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The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire

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Without sentiment or any sense of loss, David Pryce-Jones chronicles the fall of European communism through a journalist's eye and the eyewitness accounts of the rulers, dissidents and apparatchiks who were there.

This is a powerful book, for it harbors no illusions that the Soviet Union was any kind of "workers' state" or that communism, as an ideal or a practicality, had any legitimacy as a form of government.

In Pryce-Jones' analysis, if anything caused communism's downfall, it was the misplaced reasoning that a regime built on fear, terror and corruption could stand up to glasnost and perestroika. By their own admission in the book, most of the nomenklatura in Russia and its Eastern European satellites understood this. Mikhail Gorbachev, in an attempt to reform the system, exposed its basic illegitimacy and brought it crashing down.

With the former Communist bloc now open to greater investigation into its history, Pryce-Jones' book provides a great deal of illumination into Kremlin and Warsaw Pact politics during the late 1980s. For instance, while Gorbachev was being courted by the West, he was being reviled as a traitor by his own cabinet and allies. One of the more tantalizing questions Pryce-Jones leaves unresolved is whether Gorbachev indeed knew the consequences of perestroika would be the break-up of the USSR and the end of its occupation of Eastern Europe. The author interviews participants in the failed August 1991 coup, which essentially ended Communist Party rule in Russia, who openly wonder if Gorbachev instigated it as a calculated risk to flush out any remaining hard-line opposition.

Parts of the book read like a political thriller. As the gradual revolution in Eastern Europe and the Baltics takes hold, Pryce-Jones' sources take us into Round Table meetings and back room conferences where, quite literally, the fates of nations were being decided. The author compares the way popular resistance grew in the wake of Gorbachev's reforms and-in telling detail-shows! that Gorbachev essentially disallowed the use of Soviet forces to sustain control in any of the satellites. Only in Romania did the tanks roll, and that proved disasterous in the end as Ceaucescu became the only Communist ruler to be executed.

More pointedly, we get the inside stories of how leaders aging leaders like Poland's General Jaruzelski and East Germany's Honecker. in the end, lacked the will to enforce their rule through armed repression. Some of the most exciting material concerns the last days before the Berlin Wall fell, where we see Honecker fuming over Gorbachev's refusal to order Hungary to close its border-through which thousands of East Germans were escaping, and the growing tension over the Leipzig "prayer meetings," which had become weekly mass demonstrations against the government.

Throughout his reporting, Pryce-Jones is not afraid to make judgments. One of his sharpest is against the American and Western European Intellectual Left, which he views as doing much to perpetuate the belief that Communism was as legitimate a political system as democracy and that the Cold War was little more than a face-off between two superpowers that, at the bottom line, were essentially the same. His heroes, on the other hand, are Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the dissidents in Russia, the Baltics and all of Eastern Europe, and the long line of West German chancellors who resisted domestic and international pressure to withdraw from NATO, a long-term strategic objective of the Kremlin.

It is too bad that right now, "The Strange Death of the Soviet Union" is out of print. One would hope that it is still available from the U.K. It is an invaluable contribution to history and deserves reading by anyone interested in learning the kitchen details about how communism fell.

The commonly accepted theory for the disintegration of the USSR is that Ronald Reagan brilliantly increased American military spending, knowing that the Soviets would match the American effort, and drive themselves into bankruptcy. This book decisively rebuts that claim.

The author interviewed former members of the Politburos and Central Committees of most of the Soviet Socialist Republics, to learn what happened at the top levels in the last weeks and hours of communist rule. In virtually every case, the top man asked the Red Army to put down a local, anti-communist uprising, and Gorbachev refused. While many of the SSRs were "third world" countries, and economically weak, economics had nothing to do with the downfall of even one of them.

Price-Jones seems less interested in telling the history of the demise of the USSR than he is in attacking the left. He spends the first chunk of the book talking about how evil communism was, which is not debatable. However, Price-Jones' target is not the Soviets; it's Western liberals who did not share his views on confrontation with them. The author attacks those who tried to promote coexistence as unwitting stooges or active collaborators with the Soviet regime. That's not the kind of book I expected from the title. I kept reading, waiting for the history to start, but I gave up after more than 80 pages of Price-Jones' ranting.