Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet System

Excerpt

The collapse of the Soviet Union involved many different phenomena and processes. Any description of the end of the USSR requires an investigation of the faults both of the Soviet system and of the perestroika reform process that was supposed to address the design flaws of the Soviet political and economic model. It was this reform process that gave birth to the centrifugal forces that pulled the USSR apart. These forces were legion. The fall of the USSR involved uprisings by very different social forces, including, but not limited to, nationalists of different hues, workers, and nascent civil society groups. There was a revolt by conservatives against reform and change, a liberal revolt for faster change, a revolution in the press, and cultural revolutions in art, literature, history, and spiritual life. The crisis of Soviet power involved both an economic collapse and a reconfiguration of economic power as control over economic decision-making and property usage devolved from central political authorities and planners to republics, local elites, managers, and the opportunists who would, if they managed to survive, become post-Soviet oligarchs. It is impossible to ignore the fact that the end of the Soviet Union is a story of ‘great men’, like Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, but also a profound change in global political structures with the end of the Cold War. The personalities and intentions of Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin — to name only the two main Russian protagonists — shaped Soviet collapse, but collapse also influenced, and was influenced by, the geopolitical changes that reform of Soviet foreign policy prompted in Eastern Europe and in East-West relations. Finally, there is a question of the nature of Soviet collapse. How can the USSR’s end be related to our understandings of what systemic change are? Was it a revolutionary event, a democratic transition, a series of national liberation struggles, or some combination of all of these? …