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Audible book:
I love this book, and I’ve already ordered Zubok’s “Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War”,
First, Zubok is a Russian, born and educated in Moscow, so the book is clearly written, both by his acknowledged design, and his perspective, from that point of view. This is not an apologia or an attack on the Soviet Union’s adversaries, but he deals with external events and factors based upon their impact on the thinking of Soviet leadership, and their resulting actions. He more or less steps around the “human rights” issues, instead focusing on how they impacted internal thinking, particularly the Czechoslovakian revolt which undercut the intellectual renaissance that occurred under Khrushchev, and dramatically impacted Gorbachev.
Zubok has four main points in the book:
1. The belief in socialism was real, perhaps not Stalin, but for the leadership before and after, and many more, it was a driving force; they did believe they were doing something special, developing a alternative to Capitalism/Westernism not just to modernize the Soviet Union, but the post-colonial world as well.
2. World War II was the searing experience that changed everything, Stalin included. The need for a buffer against Germany was as important, if not more important, than ideology in holding on to Eastern Europe, leading to the East/West conflict.
3. The American / Western strategy of containment fed the xenophobia unleashed by World War II. Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev all seemed to let disarmament slip away, sometimes their mistakes, and sometimes things they could not control like Watergate and the demise of Détente. Exhausting their country in the Arms Race.
4. In the end, the Soviet Union was not defeated, “it committed suicide.”
The final point is perhaps most interesting, and it displays the current Russian, and the author’s, ambivalence about Gorbachev, and loss of the empire. What mattered in the end was the decline of the ideology on which the empire was built. Despite the colossal military power, with the erosion faith, people were not prepared to support a system they no longer believed in. One December 8th, 1991, in a hunting lodge, Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and the Ukraine, disbanded the Soviet Union.
It’s an interesting perspective as presidential candidates tell us our system is rigged?
- File Size: 2637 KB
- Print Length: 500 pages
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press; 2 edition (February 1, 2009)
- Publication Date: February 1, 2009
- Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0807899054
- ISBN-13: 978-0807899052
- ASIN: B007X5UENI
- Text-to-Speech:
Enabled
- Word Wise: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #304,435 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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