Explaining the Soviet Collapse Peter Rutland Transitions What will the final verdict be on the fall of the Soviet Union, and which figures of its post-communist transformation will future historians treat most favorably? The jury is still out, but the books reviewed here lay some interesting foundations The Soviet empire does not yet have an Edward Gibbon to track its decline and fall. A little more than six years after its collapse, it is too early to expect a definite overview, but it is time enough to try to establish what we know, and what we do not know, about the disintegration of the largest-and last-empire of the 20th century. Historical events can be divided into two groups: those about which we know (or think we know) why they happened; and those about which there is still fundamental disagreement. There is broad consensus over the reasons for the collapse of the British empire, for example, or on the fatal sequence of events that led Japan and America to war in 1941. Disagreements are often sharpest when it comes to attributing responsibility to individual leaders. Recent books by Daniel Goldhagen and John Lukacs, for example, have reignited the debate over the argument that it was Hitler's insanity and not deeper forces in German society that caused the Holocaust and the suicidal attack on the Soviet Union. Much of the debate over Soviet history still revolves around personalities. Arguments over the role of Lenin in the 1917 revolution gave way about 15 years ago to the "revisionist" attack on the totalitarian model, instead arguing that the Stalinist regime had deep roots in Russian society and was not simply the product of Stalin's paranoia. Similarly, in the case of the Soviet collapse we find that the argument gets most heated when it comes to handing out praise and blame for the leading figures of the drama-Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Historians and political scientists have not yet had time to forge a consensus on why and how the Soviet Union collapsed. Most of the volumes published so far by academics and journalists confine themselves to establishing a chronology of events and sketching out the general background causes. Two of the books reviewed here-those by Archie Brown and Jerry F. Hough-represent the most serious and thorough efforts to analyze the collapse by the two leading Sovietologists on each side of the Atlantic. (Brown is a professor at Oxford; Hough teaches at Duke and is a fellow at the Brookings Institution.) WHAT DO WE KNOW? Although there is no agreed story on why the Soviet Union collapsed, there is a surprisingly large number of aspects about which observers do agree. Most concur that the Soviet Union was a failed experiment, which had long ago lost its viability as an alternative model to Western capitalism. The only people who still believed in the Soviet model at the time of its demise were those (such as Andean guerrillas or South Korean leftist students) ignorant of how the Soviet system functioned. Nobody really expresses surprise that the Soviet system collapsed. What is puzzling is that it collapsed so quickly, in the space of two to five years, and that it collapsed when it did, in 1991, and not in 1933, 1953, or 2003. The fundamentally flawed nature of the Soviet system means that it had multiple weaknesses, any of which could have caused or contributed to its collapse. It is as if Hercule Poirot was given a case in which the victim had been poisoned, shot, bludgeoned, drowned, and frozen by different persons at different times. (Such was the unfortunate fate of Grigorii Rasputin, but in his case the various methods were serially applied by a known group of assassins.) Factors in the Soviet collapse include military, economic, and political dimensions, and can be grouped into long-term and proximate causes. In reality, despite the vituperation of some of their exchanges, Sovietologists do not substantially disagree about the factual record of what happened. The disagreement lies in the relative weight placed on them in explaining the Soviet collapse, particularly when it comes to the personal role of the top leadership. Historically, most empires collapse due to defeat in war, and the Soviet Union was no exception. Its troops were defeated on the ground in Afghanistan (withdrawing in 1989), but more seriously its military-industrial complex was defeated in the Cold War arms race. The Star Wars program, begun as a "scam" to bring the Soviets to the negotiating table, worked even better than expected, since Ronald Reagan sincerely believed it might work. The Soviet military knew that their economy could not afford to create a new generation of weapons, and opted for compromise-paving the way for arms reductions and, more importantly, eventual withdrawal from Eastern Europe. The fact that the military had already given up on winning the Cold War meant that they did not go to the mat to maintain the Soviet hold over the East that no longer had strategic value. Nobody denies that Star Wars gave the Soviet leaders a fright and helped tip the balance in favor of reform. The disagreement comes when one raises some counter-issues. For example: could Gorbachev's conservative rivals in the Politburo have negotiated military downsizing without triggering the Soviet collapse? On the economic front, the consensus has shifted since 1991. At first glance, most observers, noting the mounting shortages and runaway inflation of 1989­1991, are inclined to believe that economic inefficiency was the smoking gun that killed the Soviet system. Work by Vladimir Kontorovich and Michael Ellman, however, has shown that although the Soviet economy entered a period of flat growth in the early 1980s, there are no grounds for believing that the economy could not have stumbled on for many more years. They argue that it was the half-hearted reform program launched by Gorbachev after 1985 that disrupted the creaky functioning of the planned economy and triggered the dire economic conditions that led to the collapse. No one has come forward with any serious analysis to challenge the Kontorovich-Ellman view that the Soviet economy was still good for a few more decades (had Yuri Andropov's kidney not given out on him). Few scholars see social mobilization as a decisive cause in the Soviet collapse. In Russia there was no social revolution in 1991, on a par say with the revolutions of 1789 and 1917, or Iran in 1979. Mass mobilization was largely limited to Moscow and other major cities and was of short duration. The "democratic movement" did not produce a lasting political organization (such as Poland's Solidarity trade union). American scholars rushed to Russia after 1991 to find and document the rise of civil society, on the assumption that the emergence of grass-roots organizations had played a vital role in the collapse. They came back largely empty-handed, and the work they produced documents the frustrations and limitations of civil society in Russia. On the ideology front, glasnost and democratization revealed that the ideological underpinnings of Soviet socialism had eroded, such that a vocal democratic minority was able to win a foothold in the elections of 1989 and 1990 and propel the reformer Boris Yeltsin to the Russian presidency in June 1991. The strength of communist and nationalist candidates in post-1991 elections suggests that pro-Soviet values continue to hold sway in at least one-third of the population. The social divisions are usually explained in generational terms, with the young opting for perestroika and democracy and the old remaining nostalgic for the past. It is not clear, however, how much direct causal power one can attribute to this process of ideological erosion, since it began back in the 1960s or even the 1950s. No one would disagree with the belief that ethnicity was a crucial factor. If the Soviet Union had been as ethnically homogeneous as China, it would probably still be in business. Of the 140 million non-ethnic Russians (48 percent of the Soviet population), mass ethnic movements were largely confined to the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and western Ukraine, encompassing perhaps 10 percent of the Soviet population. Such conflicts could in principle have been "managed," as demonstrated by the actions of India in Kashmir, Turkey in Kurdistan, and Britain in Northern Ireland. Clearly, the ethnic mobilization in Lithuania and Armenia put Gorbachev on the spot and exposed the risks of democratization in a multiethnic society. But ethnicity played a decisive role not so much to mobilize the oppressed masses as in providing a power structure for disaffected elites. The Soviet state was structured around 15 ethnically designated republics. After the elections of 1990, Boris Yeltsin was able to use the Russian Republic as a power base in his struggle with Gorbachev, and all the other republican leaders followed suit, pulling the rug out from the all-union state in the wake of the August 1991 coup. THE HUMAN FACTOR The military, economic, social, and ethnic factors are important parts of the causal chain that led to the Soviet collapse. Individually, they may be seen as necessary but not sufficient factors in explaining the empire's demise. Those structural elements only came into play through the prism of human agency. Any objective historical account must recognize that political leaders had choices between 1985 and 1991, that they were not mere froth on the tide of human history. Beyond that, one must also acknowledge that there is an unfortunate preference among readers and authors to interpret history as a struggle between individuals. A glance at any book-club catalogue will confirm that biography is the most popular form of history. Perhaps it is comforting for us to believe that leaders (good and evil, smart and stupid) determine historical outcomes. Perhaps it is easiest to comprehend history if we map it onto the fate of an individual person. Either way, the most heated controversies in the Soviet collapse debate revolve around the characters of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Archie Brown argues in his political biography of Gorbachev that he "has strong claims to be regarded ... as the individual who made the most profound impact on world history in the second half of the twentieth century," since, according to Olga Chaykovskaya, he inherited "a moribund, slavish country and made it alive and free." Gorbachev was a determined reformer and a skillful politician who seized the moment to press ahead with liberalization in the face of fierce opposition from party conservatives. Brown argues that it is important to closely study Gorbachev's thinking, and its evolution over time, in order to understand what happened. Without Gorbachev, change would have been slower and more violent. Gorbachev may have mismanaged economic reform and been slow to respond to the nationalist challenge, but he stayed the course, and no other leader could have done a better job of dealing with those "intractable problems." It is indeed hard to imagine any other leader willingly relinquishing Soviet control over Eastern Europe as smoothly as did Gorbachev, thanks to his rapport with Western leaders and his willingness to trade in the old empire in exchange for Western support for his reform efforts. One must agree with Brown that "The key to change in Eastern Europe was Gorbachev's decision in principle to abandon Soviet foreign military interventions." The fact that Gorbachev thought he was saving the Soviet system but instead brought about its downfall is just another of those ironies of history that have dogged Russia this century. Everybody-from Yeltsin to Gorbachev's aides-recognizes perestroika as "a revolution from above." For Brown, the revolution was made by Gorbachev and not by the nomenklatura. Gorbachev used the powers vested in him as general secretary, plus new powers that he fashioned for himself (such as international support) to press ahead with reform that in many ways went against the interests of the nomenklatura. He alone (together with his small circle of advisers) deserves credit for the revolution in foreign policy and the abandonment of repression and censorship as instruments of rule. Only in the face of stiff opposition from the party and ministerial elite was Gorbachev able to move ahead with limited market reform. He came to see the need for radical political reform in order to overcome the "70 percent of the ... Central Committee [who] are against me and hate me." Gorbachev emerges from the pages of Brown's book as a sort of kamikaze politician, who used his powers as general secretary to undermine the very system that created him. Gorbachev described himself as "a product of that very nomenklatura and at the same time its anti-product, its 'gravedigger,' so to speak." Although Brown argues that Gorbachev had broad popular support until 1990, he does not suggest that there were any organized social or political groups with whom Gorbachev struck alliances. Brown's political model boils down to three elements: leader, bureacracy, and people. In contrast to Hough, he makes almost no use of generational arguments, that Gorbachev represented a new, post-Stalin generation of political leaders. Yeltsin's role is downplayed in Brown's narrative, since "Yeltsin had moved into a political space created by Gorbachev and but for Gorbachev's reforms would have remained a little-known Communist Party official in the Urals." WHERE WAS THE NOMENKLATURA? For Brown then, the Soviet collapse was the triumph of Gorbachev against the interests of the nomenklatura. That interpretation is being challenged by a growing literature, which argues that the Soviet Union fell because the elites who ran it decided that they could have a better life if they ditched the monster that Stalin had created and switched over to market capitalism. This has been a consistent theme in the works of Russian New Left dissident Boris Kagarlitsky. He attacked perestroika from the very beginning, arguing that it was a halfway house through which the embattled elite hoped to preserve their grip on power. In dispatches from the front every couple of years, Kagarlitsky has sketched the process by which the Soviet nomenklatura came to know and eventually accept market democracy. He argues that this process can be traced back to the 1950s, with successive efforts at partial reform and marketization. However, Kagarlitsky's works do not address Brown's point: that the nomenklatura seemed to put up a fierce resistance to reform. Kagarlitsky's main argument is that whatever is happening in Russia, it is not a social revolution serving the interests of the population at large. That may indeed be true, but such an approach leaves open a broad range of alternative explanations. In Revolution from Above, an economist (David M. Kotz) and a journalist (Fred Weir) try to put some analytical flesh on the bones of the Kagarlitsky thesis. They argue that as the system started to collapse in the wake of Gorbachev's reforms, the party-state elite realized that it was time to abandon the sinking ship of state socialism and launch the lifeboats for market capitalism. Most of the elite survived the voyage: it was the steerage-class passengers who went down with the vessel. Kotz and Weir do not suggest that the restoration of capitalism was the result of a dark conspiracy. Rather, it was an opportunistic response to changing conditions by an elite who read the writing on the wall. Hence for Kotz and Weir the key decisions came not in 1985­1988, but in 1990­1991, when re-gional elites decided to switch their loyalties from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. That defection from Soviet to republican institutions (above all, the decision by companies to switch their tax payments from Soviet to republican institutions) brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the launch of shock therapy in January 1992, opening the capitalist era. There followed the rapid and highly corrupt privatization program that passed control of the bulk of Russia's economic assets from the state into the hands of the managerial class. Kotz and Weir make an interesting, clearly stated argument. It is even probably true, although one cannot tell conclusively from their book, since it lacks the research necessary to prove such a case. To an extent, their argument is driven from hindsight; by identifying the beneficiaries of the transition, the implication is that they caused those events to occur. Kotz and Weir are careful to argue that the capitalist restoration was a relatively spontaneous and unexpected process. But by using the term "pro-capitalist coalition," they are implying that such a coalition existed and that it operated as a unified political actor. The introduction of capitalism in 1992 was probably more by accident than design. The fact that "Russia has been the scene of unrelenting political conflict" since 1991 suggests that a coherent political elite has not, in fact, been steering the process. The capitalist-restoration thesis is also somewhat undercut by the authors' apparent belief that capitalism cannot work in Russia's present conditions and will most likely degenerate into an increasingly authoritarian regime. MIDDLE-CLASS REVOLUTION Jerry F. Hough's thorough and balanced account of de-velopments between 1985 and 1991 provides some ammunition for the idea of a nomenklatura-led re-volution. Hough portrays the events of 1990­1991 as a middle-class revolution in which the middle layers of Soviet society threw off state socialism and embraced market reform. This process reflects the culmination of decades of development in the course of which an educated, urban society emerged in the Soviet Union, increasingly out of synch with its state-socialist political and economic system. However, that does not mean the masses were politically mobilized in 1990­1991; rather, events were driven by an intra-elite struggle. In contrast to Brown's somewhat "Gorbocentric" account, Hough gives equal weight to Yeltsin's political actions in bringing about the Soviet collapse, and credits him with "political genius" for seeing that the Soviet state could be cracked open along republican lines. Hough candidly admits that he has changed some of his earlier views in the light of the way events unfolded. He no longer portrays Gorbachev as the master politician, skillfully balancing left and right and in control of the situation to the very end. On the other hand, Hough still underlines the radical nature of Gorbachev's economic program, and provocatively suggests that Yeltsin, in launching shock therapy, was in fact completing Gorbachev's reform agenda. Gorbachev delayed price reform and instead in 1988 switched his attention to political reform. While Brown lauds Gorbachev's commitment to democracy, Hough criticizes Gorbachev for treating the state apparatus as an enemy of reform and trying to use democratization to undermine them. That prevented Gorbachev from introducing a Chinese-style managed reform and left observers "puzzled" as to why he did not use his powers to launch an authoritarian crackdown. Gorbachev "was not riding an uncontrollable tiger." He had options but failed to use them, partly because he lacked the models to deal with economic and ethnic reform, and partly because he was outmaneuvered by Yeltsin. While Brown praises Gorbachev for embracing liberalism, Hough describes his shift in attitude in terms of "losing faith" in socialism. Hough credits Gorbachev with introducing "new thinking" in foreign policy but cautions that events in Eastern Europe swiftly spiraled beyond his control. For example, Gorbachev's foreign-press secretary, Gennadii Gerasimov, has suggested that Gorbachev only approved competitive elections in that region on the assumption that reform communists would win. Hough's book includes an analysis of macrosociological trends and a discussion of the various elections, together with Kremlinological-style investigation of top decision-makers. It has a thorough discussion of the policy debates over economic reform and Soviet federalism and the political end-game between August and December 1991. Apart from a few pages of biographical information, it does not include a detailed study of the role of regional elites, one that would sustain (or refute) the Weir-Kotz version of a nomenklatura-led reform. To a degree Hough implicitly shares the Brown approach, that power was highly centralized and the key activity was that played out in the corridors of the Kremlin. Had Gorbachev been more adept, he could still have won the game. Overall, Hough paints a picture of mounting chaos, confusion, and uncertainty about the future course of events. He underlines that it was an open-ended process that could have turned out quite differently. He portrays overloaded leaders whose capacity to steer policy was swamped by the multiple and complex forces which had been unleashed. He suggests that from 1990 Gorbachev became increasingly "tired and depressed and [his mind] may essentially [have] shut down for a while." Yeltsin's political instincts enabled him to gather power in his own hands while Gorbachev dithered. Hough finds it difficult to explain Gorbachev's ultimately self-destructive behavior in the period before the August coup. He suggests he may have been suffering from exhaustion and clinical depression. On the crucial question of the possible viability of a reformed Soviet state, Brown argues that "Gorbachev's efforts to maintain a union on the basis of a transformed federation were not necessarily misplaced." Hough in contrast argues that "Gorbachev accelerated the disintegration by the bizarre manner in which he tried to negotiate a more democratic federation." For Brown, the Gor-bachev years are a triumph, during which a great reformer frees Russia from its history of oppression. For Hough, they are a tragedy of missed opportunities and a shattered state. Perhaps a few decades hence, historians will look back on the capitalist revolution in Russia as the logical and inevitable conclusion to the failed Soviet experiment. If the history of the 1917 revolution is anything to go by, the credit will go not to those who brought about the collapse of the old system, but to those who laid the foundations of the new era. Although in objective terms Gorbachev may deserve the lion's share of the kudos for the Soviet collapse, the future may well belong to Yeltsin. A November 1996 poll revealed that 52 percent of Russians now believe that "the mafia" runs their country. Organized criminal gangs are virtually absent from the pages of the books reviewed here (except for a few pages in Kotz and Weir). The rise of the mafia reminds us that those who sow change are not always the ones who reap the rewards. Not that Gorbachev came away empty-handed. Besides acclaim as the most influential politician of the 20th century, he has his $1 million endorsement contract from Pizza Hut. He will use the funds to maintain the Gorbachev Foundation. One hopes that the scholars working there will write a sympathetic history. Peter Rutland is an associate professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut. From 1995 to 1997, he was on leave as assistant director of research at the Open Media Research Institute.