Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (25 page)

Russia’s future also entails some kind of reintegration within its own potential NAFTA, the phantom CIS. As in the aftermath of the British and French colonial empires, or the aftermath of the Japanese and German wartime systems, Russia—given its size, capabilities, and energy resources—could be expected to maintain a position of diplomatic and economic strength in lands it used to rule. By world standards, that would not be a return to 194

idealism and treason

imperialism, but an expression of what is usually called the power of the market. But whether, in the meantime, the present world economy under US hegemony would go the way of the first—the late-nineteenth-century one under British imperial hegemony—remains to be seen.

No one knows the future, of course, but every histor-ian knows that the current conjuncture will change.

Nineteenth-century Britain, whose vast commercial and geopolitical empire was mind-boggling, had refused to tolerate the abrupt rise of German power on the continent, especially German ambitions to build a navy beginning in 1898. Sucking in all the great powers on either side of the Anglo-German rivalry, the First World War and its consequences, including fascism, Nazism, Soviet socialism, and the Great Depression, ended the first world economy and culminated in the Second World War, which brought even greater death and devastation. But that war also ushered in a second world economy with a new, and differently organized, commercial and geopolitical empire—the United States.
23

Only the Soviet Union, among the great powers, had been defiantly out of step with the changes wrought by the Second World War and the dominance of the basic US

model, but in 1991 the Soviet outlier came crashing down peacefully. This turn of events may have exposed, and even helped unloose, the instability inherent in the second world economy. Capitalism is an extremely dynamic source of endless creation, but also of destruction. Interconnections bring greater overall wealth but 195

idealism and treason

also heightened risks. And the US—bearing a titanic national security establishment not demobilized after the cold war, exhibiting a combustible mixture of arrogance and paranoia in response to perceived challenges to its global pretensions, and perversely disparaging of the very government institutions that provide its strength—makes for an additional wild card.

196

Notes

1. History’s cruel tricks
1 Daniel Yergin,
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and
Power
(New York, 1991), 588–673.

2 Geoffrey Tweedle,
Steel City: Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and
Technology in Sheffield, 1743–1993
(Oxford, 1995), 1–7.

3 Companies cut line workers at a far higher rate than costlier, better-paid managers. David M. Gordon,
Fat and Mean:
The Corporate Squeezing of America and the Myth of Managerial
‘Downsizing’
(New York, 1996).

4 Terry F. Buss and F. Stevens Redburn,
Shutdown at Youngs-town: Public Policy for Mass Unemployment
(Albany, NY, 1983), 4. See also John Strohmeyer,
Crisis in Bethlehem: Big Steel’s
Struggle to Survive
(Bethesda, MD, 1986), 11–14; Barry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison,
The Deindustrialization of
America
(New York, 1982); and Lloyd Rodwin and Hidehiko Sazanami (eds.),
Deindustrialization and Regional Economic
Transformation: The Experience of the United States
(Boston, 1989).

5 Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel,
The Second Industrial
Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity
(New York, 1984); Philip Cooke (ed.),
The Rise of the Rustbelt
(London, 1995).

6 Quoted in William E. Schmidt, ‘A Steel City Still Needs Help Despite Big Steel’s Comeback’,
New York Times
, 4 Sept.

1989. Another flagship of US Steel (now USX), the Home-stead Works, employed 20,000 workers in 1945, 9,000 in 197

notes

the 1970s, 3,500 in the early 1980s, and 23 the day the mill closed in July 1986. Immediately after the Second World War, about 40% of all wage-earners in the US had owed their livelihood directly or indirectly to the steel industry.

7 John Brant, ‘Unemployment: The Theme Park’,
New York
Times Magazine
, 28 Jan. 1996. On a similar coke-oven theme park in Germany, see Alan Cowell, ‘Old German Steel Plant Becoming a Tourist Site’,
New York Times
, 17 Dec. 1995.

Originally, the plans for Johnstown had called for creating a fully-fledged national park, with old-style pubs and restored company housing, to showcase a working-class community. That never happened.

8 Henry Kissinger,
Years of Upheaval
(Boston, 1982), 854.

9 Heinrich Hassmann,
Oil in the Soviet Union: History, Geography, Problems
(Princeton, 1953), 109; Robert W. Camp-bell,
Trends in the Soviet Oil and Gas Industry
(Baltimore and London, 1976).

10 Thane Gustafson,
Crisis amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet
Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev
(Princeton, 1989), 47.

11 Khrushchev is also recorded as having said, ‘There are people in the Soviet Union who would say that as long as Stalin was in command, everyone obeyed and there were no great shocks, but now [these new bastards] have come to power, Russia has suffered the defeat and loss of Hungary’

(Mark Kramer, ‘The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings’,
Journal of Contemporary History
, 33/2 (1998), 163–214 (at 173, 191).

12 Charles S. Maier,
Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the
End of East Germany
(Princeton, 1997); Roman Laba,
The
Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class
198

notes

Democratization
(Princeton, 1991); Martin Malia, ‘Poland: The Winter War’ and ‘Poland’s Eternal Return’,
New York
Review of Books
, 18 Mar. 1982 and 29 Sept.1983. See also Kazimierz Z. Poznan

śki,
Poland’s Protracted Transition: Institutional Change and Economic Growth 1970–1994
(New York, 1996). In the 1970s, Polish economists began to ponder how socialist planning, which presupposed autarky, could be carried out if Poland were to become more and more tied to the world economy. See the (accidentally) prescient work by Marian Ostrowski and Zbigniew Sadowski,
Wyzwania rozwojowe
(Warsaw, 1978).

13 Robert M. Gates,
From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story
of Five Presidents and how they Won the Cold War
(New York, 1996), 89; Nikolai Leonov,
Likholet’e
(Moscow, 1995), 164–5; Pavel Palazchenko,
My Years with Gorbachev and
Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter
(University Park, PA, 1997), 24.

14 Fred Halliday, ‘A Singular Collapse: The Soviet Union, Market Pressure and Inter-State Competition’,
Contention
, 1/2 (1992), 121–41.

15 Konstantin Simis,
USSR: The Corrupt Society: The Secret World
of Soviet Capitalism
(New York, 1982), 248.

16 William A. Clark,
Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom:
Combating Corruption in the Political Elite 1965–1990

(Armonk, NY, 1993); T. H. Rigby, ‘A Conceptual Approach to Authority, Power, and Policy in the Soviet Union’, in Rigby
et al
. (eds.),
Authority, Power, and Policy in the USSR:
Essays Dedicated to Leonard Schapiro
(London and Basing-stoke, 1983), 9–31.

199

notes

2. Reviving the dream

1 Peter Gornev [pseudonym], ‘The Life of a Soviet Soldier’, in Louis Fischer (ed.),
Thirteen Who Fled
(New York, 1949), 39. On the process of Soviet defection, including the centrality of knowledge of the outside world, see Jay Bergman, ‘The Memoirs of Soviet Defectors: Are They a Reliable Source about the Soviet Union?’,
Canadian Slavonic Papers
, 31/1 (1989), 1–24.

2 Richard Crossman (ed.),
The God that Failed
(New York, 1950), which contains the stories of six prominent Communist apostates, including the editor of the anthology with Gornev’s story. Many former Communists did indeed become anti-Communists on the right. But there was another path, the path traced by Mikhail Gorbachev and millions of others, as my narrative develops.

3 Elena Zubkova,
Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and
Disappointments, 1945–1957
(Armonk, NY, 1998), 91–2.

4 Mikhail Gorbachev,
Memoirs
(New York, 1996), 60. See also Archie Brown,
The Gorbachev Factor
(New York, 1996). On the Stavropol days, see the exposé by Boris Kuchmaev,
Otverzhennyi s bozh’ei otmetinoi: Tainoe i iavnoe v zhizni Mikhaila
Gorbacheva
, 2nd edn. (Stavropol, 1992); and the bitter reminiscences of Anatolii A. Korobeinikov,
Gorbachev:
Drugoe litso
(Moscow, 1996).

5 Nikolai Leonov,
Likholet’e
(Moscow, 1995), 47–55. Leonov describes being swept off his feet by meeting Raul Castro and Che Guevarra. Oleg Kalugin, another young KGB

officer, who went as an exchange student to Columbia University in 1958, recalls romantic reactions to the Khrushchev era and sincere party beliefs, which were also very close to Gorbachev’s. Kalugin with Fen Montaigne,
The First
200

notes

Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the
West
(New York, 1994).

6 The blueprint for a Communist future resembled a much-expanded welfare state. Sergei Strumilin, ‘Mir cherez 20

let’,
Kommunist
, 13 (1961), 25–36. A transition to Communism was first announced in 1947–8, but quickly dropped. Zubkova,
Russia after the War
, 141.

7 Gorbachev,
Memoirs
, 102.

8 Valery Boldin,
Ten Years that Shook the World: The Gorbachev
Era as Witnessed by his Chief of Staff
(New York, 1994), 175–6.

Gorbachev graciously writes (
Memoirs
, 97) that Kulakov, an important patron, died of heart failure, the officially reported cause of death (
Pravda
, 18 July 1978). The other leading contender to replace Kulakov, Sergei Medunov of agricultural Krasnodar, had known Brezhnev since the war, but was tarnished by corruption charges leaked by Andropov’s KGB. Arkady Vaksberg,
The Soviet Mafia: A Shocking
Exposé
(New York, 1991). On Kulakov see Zhores A.

Medvedev,
Gorbachev
(New York, 1986), 76–7, 87–93, and Seweryn Bialer,
Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and
Change in the Soviet Union
(New York, 1980), 76–7.

9 Public abandonment of the ‘final transition’ came only in February 1981, after much gnashing of teeth over ‘depriv-ing’ the Soviet people of the possibility of achieving Communism. Vadim Pechenev,
Gorbachev: K vershinam vlasti
(Moscow, 1991) 21, 48.

10 Donna Bahry, ‘Society Transformed? Rethinking the Social Roots of Perestroika’,
Slavic Review
, 52/3 (1993), 512–14.

11 Filipp Bobkov,
KGB i vlast’
(Moscow, 1995), 242.

12 Dmitri Volkogonov,
Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders
who Built the Soviet Regime
(New York, 1998), 313–15; 201

notes

Mikhail Dokuchaev,
Moskova. Kreml’. Okhrana
(Moscow, 1995), 102. In ten years under Khrushchev, there were eleven uprisings involving 300 or more people, and during the eighteen years of Brezhnev’s rule only nine more, mostly over price hikes, living conditions, or ethnic grievances. The authorities repressed ‘ringleaders’, enforced news blackouts, and held pre-emptory conversations with anyone aware of the events. Vladimir A. Kozlov,
Massovye
besporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953—nachalo
1980-x gg.)
(Novosibirsk, 1999); ‘O massovykh besporiad-kakh c 1957 goda’,
Istochnik
, 6 (1995),146–53.

13 Ludmilla Alexeyeva,
Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements
for National, Religious, and Human Rights
(Middletown, CT, 1985), 449.

14 Yitzhak M. Brudny,
Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism
and the Soviet State 1953–1991
(Cambridge, MA, 1998).

15 Evgenii Chazov,
Zdorov’e i vlast’: Vospominaniia ‘Kremlevskogo
vracha’
(Moscow, 1992), 80, 115, 127–8. Mark Kramer, ‘The Czechoslovak Crisis and the Brezhnev Doctrine’, in Carole Fink
et al
. (eds.),
1968: The World Transformed
(Washington and New York, 1998), 111–71; R. G. Pikhoia, ‘Chekhoslovakiia, 1968 god. Vzgliad iz Moskvy po doku-mentam TsK KPSS’,
Novaia i noveishaia istoriia
, 6 (1994), 8–20; 1 (1995), 34–48.

16 Vladimir Kriuchkov,
Lichnoe delo
(Moscow, 1996), i. 97–8; Luba Brezhneva,
The World I Left Behind: Pieces of a Past
(New York, 1995), 363. See also Chazov,
Zdorov’e
, 139–48.

17 Stanislav Shatalin, ‘500 dnei i drugie dni moei zhizhni’,
Nezavisimaia gazeta
, 31 Mar. and 2 Apr. 1992; N. K.

Baibakov,
Sorok let v pravitel’stve
(Moscow, 1993), 126–33.

18 Georgi Arbatov,
The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics
202

notes

(New York, 1992), 259. On Andropov’s high opinion of Gorbachev in 1977–8 as a ‘convinced, consistent, and bold Communist’ and ‘a party organizer from the soil’, see the testimony of a then-high-ranking KGB officer Viacheslav Kevorkov,
Tainyi kanal
(Moscow, 1997), 208–9. See also Chazov,
Zdorov’e
, 195.

19 Yegor Ligachev,
Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin
(New York, 1993), 24.

20 Leonov,
Likholet’e
, 136, 175. See also S. F. Akhromeev and G. M. Kornienko,
Glazami marshala i diplomata: Kriticheskii
vzgliad na vneshniuiu politiku SSSR do i posle 1985 goda
(Moscow, 1992), 312.

21 Gorbachev,
Memoirs
, 164; Boldin,
Ten Years
, 60; Chazov,
Zdorov’e
, 212. The purported minutes of the politburo meetings, published in
Istochnik
, (1993), 0: 66–75, are an edited composite of the two sessions (10 Mar. and 11 Mar.).