This review was submitted by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own content, please email AmerikanerContributions@proton.me
It is a self-reinforcing aspect of the fall of empires that the very idea of “collapse” becomes more fascinating to the public and their rulers. Right now, there are a lot of books about “collapse”, political and historical, predictive and descriptive, but Vladislav M. Zubok’s work “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” is still well worth the read.
The book is written by a Russian who lived through the heady last days of the Soviet Union, and was in fact one of the liberals who supported its dissolution and the supplanting of Boris Yeltsin and the Union with a democratic Russian Federation. Zubok writes with the benefit of hindsight and age, and he manages to tease out the reasons why the noble vision of the reformers, Russian and Soviet both, went so wrong, without being condemnatory of the solutions they tried, the dangers they feared, or the illusions they cherished.
“Collapse” is a valuable work for American readers in particular, rectifying some of the myths which have dominated the telling of this story in our country. Chief among the truths which come out from Zubok’s narrative is the fact that, by the end, no one in the ruling class of the Soviet Union believed in Communism. In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin’s primary argument was over whether there should be a new union of the republics of the Soviet Union, or a looser confederation, and at what pace the reforms proposed in the West should be pursued.
Even the generals who briefly seized power from Gorbachev in August of that year were not doctrinaire believers in Stalin and Marxism, so much as scared old men reacting to the rapid pace of change and hoping to pull their country back from the edge of the abyss which it was speeding towards. None of these three groupings and their supporters had any belief in the messianic vision of Marxism-Leninism, nor any confidence that the Soviet Union could maintain its influence in the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The only thing left to debate in foreign policy was the terms of surrender to the West.
That is another lesson to be learned from “Collapse”.
The years leading up to the end of the Soviet Union were a golden opportunity for America, because both of the power centers of the Soviet Union were hopelessly infatuated with the United States. Yeltsin hoped to emulate Pinochet’s Chile by importing a team of American economists, and Gorbachev eagerly signed away Soviet interests in military armaments and geopolitics for a pat on the head from George H.W. Bush and vague promises of enough money to keep the Soviet economy afloat (the kind words were much more forthcoming than the cash).
The intelligentsia which had been treated as the princes of Soviet life and culture were head over heels for the American concept of freedom which had been sold to them. The defenders of the Soviet system ended up being the ordinary people, who had been abused and exploited by the system, but at least it promised more stability than what came after. It was the artists and the professors, the pride and joy of the Soviet system, who had been showered with privileges and education, who were the most eager to rush headlong toward the West, caring little for how they would keep warm when the system they burned down was reduced to ashes.
The final myth that Zubok sheds light on in “Collapse” is the economic nature of the Soviet Union’s fall.
The much-ballyhooed military build-up of the Reagan era did not strain the Soviet economy to its breaking point, as is commonly asserted by conservative cheerleaders. In fact, Zubok shows that the Soviet military, along with its nuclear program, actually had a comparative advantage to the American system in terms of its efficiency at turning investments into results. The challenge, he explains, was getting the rest of the Soviet system to be as efficient as the military was. The real deathblow to the ailing Soviet economy was a series of banking reforms which produced runaway inflation, exacerbated shortages of goods for ordinary citizens, and led to lower tax revenues as businessmen and individual republics did everything they could to grab what they could before the house of cards came tumbling down.
I have written before about the uncomfortable comparisons between our currently teetering empire and the Soviet example, as have others. “Collpase” is a fascinating deep dive into the personalities and ideas which were swirling around at this time when it seemed like the end of history was within reach. The sharpest break between the American and the Soviet examples of imperial decline strikes me as being that the Soviets had an alternate model to look to for inspiration as they sought to rebuilt their new world.
By contrast, the Washington Empire has brutally enforced an orthodoxy on the world to an extent which would have made Metternich and Brezhnev blush. The Soviet reformers may have ultimately opted for a bad system, as evidenced by the sheer horrors of the 1990s in Russia, but it was one which had at least some arguments of feasibility. What comes next for America, I believe, is still waiting to be born, and that birth is likely to be a horrifically messy one. At least Yeltsin and Gorbachev were aware that the system they were in was failing. Both men, in their own ways, worked to pull back the curtain and align the regime and its beliefs with the lived facts of its subjects.
Our rulers, by contrast, are locked in a death grip with their monstrous ideology and show little signs of relinquishing any of their sacred totems. A radical challenge at home or abroad might be able to inspire some measure of change, and intra-elite competition may lead to alternate power brokers who are unafraid to criticize the failures of the current system, including its disenfranchisement, exploitation, and hatred towards Heritage Americans. But if the crop of “rising stars” in the Democratic and Republican Parties is any sign, something more radical will be needed than a mere turnover in generational leadership.
What let Yeltsin get away with so much in his open conflict with Gorbachev over the fate of the Soviet Union? Yeltsin was able to seize control of an alternate power center, the Russian Federation, and, despite its long dormant status, used the legal and political tools afforded to him by the Soviet constitution to destroy the federation from the inside out. The European Union still possesses alternate nodes of power which can be used against it, but the United States had long crushed the power of governors to use their states as any kind of rallying point against the federal government. Only recently are governors beginning to show more resistance, in Texas most prominently, but time will tell if there is enough of a state identity to provide a bulwark against federal power.
Otherwise, we will need to wait for the center to weaken further before we can be free.