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Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union

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Scott Shane's "Dismantling Utopia" is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Russia. David Remnick (Lenin's Tomb) called it "A critical book [written] with grace, sympathy and intelligence." I can't improve upon that assessment. I do think Shane is one of the United States' best journalists, and could make any subject interesting reading.

Wow. What an interesting book. Scott Shane was in the right spot and had the right skills to interpret the demise of a great empire, the Soviet Union. We don't have the luxury to run controlled trials in society, but sometimes they happen for us. The Soviet Union was one of history's biggest experiments. As we now know, it failed miserably. If we can't learn lessons from such a colossal failure, we aren't very good students of history and human behavior. The lesson from Scott Shane, that gives the book its subtitle, is that information can set us free. The lesson I draw is that governments should serve the people, not visa versa.

Charles L. Hooper, coauthor Making Great Decisions in Business and Life

I have lived in Russia for the past three years and am a personal friend of Andre Mironoff. I have taught Human Rights in Russian Universities, and have had Andre as a guest lecturer in my classe.

I recommend with out reservation reading this book to have a better understanding of life that still exists in modern Russia. There are more paradoxes than solutions to the complexities existing in Russia's difficult transition. I found Scott Shane's book to give a better understanding to the paradoxes existing today than did David Remnicks "Lenin's Toumb". Shane skillfully and accurately identified the power of informtion in the Soviet Union's collapse, the paradox being, the lack of coodinated information desemination in Russia today being a major barrier to reform.

Andrei is still pursuing Human Rights in Russia, and many others like him are vital to keeping the foundation of reform alive----that is a civil society with an appreciation of the importance of recognizing Human Rights of its citizens.

This book also has a great potential not in classes relating to Russia's current transition, but to Human Rights classe in general...The theoretical aspects are grounded into a practical reality for a reader of Shane's book.

To any reader,,,the importance of media in our modern society is underscored by this account. This book is an excellent gift to share with friends, It also allows readers to understand the importance of supporting reform in Russia

DISMANTLING UTOPIA

Scott Shane, an American educated journalist who also studied at Leningrad State University, was the Baltimore Sun's Russian speaking Moscow correspondent from 1988-1991. His book is the story of the Communist rulers of the USSR and their failure to comprehend the implications of the global telecommunications revolution. In trying to match the USA in military might, a feat presumed by many to be a foregone conclusion in 1980, the inhabitants of the politburo instead locked their country out of the global telecom revolution hastening the implosion of their already rotten and inefficient communist system. Shane weaves a fascinating tale of this unexpected transition, an event from which Hard Leftists of the world have yet to recover.

At the outset Shane tells of the banning of books, of the speech codes and of the virtual thought control so pervasive in the communist system. One can't help but compare it to the speech codes so popular today with the tenured radicals who run American universities. Moving right along Shane morphs into the early 80's when Gorbachev asked Andropov how much the USSR spent on defense? Andropov brushed him off. It was then that Gorbachev realized that nobody knew! This was a time when personal computers were 8 bit with 64K of RAM. Contrast this with the >10 gig PC hard drives of today, selling at a fraction of the cost of the 1980 PC. Contrast the decline of the Soviet economy with the rise of Americas' and you have the essence of this book.

As the Communist leviathan unraveled its shortage of hard currency became an untenable burden. They made more of everything than anyone else, but nobody wanted any of it. They couldn't feed their people and compete with American military might. Russia's decline can be paralleled with the fall in labor union membership in America where the only ascendant unions today are made up of government employees (hardly the laborers Marx had in mind when he encouraged workers to throw off their chains). The reason is that the global economy is moving away from industries that make things and move things and toward the development of intellectual capital and software.

As the plummeting of the Communist economy accelerated the phrase "Kogda ty znal - when did you know?" became a common one. "When did you know the accomplishments of the communist party were based on lies?" Information from smaller and smaller electronic units proved impossible for the Reds to block. The corrupt communist elite was on the ropes. Scott Shane describes this building pressure in Soviet society. Just as water pressure builds behind a dam after 40 days and 40 nights of rain, pressure built in Soviet society and when the dam finally broke, the apparatchiks were swept away and the party unity and organization did a face plant into the sidewalk of history.

An interesting vignette in the book occurs when the main apartment unit, in one of those dreary grey Soviet housing projects, plays a tape cassette of an American movie. Everyone is watching as all TV's in the building are hooked up to the same channel. The people watching are aghast, and not about the show. When they see a character in the sitcom open the refrigerator door and they see what is inside the refrigerator, they can't believe the varieties of food and furthermore are astounded that American consumers have cold beer. It's like the scene in the movie portrayal of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath where the Okies are going west in their cars. The Leftist screen writers in Hollywood were intent on making a statement about poverty in America, but when the movie was seen overseas the viewers were instead incredulous that America's poor had their own cars.

In Russia the fact that everyone in America seemed to have a car and excess living space was over the top. When Gorbachev's attempts at Socialism lite failed the end was in sight. Shane cataloges how the elite's could no longer get away with the Big lie as they had in the past. They were unequipped to deal with advances in telecommunications such as simple fax machines. Instead of keeping people in the dark while they were divided and conquered, the elites were exposed like the wizard of Oz when the curtain was pulled back. They were just like he, bumbling little old men with lots of bluster. They lost their will to bring in the Tanks, to continue their rule by terror. Thus ended a century of intellectual support for the socialist ideal that promised so much, but delivered so little. Shane tells this tale with sympathy and understanding. He brings to life the relief of the people from the 70-year yoke of the Communist party. As he makes clear, if governments could control prices and quantities of goods and services then Communism would have worked. But, that will never happen and under strict regimes such as those found in Soviet Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Communist China, etc. the result has too often led to Genocide and Gulags.

A well told tale of a fascinating event in history which caught 99.999% of intellectuals completely by surprise.

Author Scott Shane produced this work in those giddy post-Perestroika days, when the world was still aglow over the "promise of reform" led by the "Russian democrats" with Peoples' Hero Yeltsin at the helm. The halos have dimmed and rusted considerably then. But the book remains useful as a period example of American attitudes, presumptions, and arrogance.

It is, as one would expect, chock-full of cold war anti-communism whose cliched stereotypes not even familiarity with Russian languange and everday life seem to mellow - such as the Lubiyanka seving as the terror scene of the most sweeping violations of human rights in history, per Mr. Shane. Considering the butchery and barbarity perpetrated around the world since 1917 that statement is one of many fatuous remarks one must endure to get at the book's more solid accounting of the rise of the "information wars" of the USSR's last days.

Of course the old USSR survived as long as it did by isolating its people from contact not only with the outside world, but their own past; a topography where information flowed in underground streams often dangerous to the intruder. This, as much as physical coercion,underpinned its autocracy. The Second Revolution of 1991 occurred for the same reason as the First: Russia's sarcophagus was opened in a rush of fresh air, its mummified contents crumbling on contact. Yet those who *really* wanted to pursue and accept the risks - like Solzhenitsyn - could mine these depths even if forbidden to display their results. Contrast this with the shameful behavior of the Western "free press," that uncritically bazoos arrant government nonsense like Iraqi WMD, as brazenly as Pravda ever could have.

As one reviewer remarked, it was only natural for a journalist like Mr. Shane to emphasize (and perhaps overstate) the role of news, information, and IT to bring down the house. He was quite right in stating that information is a tool, which can be disseminated to deceive or enlighten, depending on the user's character. That said, it's obvious that the information assaults of Glasnost were political weapons of the reforming intelligentsia to openly batter the Kremlin's Soviet Orthodox ramparts. How much this actually resonated with the "little people" with whom Shane brushed shoulders was really any foreigner's guess, and at this point we see that the anti-establishment rhetoric of the time was little more than opportunism, now leaving a strong nostalgic residue for Paradise Lost.

The winners were not Andrei Mironov, who suffered the rigors of Soviet prison for the courage of his convictions. It was the insider fixers and connected black marketeers, whom Shane dispatches with a few brushoff remarks, who claimed the victory over the repressive totalitarian apparatus. One recalls the old proverb of the elephant giving birth to a mouse. At Mr. Scott's writing the gestation was still in process, and on it he projected all his cold war liberal hopes. It's not entirely his fault that his rose-colored glasses distorted his perceptions - as an average Westerner he really didn't have the background to perceive either his subject or himself.

When it sticks to the concrete facts of the Glasnost struggles his account is still informative. I'm reminded of Trotsky's writings on Russia's lag in historical development, how the latest foreign technology is imported whole and fostered on Russia's "backward" society, without any intermediate stages. This was the longterm cause of revolution in 1917, so the cycle Mr. Shane describes is nothing new either. I'm also reminded of Marx' allusions to the "heroic stage of the bourgeoisie" in fighting absolutism, only on victory to drop its ideals and stand exposed in all its crass materialism, craving for law and order and tradition to protect its new wealth, promoting aggressive nationalism to grab its share of the global economy.

Thus we see the hero Yeltsin quickly transformed into a power-grabbing drunk, ordering Russia's "free Parliament" shelled, depriving his opposition of media access, handing over the economy to oligarchs and the Russian state to Putin the KGB apparatchik. But even the United States has problems matching its rhetoric to reality. The American Bill of Rights has always connected badly to majority cultural trends (racism, fundamentalist Protestantism)and suffered expediency at the hands of those in power (the "War on Terror"). To expect Russia to rise higher than its mentor is not to dismantle Utopia, but to spin it.

In retrospect Gorbachev the Marxist-Leninist was a more sincere democrat than the anti-communist "reformers" over whom Western reporters like Mr. Shane waxed and gushed. The greatest post-cold war revelation to see light: that its presumptions were basically self-deluding nonsense on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Mr. Shane saw the beam in his neighbor's eye, inadvertantly recording the one in his own that blinded him.

Scott Shane does a good job of describing the collapse of the Soviet Union, mostly through the eyes of a few people he knew well. However, the book is rudimentary for anyone who has studied Russia, and if anyone is to choose one book it should be "Lenin's Tomb" by David Remnick.

He does add to the discussion about the fall by focusing on information, but it also seems a bit predictable that a journalist would emphasize the role journalism and information played in the collapse.