that Gorbachev, keenly aware of his place in history, knew that he would be viewed as a villain had he butchered his own people to save the regime. Indeed, Gorbachev just may have been too decent a human being to preside over a bloodbath, regardless of his ideological convictions. Moreover, from a geopolitical standpoint, it would have been dangerous for Gorbachev to use overwhelming force internally. The United States and the rest of the world were keeping a close watch on him. Gorbachev had no assurances that the West wouldn't support independence movements in the Republics had he moved decisively to suppress them.

In his concluding remarks, Kotkin indicates that Russia's best bet for the future might be to join the euro. While this might be a great idea in theory, one wonders when Russia will be able to meet the economic criteria required to do so.

"...What no one, from national-security experts to ordinary citizens such as my mother, dared to dream was that within ten years of Brezhnev's death, the Soviet Union would collapse and simply cease to exist. How and why did this momentous event occur? Princeton University historian Stephen Kotkin takes up these salient questions in his concise, readable, and informative book Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000.

"Kotkin dismisses the oft-cited explanations that emphasize increased U.S. military spending and the failure of central planning, arguing that as late as 1985 the Soviet Union was `lethargically stable' (p. 2). Instead, he blames attempts -- first initiated by Khrushchev's de-Stalinization effort and culminating in Gorbachev's policies of perestroika, glasnost, and democratization -- to reform a system that was inherently incapable of reform. To offer only an explanation of the Soviet Union's collapse, no matter how compellingly argued, however, is unsatisfactory because that explanation leaves too many questions unanswered. Why were the reforms undertaken? Why did the Soviet elites not resist them? What effect did the Soviet legacy have on the reforms? By considering these questions, Kotkin provides a deeper understanding of the Soviet Union's astonishing collapse....

"The man to undertake the reforms was Mikhail Gorbachev. Perhaps the most revealing comment on Gorbachev is a 1988 statement by Milovan Djilas that Kotkin quotes: `Gorbachev, unlike Brezhnev, strikes me as a true believer' (p. 31). Perhaps he was a true believer because, as Kotkin points out, he had witnessed many socialist and Soviet triumphs: for example, Sputnik, manned space flight, and communist takeovers in China and Cuba. Whatever the reason, this belief entailed that Gorbachev would not be satisfied with `lethargic stability.' He would seek reforms, and, unlike Khrushchev, he had the political skills to carry them through. Perhaps surprisingly, he attempted reform for a largely receptive population who maintained a `strong allegiance to socialism' (p. 44) despite deteriorating economic conditions (for example, it typically took ten years to get an apartment). Neither Gorbachev nor the populace realized that reform ultimately would lead to collapse....

"According to Kotkin, what made Gorbachev's reforms so risky, far riskier than Gorbachev ever realized, was that he, unlike Khrushchev, did not have an ideological safety net. Whereas Khrushchev could say that socialism's failure was owing to Stalin and that reforms would restore `Leninism,' when Gorbachev acknowledged socialism's need for reform, the only possible conclusion was that socialism itself was inherently flawed. In the end, the Soviet Union could not afford the superpower competition. Its economy was underperforming, and its ideology was bankrupt. It withdrew from Afghanistan and gave up eastern Europe. In August 1991, conservatives tried to restore the old order, but their attempt failed with Boris Yeltsin's standing triumphantly and defiantly atop a Soviet tank. With nothing to hold the Soviet Union together, it disintegrated without the bloodshed that many had believed inevitable. Gorbachev acknowledged reality by formally dissolving the union in December 1991.

"The USSR may have formally ended its seventy-four-year existence in 1991, but its legacy resulted in a continuing collapse, which Kotkin documents in chapters 5 and 6. In Russia, Yeltsin promised a market economy, although he knew nothing about one. Even a politician with the most thorough understanding of market capitalism would have been unable to withstand the former-Soviet elites who were establishing their own version of `capitalism.' These elites, many of whom had abandoned any ideological attachment to socialism and the rest of whom were quite willing to do so when faced with the possibility of financial gain, began systematically to appropriate state assets. Kotkin explains the appalling and systemic corruption that contaminated the privatization process, which culminated in perhaps the most egregious episode, the infamous `loans for shares' deal. Realizing that the `mass opportunism of self-privatization' was irreversible, vice premier Anatoly Chubais simply chose to `institutionalize' and `rationalize' it (p. 130)....

"In sum, Kotkin presents a practical, accessible, and informative account of the Soviet Union's collapse. His book stands as a suitable complement to Richard Pipes's Communism: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2001), which explores more of the philosophical reasons for communism's demise. Yet Kotkin's book is more than a historical retelling of the Soviet Union's fall. It provides an explanation of how and why the Soviet Union fell, a story of socialism's inability to compete with the West, its loss of hope, and the willingness of those in power to prostitute any remaining belief in socialist ideals for corrupt material gain. The book also serves as a case study of socialism's inability to reform itself without self-destruction and of the ensuing institutional shortcomings that render market capitalism and political liberalism difficult to obtain. Those who believed that Russia could quickly copy the economic perfor-mance and political liberty of the West failed to understand that the Soviet Union's legacy was antithetical to markets, private property, and the rule of law. Kotkin's book should appeal to any reader who grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and wants to understand more fully not only how and why the Soviet Union fell, but also why its legacy has been so bitter and enduring."

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Excerpted from a review by Jody Lipford in "The Independent Review," Winter 2004.

I had just returned from a trip to Russia when I came across this little book purporting to explain the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union. I've read other works on russian and Soviet history, but have never come across such a clear presentation of the issues to consider. Other reviewers have suggested that there's too much political bias in the account and that it's boring. I did not find this at all (especially the boring part), and I've always had a sympathy for the Left. Indeed, when I was in Russia and witnessed first hand the impressive and awe-inspiring achievements of Soviet and Czarist Russia (as well as some of the more horrific ones) I asked people to explain to me what caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, an idealist experiment that went wrong disappointing so many who hoped for a better system. You cannot help but ask these questions as you see the unbelievable luxury and wealth in Moscow and parts of St. Petersburg with the obvious poverty that co-exists with it. Yet, as the notes of the soviet anthem so poignantly reflect, The Soviet Union was supposed to herald a new era in human relations. Of course, reality has a way of breaking dreams and I believe that Stephen Kotkin has captured the illusion and its collapse, outlining the reasons and the effcts with unprecedented clarity. perhaps, more than this, Kotkin offers a model for analyzing the problems faced by all regimes as they attempt a reform from within and is a very effective text to understand politics in much of the developing world and I found personally usful in studying such regimes as Egypt under Sadat and Mubarak, Qadhafi's in Libya, or Asad of Syria. It's definitely a short book that travels very far.

How easy it is to forget recent history; how easy it is not to know what happened in the first place. Looking back at the collapse of the Soviet Union, we Americans think we had something to do with it. We think we "won" the cold war. Media reports at the time focused on our conduct, not what actually happened over there. Too many American's think that Reagan saying "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" actually influenced Soviet policy.

Kotkin, in his short, but detailed, book focuses on what happened in the Soviet Union, and why its collapse did not result in Armageddon. The story involves the ideals of Gorbachev, his political ability, the objectives of the Soviet leadership at a personal level, and a collapse that took decades and is continuing, but was inevitable because of the shortcommings of the system. It is ironic that the American political right which always predicted that a communist system could not work, fails to accept the Soviet collapse as a result of the failures of the system, and insists on claiming we caused it. We cannot understand the world today if we do not understand how and why things happen in other countries, and insist we are the cause of everything.

It is unfortunate that there is no English language biography of Gorbachev that fully explains how someone brought up through the system came to the same conclusion as the American political right. At least with Kotkin's book, we have a descritpion of the events. It would be interesting to have a book that probes his personality and character.

The book is good and provides a lot of useful information. However, I was missing more info about economy, more hard facts. Almost completely missing is a description of situation within Soviet Army, the army that was well armed and in possession of nuclear arms, often beyond Russian borders. Army could have caused the Armageddon that did not happen, yet is not covered by the book. Another interesting topic would have been role of secret services - if any. In summary, great insight into politburo activities, but less focus beyond.

This relatively short book is a strong analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Kotkin is particularly concerned with rebutting Western triumphalist accounts of the Soviet collapse and focuses on the people who really made the key decisions, the leading elites of the Soviet state. Kotkin points to 2 major structural features that undermined the Soviet Union. The first was the failure of the Soviet economy to keep pace with the burgeoning economies of the USA, Western Europe, and Japan. As early as the mid-1960s, intelligent Soviet economists were warning of economic stagnation. The second factor, greatly magnifying the effects of Soviet economic inefficiency, was the burden of Cold War competition with the USA and its allies. The Soviet state promised economic and social utopia, and despite real achievements in modernizing Russia and other parts of the Soviet state, delivered sluggish economic growth, massive corruption, an oligarchic party-state, and suppression of human rights.

Many Soviet leaders were aware of these problems, but the generational shift that occurred with the ascent of Gorbachev brought a real reformer to power. Unlike his predecessors, who were willing temporize and maintain power with very modest efforts at reform, Gorbachev was willing to take what were in the Soviet context truly radical steps. A pragmatic idealist, Gorbachev was motivated by a sincere desire to produce a humane form of socialism, but the ironic result of his efforts was to destroy the entity he wished to save from itself.

Kotkin lays out nicely how efforts at reform, notably the weakening of the Communist Party, undid some of the key bonds holding together the Soviet Union. He shows as well that many of the features of post-Soviet world were continuations of patterns well established during the Soviet years and that others, notably some aspects of the economic chaos, were the result of a weak central state. Kotkin makes a particularly interesting point that the nationalism that emerged with the breakup of the Soviet Union was partly a product of the way the Soviet Union was organized into national republics. Once the trans-Union bonds of the Party, the military, and the KGB had been broken, the national republics were the remaining formal governmental structures.

Kotkin sees the poverty and lawlessness that followed the end of the Soviet Union as essentially inevitable and argues that a democratic state will emerge in Russia only with the establishment of an effective central government and legal system. He also, however, offers measured praise for both Gorbachev and his successors. True to his essentially idealistic nature, Gorbachev ultimately chose principle over the maintenance of power. The dissolution of the Soviet Union could have been accompanied by the type of massive violence seen in the former Yugoslavia, a rather scary thought given the size of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

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.

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.

Kotkin is a first rate historian who dispenses with the slogans, cliches, and jingoism that often cloud Soviet studies. Armageddon Averted is superbly titled and succinctly written. The author takes less than 200 pages of text to explain the ending collapse of the U.S.S.R. - the "death agony of an entire world comprising non-market economies and anti-liberal institutions." It's a pleasure to read history that so elegantly summarizes complex and world changing events without mischaracterizing them. Many "experts" not only failed to anticipate the changes that occurred, but subsequently gave the wrong reasons for them. Kotkin's breadth and depth of knowledge allow him to avoid such blunders. Most highly recommended. Additional plusses are the Notes and Further Reading sections. The naysayers below seem to have axes to grind that cloud their "reviews."