Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

by Vladislav M. Zubok

Scholars who studied the Soviet economy concluded that the Soviet economic system was destroyed not by its structural faults, but by Gorbachev-era reforms. The purposeful as well as unintended destruction of the Soviet economy, along with its finances, may be considered the best candidate as a principal cause of Soviet disintegration.

Many threads in the analysis of the Soviet collapse overlapped and created a widespread feeling of doom—with the result that ultimately the event became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet for a historian, this collapse presents a puzzle that does not quite click together. This puzzle became the main subject of this book. Gorbachev lies at the center of this puzzle.

It was a deliberate choice of a new vision to replace the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and Soviet geopolitical power. As such, it was probably the most ambitious example of ideological thinking in foreign affairs since Woodrow Wilson had declared his Fourteen Points at the end of World War I. It was this vision that made Gorbachev, and not Ronald Reagan or other Western leaders, a truly key actor in ending the Cold War.

Yeltsin had spent years battling with lack of food supplies in his Sverdlovsk region. His greatest achievement had been to establish a system of poultry farms near Sverdlovsk that supplemented the meagre diet of workers in the industrial plants and factories. Randalls supermarket amazed him. This was an average place where the poorest American could buy what even the top Soviet nomenklatura could not back home.

“I want to say to you and the United States,” Gorbachev said solemnly, “that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war. The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.” For the Soviet leader, this was a fundamental statement, a foundation for all future negotiations, but Shevardnadze and Chernyaev noted that Bush did not react. The Soviet offer was a hand extended, but without a handshake.