Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

by Vladislav M. Zubok

I had begun working as a Russian aide for the journalist Strobe Talbott and historian Michael Beschloss, who were writing a book about the end of the Cold War.

The Soviet economic crisis played a central and often underestimated role in the last three years of Soviet history. In conjunction with revelations of past communist crimes, it contributed to mass discontent and mobilization against the central authority.

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.6 This book is the first study of the Soviet collapse that pays closest attention to the economic and financial factors within a larger historical narrative.

William Taubman, in his excellent biography of Gorbachev, finds faults in his hero, yet also refuses to call his reforms a failure. On the contrary, Taubman believes that Gorbachev “laid the groundwork for democracy” in the Soviet Union. “It is more the fault of the raw material that he worked with than

of his own shortcomings and mistakes that Russian democracy will take much longer to build than he thought.”11 A leading Cold War historian, Odd Arne Westad, seems to agree. “The final drama of the Cold War became a purely Soviet tragedy,” he concludes. Gorbachev could have preserved the country by force, but he “would rather see the union disappear . . .”

My book is not an exercise in “how the evil empire could have been preserved.” Rather it is an attempt to be intellectually honest about what happened. History is never a sequence of inevitabilities, and the Soviet demise was no exception: it was full of contingencies. Unpredictability and uncertainty are fundamental features of human, state, and world affairs. Social movements and ideological currents are not rational, and political wills propel history in unexpected directions. Finally, there are accidents that have huge consequences. This last point resonated with me especially as I was finishing this book during the pandemic.

In this book, I try to break free from the straitjacket of the dominant narrative that the Soviet collapse was inevitable—the

The idea of renovating the Soviet Union originated not with Mikhail Gorbachev, but with his mentor Yuri Andropov. For years after the Soviet collapse, many said wistfully: “If only Andropov had lived longer.” They meant that under his leadership the country could have been reformed yet be held together. In fact, Andropov made the idea of renovation possible and left his heir apparent Gorbachev with the task of promoting it.

The problem was the growing Soviet engagement with the global economy and its own finances. The Soviet balance of trade depended entirely on high oil prices.

Andropov’s main contribution to Soviet reforms was the team of people and academics he had brought into the Politburo and the Soviet government. It took them a further two years to launch the reforms he had initiated. The key man whom the ex-KGB reformer had groomed to continue his policies was Mikhail Gorbachev.

William Taubman, the prize-winning American author of Gorbachev’s authorized biography, begins his account with the phrase: “Gorbachev is hard to understand.” Taubman concluded that Gorbachev was a unique “tragic hero” who attempted to change Russia, laid “the groundwork for democracy,” but predictably failed in constructing a new state, society, and economy. A Russian biographer of Gorbachev writes about him as “a victim of a merciless caprice of history . . . One of the most tragic figures in Russian history.”

William Taubman wrote that during 1986 Gorbachev underwent “the dual process of convincing himself and trying to convince his Kremlin colleagues that their initial strategy, or lack of strategy, had failed.”45 Gorbachev’s rhetoric, however, pointed to different conclusions. Instead of taking stock of failures, the Soviet leader wanted his Politburo and government colleagues to abandon caution, and plunge headlong into the troubled sea of radical reforms without a road map.

Even thirty years later William Taubman could not conceal his amazement: “What possessed him to think he could overcome Russian political, economic, and social patterns dating back centuries in a few short years: tsarist authoritarianism morphing into Soviet totalitarianism . . . minimal experience with civic activity, including compromise and consensus, no tradition of democratic self-organization, no real rule of law?”

William Taubman, who quotes Deng Xiaoping’s verdict on Gorbachev, concedes that Gorbachev put the cart (political reform) before the horse (radical economic reform). The Soviet leader’s conservative colleagues in the Politburo thought so as well. Still, Gorbachev’s biographer, as well as other scholars of perestroika, have dismissed Deng’s verdict. The success of authoritarian reforms in China, they argue, was a unique case and could not be repeated under Soviet conditions.55 China, although in many ways a communist clone of the USSR, had fundamentally different starting conditions for reforms. Gorbachev could not release the energy of the peasantry in the way Deng did: Soviet agriculture, no more than 20 percent of the total workforce, had long been a state-subsidized business. China could leave its old industries, 15 percent of the total economy, alone, while creating a new market industrial sector. The Soviet economy was industrialized to an absurd extent, and its mono-industrial cities had no chance of surviving under market conditions. China’s economy tapped into peasants’ savings and foreign investments. The Soviet budget was overloaded by a safety net of 100 billion rubles paid as pensions and social benefits to Soviet citizens, as well as subsidies to external clients and internal republics. Moscow was losing billions of rubles because of oil prices and ill-fated economic decentralization.

More important, however, were Gorbachev’s intentions. He never considered China a model for his reforms and, in contrast to Deng, pursued a global ideological mission. The Chinese, he said to Chernyaev, had not solved the main problem: how “to link personal interests with socialism,” the problem “that preoccupied [Lenin].”57 The Soviet leader believed the Soviet Union had human and scientific resources to reclaim a world leadership in new technologies. Democratization would tap into this potential. In May 1989, during his stay in Beijing, Gorbachev turned to his entourage of intellectuals: “Some of those present here have promoted the idea of taking the Chinese road. We saw today where this road leads. I do not want the Red Square to look like Tiananmen Square.” The Soviet leader believed that history had spoken in favor of the road he had taken.58 With this conclusion in mind, Gorbachev passed his own verdict on Deng Xiaoping. At his press conference in Beijing, Gorbachev declared: “We became convinced that we cannot succeed with reforms unless we dismantle the command-administrative system.”

“The old regime must go, should be destroyed, and only then can society, acting on the instincts of self-preservation, resurrect itself from scratch.”

The Chinese communist leadership, which had just emerged from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, preferred brute force to reclaim “the mandate of Heaven.” Gorbachev, as his loyal aide Shakhnazarov recalled in 1992, “lacked the guts to have his Tiananmen. He only had to suppress the first stirrings of separatists and radicals, and the Soviet Union would have remained in good health. This, however, would have meant bidding farewell to his glorious dream of bringing democracy to our country and would have dealt an irrevocable blow to his personal prestige as a reformer.”60 Prestige among the liberal-minded intelligentsia and Western public, one should add.

Abalkin was untrained in macroeconomic analysis: he did not identify the Law on State Enterprises and the Law on Cooperatives as a major source of the deficit.

There was also a lack of solid economics. Soviet economists, including Abalkin, remained caught between the realization that the Soviet economy was too complex to be managed from the top, and rejection of the idea of market deregulation. This left the Gorbachev leadership with the “third option”: transferring power, responsibility, and resources to state enterprises, regions, and republics.

“Lenin in Zurich,” a documentary pamphlet written by the Russian anti-communist émigré Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was published in 1975, after Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union at Andropov’s suggestion. Solzhenitsyn’s piece was a documentary study about the Bolshevik leader in 1916, on the eve of the Russian Revolution, when Lenin was living as a political émigré in Switzerland,

The pamphlet tore to pieces the myth of a kind and humane Lenin.

Solzhenitsyn used Lenin’s correspondence with his lover Inessa Armand and other people to present a revolutionary fanatic who ranted and raved at his enemies and disciples alike. Solzhenitsyn also made a point that Russian nationalists had been making since 1917: Lenin viewed the Russian state and people as fuel for his world revolution. In the Soviet Union the pamphlet remained taboo; its reading was punished by imprisonment. Gorbachev’s copy had been printed specially for the high Party nomenklatura. In a long monologue to Chernyaev after reading the pamphlet, Gorbachev admitted that Lenin was a destroyer: “And always alone against everyone.” In front of his surprised aide, the exci...

Lenin’s political loneliness resonated with Gorbachev. So did the unique ability of the Bolshevik leader to turn a seemingly intractable problem on its head, getting ahead of all others and seizing the political moment. Just as Lenin had dismissed all his critics as distractors, so Gorbachev viewed all doubters of perestroika as “conservatives,” the “left” and “right” deviationists, “the ballast” for his idea of a revolution. Prompted by KGB reports, Gorbachev decided to purge the remaining Old Guard: about one hundred octogenarian members of the top state nomenklatura who had remained in the Party’s Central Committee because of their past achievements and service. After his return to Moscow, he began to meet with the targeted stalwarts, apparently one to one, and convinced them to retire “voluntarily.”

After Pitsunda, Gorbachev distanced himself even more from discussion of economic and financial problems. He swung between Ryzhkov and the conservatives in the Politburo, but he was not interested in the nuts and bolts of reform. The Soviet leader never invited Abalkin or other economists to explain what was happening with the Soviet budget, supply and demand. Lenin’s fixation was on a world revolution. Gorbachev became fixated on democratization. It was for him now even more than a precondition for successful modernization. Gorbachev convinced himself that he had a historic mission to guide the Soviet Union towards its social-democratic renewal.

Gorbachev’s developing political views were powerfully affected by literary and historical revelations of glasnost. The second half of 1988 and early 1989 became a time of great cultural creativity in the Soviet Union: thick literary journals and mass circulation newspapers competed in publishing revisionist essays about history, novels and memoirs by banned authors, diaries and manuscripts buried for decades in secret archives. Writers and journalists rushed to bring out in print everything they had

been accumulating over decades of their creative life. The cumulative effect was powerful. Not all publications had the power of Solzhenitsyn’s pamphlet, yet each presented a fragment of Soviet history and culture that had defied and destroyed its literary canon and imaginative life. The dreary Party discourse was replaced by an effervescent intellectual feast of unexpected ideas, a baffling variety of ways of seeing and speaking. “How many ideas and talents in Russia,” enthused Chernyaev in his diary. “What freedom! This alone is a great achievement that will make history forever, even if nothing comes out of perestroika proper.” Chernyaev, sensitive to the most minute motives of his boss, recorded a simila...

The surge was genuine: Gorbachev had embarked on a mission to give his country and people “universal values” and freedoms they had never experienced before. He would continue to emancipate Soviet people, make them “masters of their factories and their land.” He would take more power from the Party apparatus and give it to “the Soviets,” the national republic, and local people’s councils. The high-minded General Secretary was so fixated on this that he willingly overlooked history lessons apparent to those who had read widely on world and Russian history. Apparently, Gorbachev had never read about the Great Reforms in Russia during the period between 1861 and 1881. Tsar Alexander II had granted freedoms to peasants, and civil rights to broad groups of Russians and non-Russians. This had put Russia on the track of rapid modernization, but it also radicalized the educated youth and produced large numbers of radical intelligentsia; the non-Russian periphery of the empire (Poland) rebelled and a group of revolutionaries declared war on the Tsar and assassinated him in broad daylight in 1881. The British historian Dominic Lieven, a descendant of the aristocratic clan that had served the Russian monarchy, wrote in 1994 that “knowledge of Alexander II’s goals, strategy and dilemmas allowed one to predict very accurately many of the problems Gorbachev was bound to face.”78 Other great writers would have been instructive for Gorbachev, had he read them. Alexis de Tocqueville, the Fr...

about the fall of the French ancien régime in 1789 as follows: “Only a great genius can save a prince who undertakes to alleviate the lot of his subjects after a lengthy period of oppression. Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable once the idea of escape from them is suggested.”79 This was a powerful warning about the perils of a sudden release of mass emotion after decades of communist dictatorship. The developments of 1988 and early 1989, especially nationalist mobilization and economic discontent both in Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union, provided early demonstrations of this phenomenon. Gorbachev could not ignore those signs of the gathering storm. And yet, he rushed headlong into the storm with remarkable confidence. In the spring of 1989, a revolution conceived by Gorbachev and his narrow circle of lieutenants took on a life all of its own. The ship had sailed; the time for “theorizing” had passed. In March 1989, Gorbachev’s 400-page book, Perestroika: Tested by Life, was prepared for print. It was never published. Events soon overtook everything the Soviet leader had written or even imagined.

Soviets. In less than two years this course of action would destabilize the Soviet state, ruin its finances, and make the father of perestroika a “sorcerer’s apprentice,” unable to control the destructive forces he had unleashed.

when Bush said that he wanted to waive the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the US-Soviet Trade Act. This clause had been adopted in 1974 and linked American trade with the Soviet Union to freedom of emigration; it had helped to wreck Soviet-American economic relations and détente. Bush promised to “explore with Congress” the lifting of limitations on US export

credits and guarantees, which prevented American businesses from operating in the Soviet Union. He also supported Soviet participation in GATT. He said nothing about Soviet membership of the IMF or World Bank.

Bush set out the American demands. He pushed Gorbachev to halt assistance to Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. This was top of the US list of priorities. The Soviet team was surprised. Gorbachev wanted to draw a “strategic and philosophical” line under the Cold War. On the second day of the summit he unveiled his surprise for the Americans—but it was not the one that Bush and Scowcroft feared. “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. The conversation dissipated into specific and familiar areas of discussion about arms control.

At the very end, the two leaders spoke about the Baltics. Gorbachev explained that he could not just let the Balts go unilaterally: the constitution required an equal treatment of all republics. If he just let Lithuania go, this “would bring out all sorts of terrible fires” in other parts of the Soviet Union. Bush replied: “But if you use force—you don’t want to—that would create a firestorm.” Gorbachev bristled at what he saw as a double standard: the US troops were in the process of intervening in Panama, where

they would seize its ruler Manuel Noriega and put him in jail in the United States. Still, he did not give the usual Soviet rebuff about US meddling in internal Soviet affairs. Gorbachev was relieved that Bush refrained from triumphalism about Eastern Europ...

After the Malta meeting, Scowcroft flew secretly to Beijing, where he shook hands with “the butchers of Tiananmen” and assured the Chinese leaders that nothing would affect the Sino-American partnership. The Chinese accepted American reassurances almost indifferently. They were openly contemptuous of Gorbachev’s policies. The Kremlin leader, said the Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, wanted to build a new order, but he could not maintain stability in his own country. Qian also shared some surprising news with Scowcroft: the Soviets had asked China, a very poor country, to lend them money.

In 1989, according to the census and the nationality that people claimed, ethnic Russians numbered 145 million, over half of the Soviet population of 287 million.

The first rumblings of Russian secessionism were heard at the Congress of People’s Deputies in June 1989.

On 4 March 1990, at the elections to the RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies, Yeltsin ran a campaign on his home turf of Sverdlovsk in the Urals and won with a 70 percent majority. He immediately traveled to Western Europe on a book tour. In Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France the elites received him with guarded curiosity, as a nationalist demagogue without a positive program.

In Paris, Yeltsin took part in a popular talk show, debating against the Russian philosopher Alexander Zinoviev. The latter had been evicted from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and had just published Catastroika, a satire on Gorbachev’s reforms.13 Unexpectedly, the Russian dissident attacked Yeltsin as a populist and demagogue. When Yeltsin argued that a multi-party system in Russia would bring social justice, Zinoviev objected: “You can create one thousand political parties in the Soviet Union, and all of them would degenerate into political mafias!” The anchorman asked Yeltsin: “How do you view the future of the USSR?” Yeltsin responded that people would choose young and energetic leaders, who would fix everything, but “without a super-authoritarian power.”

Zinoviev replied that Russian people had already seized power in 1917, but this had merely resulted in Stalin’s dictatorship. Yeltsin, he said, would kill the USSR, and the West would applaud him. In several years, however, Russian society would slide back to authoritarianism, and people would feel nostalgia for Brezhnev’s “golden age.” The host asked Yeltsin whether he wanted to replace Gorbachev as President of the USSR. Yeltsin replied with a smirk: “No....

In January 1990, Gorbachev was worn down by economic and nationalist problems, yet he believed that he had pushed the Soviet Union from its totalitarian moorings. Raisa privately encouraged her husband to retire; she doubted that he could sustain much more stress. But Gorbachev did not leave, not in 1990 and not even a year later. He repeated to his aides that he did not like power for power’s sake. Yet he was convinced that he was the only person who could steer perestroika forward. The problem was that with every month the sense of chaos and crisis in the country increased.

In December 1989, despite all efforts of the Kremlin to stop it, the Lithuanian Communist Party declared its secession from the CPSU and its course towards complete national independence.

Lenin had famously defined three conditions for a Russian revolution: the paralysis of power; people’s loss of fear of and growing contempt for the authorities; and a deterioration of living conditions.

In January 1990, the situation was stacked against Gorbachev on all three counts.

The majority of Russians, however, wanted Gorbachev to use his power, not to devolve it; and Gorbachev’s reluctance to use that power appeared to many as weakness. The Soviet leader also suffered from an accumulating crisis of confidence: his long-winded

winded explanations, in contrast to Yeltsin’s more succinct populist style, no longer appealed to the majority who felt cheated and disillusioned.

The Soviet leader still convened regular Politburo meetings. But instead of setting policies there for the Party apparatus, he would waste time in endless discussions. The conservative reformers concealed their skepticism of his leadership. Ligachev thought the abdication of power by the Party was a huge political mistake. Vorotnikov demanded Gorbachev’s resignation. Ryzhkov, responsible for the failing economic reforms, circled the wagons and bristled at any criticism. On the liberal side, Shevardnadze and Yakovlev also felt alienated and on their own. Gorbachev’s self-isolation progressed. He kept asking naïve questions: Why do people forgive Yeltsin for everything? Why do the problems in Mo...

The Russian declaration of sovereignty triggered “the parade of sovereignties” in other republics. Most notable was the declaration of “state sovereignty of Ukraine” on 16 July 1990. There had been two previous declarations in Ukrainian history. The first had been passed by the Ukrainian Rada in Kiev in January 1918, to protect the land against Bolshevik invasion and insurgency. The second had been made in Lvov on 30 June 1941, by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), murderous ethnic nationalists, who praised “cooperation with the national-socialist Greater Germany, which under the leadership of Adolf Hitler creates a new order in Europe.” The new Ukrainian declaration was mostly a copycat version of the Russian one. It claimed that all resources on Ukrainian territory belonged to “the people of Ukraine” and promised to represent all “Ukrainians” outside the republic. Ukraine owned everything on its territory, could have its own State Bank and armed forces. The declaration referred to the Soviet Union only indirectly, by claiming the republic should share in “Union wealth,” such as the state’s reserves of gold and currency.

In 1931, the Italian author Curzio Malaparte wrote a book, The Technique of Revolution, in which he described the essential ingredients of a successful coup. He analyzed Lenin and Trotsky’s coup in 1917. Malaparte’s main thesis was that a passionate minority, with a determined leadership, could succeed only if they acted resolutely at a tipping point, when everything hangs in the balance—without worrying about the consequences.

The historian Serhii Plokhy wrote: “Those who managed to ‘save’ Gorbachev first would determine the success or failure of the coup and the political—perhaps even physical—survival of the main players on the Soviet political stage.” This sentence captures the mood on the two planes, but the reality was entirely different. Gorbachev was not in a position “to pick winners and losers.”111 Yeltsin and the Muscovites had created a new political narrative in the country and around the world, and the Soviet President could only join this narrative. And the most crucial factor for Gorbachev