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SAIS Review vol. XXI, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 2002)

The Demise and Residue of

the Soviet Union
Mark Kramer
Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 19702000. By Stephen Kotkin (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 236 pp. $27.50.

ow that a decade has passed since the Soviet Union collapsed,

memories have begun to fade of the remarkable events that
followed Mikhail Gorbachevs rise to power in 1985. Gorbachevs
policies of perestroika and glasnost ushered in a momentous period
of change and turmoil. When perestroika began, no one expected that
the Soviet Union would soon disintegrate. Gorbachev aimed to reform
Soviet communism, not to destroy it. Yet, less than seven years after
he took office, the Soviet regime abruptly collapsed.
The downfall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 was
astonishing in its own right, but what was even more striking was the
way it occurredwith only minimal violence. As late as mid-August
1991 (just before an attempted coup dtat in Moscow), few, if any,
observers anticipated that the Soviet Union would peacefully break
apart. Whenever large, multiethnic empires disintegrated in the past,
their demise usually came after extensive warfare and loss of life.1 A
similar fate seemed likely to befall the Soviet Union, a country whose
leaders had used horrific violence in the past to consolidate and
maintain their power.
Contrary to expectations, however, the collapse of the Soviet
state was largely free of bloodshed. Although some violence did occur
under Gorbachevriots in Kazakhstan in 1986, skirmishes between
Armenia and Azerbaijan from 1988 on, a crackdown in Georgia in
April 1989, clashes in the Ferghana Valley in June 1989 and 1990, a
crackdown in Azerbaijan in January 1990, and a more limited
Mark Kramer is director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies at Harvard
University, and a senior associate of Harvards Davis Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies.

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crackdown in the Baltic states in January 1991these tragic incidents

were surprisingly infrequent at a time of such rapid and disorienting
political change, and they were certainly not enough, in and of
themselves, to precipitate the breakup of the Soviet state. Moreover,
the events in December 1991 that culminated in the final dissolution
of the Soviet Union occurred with no violence at all. The generally
peaceful end of the Soviet regime is often taken for granted nowadays
and is sometimes depicted as inevitable, but in the late 1980s and
early 1990s (not to mention in the pre-Gorbachev era) this outcome
seemed far less plausible.
Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton University,
offers a cogent reassessment of the demise of the Soviet Union in his
brief, elegantly written book, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse,
19702000. Kotkin is well known for two earlier books that used the
city of Magnitogorsk as a vehicle for analyzing Stalinism as a
civilization and the nature of Soviet society in the Gorbachev era.2
In recent years he has published highly insightful commentaries on
post-Soviet Russia in The New Republic and other periodicals. Traces
of his previous writings are evident in Armageddon Averted, but the
book does more than simply recapitulate his earlier work. The
introduction and seven chapters, arranged both chronologically and
thematically, provide a sweeping, sophisticated analysis of the nature
of the Soviet system, the reasons for its collapse, and its pernicious
legacy in post-Soviet Russia.
The subtitle of Armageddon Averted suggests that it covers the
period from 1970 to the present, but this is somewhat misleading.
Kotkin allots only about twenty pages (in chapter 1) to the years from
1970 to 1985, emphasizing what he sees as the connection between
Yuri Andropov, the long-time director of the KGB who briefly led the
Soviet Communist Party in the early 1980s, and the rise of Gorbachev.
Although Kotkin makes a few subsequent allusions to the early years
of the Soviet regime, most of the book focuses on the period from
1985 to the late 1990s, particularly the events that culminated in the
dissolution of the USSR.
The turbulent years under Gorbachev (19851991) and Russian
president Boris Yeltsin (19911999) have been shrouded in numerous
myths that Kotkin seeks to dispel. He rightly argues that the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not inevitable. When Gorbachev took
office in March 1985, Kotkin writes,
the Soviet Union was not in turmoil. Nationalist separatism existed,
but it did not remotely threaten the Soviet order. The KGB crushed

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THE DEMISE AND RESIDUE OF THE SOVIET UNION 341

the small dissident movement. The enormous intelligentsia griped

incessantly, but it enjoyed massive state subsidies manipulated to
promote overall loyalty.

The Soviet economy had been lagging since the early 1970s, but it
was not in crisis in 1985 and could probably have continued
functioning (albeit with lackluster results) for many more years.3
Gorbachevs own economic policies, which led to macroeconomic
imbalances, soaring inflation, rampant shortages, the stripping of
assets of large firms, and a rapid buildup of foreign debt, destabilized
the economy and produced a genuine crisis by 1990 and 1991. But
the worst of these problems undoubtedly could have been avoided if
sounder policies had been adopted.
Kotkin concedes that in 1989 the floor caved in on Gorbachev
in Eastern Europe, but he insists that the Soviet leaders policy of
nonintervention was the logical outgrowth of a purported decision
by Gorbachevs predecessors to abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine (a
term used in the West after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to
describe Moscows commitment to uphold communism in Eastern
Europe by any means necessary). Kotkin claims that Leonid Brezhnev
himself renounced the eponymous doctrine in 19801981, when he
refrained from sending Soviet troops into Poland to crush the
Solidarity movement.
Kotkin acknowledges that Gorbachevs stance vis--vis Eastern
Europe in 1989 did not necessarily reveal what his reaction would be
to unrest within the Soviet Union in 19901991. Until well into 1991,
Kotkin argues, no one could exclude the possibility of an attempted
crackdown to save the Union. In Kotkins view, the use of unrelenting
force at key moments in 19891991 might have restored order and
preserved the Soviet regime. The resort to massive violence, he notes,
has been common in states faced with grave internal threats:
In India during the 1980s and 1990s the central authorities killed
many thousands of separatists in the name of preserving the integrity
of the state, at little or no cost to the countrys democratic reputation.
The Indian government consistently issued unambiguous signals
about what lines could not be crossed, and used force against
secessionist movements that crossed them.

In contrast, Gorbachev not only failed to draw clear lines but also
unintentionally spread nationalism by resorting to half-hearted
measures. The irresolute spilling of blood, in Georgia in 1989 and
Lithuania in early 1991, Kotkin writes, served as a formidable

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weapon in the hands of separatists, helping them recruit nationalists

among those who had been undecided, while placing Moscow on the
defensive and demoralizing the KGB and army, (emphasis in
original).
Kotkin asserts that Gorbachevs unwillingness to hold the Soviet
Union together by force in 1991, as well as his earlier restraint in
Eastern Europe, stemmed ultimately from his commitment to
reform socialisma commitment that meant breaking with
anything that resembled Brezhnevism or Stalinism, including
domestic military crackdowns. According to Kotkin, if Gorbachev
had returned to Stalinist methods to preserve the system [it] would
have not only destroyed his international reputation but made a lie
of his whole inner life.
Kotkin acknowledges that Gorbachevs own aversion to largescale violence might not have mattered if hard-line advocates of
repression such as Vladimir Kryuchkov and Oleg Baklanov had
successfully compelled Gorbachev to crack down, as they tried to do
in August 1991. But Kotkin argues that the hardliners were
constrained by a rapid change of sentiment within the Soviet
nomenklatura (privileged elite). Many members of the nomenklatura,
he contends, were increasingly averse to the use of force because they
were more interested in acquiring private property. The surge of
nomenklatura privatization from the late 1980s on was crucial, in
Kotkins view, in giving former Soviet elites an alternative structure
to embrace. As they shifted their loyalties from the Soviet state to
Yeltsins government, they facilitated the eclipse of the Soviet regime
and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union.
When Kotkin turns from the Soviet period to the first eight
years of the post-Soviet era (1992 to early 2000), he offers a harsh
critique of the Yeltsin governments ineptitude and corruption.
Nevertheless, he rejects the polemical arguments of a number of
Western and Russian analysts who have derided [the Russian
governments policies] as Thatcherism and market Bolshevism and
who have offered a grossly distorted view of economic changes in
Russia. Kotkin emphasizes that the supposedly dogmatic monetarist
policies in Russia were in fact nothing more than a charade; the
problem was too little, not too much, monetary control. Kotkin chides
analysts such as Stephen Cohen, Peter Reddaway, and Dmitri GlinskiVassiliev who have absurdly exaggerated the Wests influence in
Russia and who have insistedagainst all evidencethat a go-slow
approach to economic reform would have been appropriate:

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THE DEMISE AND RESIDUE OF THE SOVIET UNION 343

Critics of Russias fictitious neo-liberalism failed to specify who was

supposed to have implemented their suggested state-led gradualist
policiesthe millions of officials who had betrayed the Soviet state
and enriched themselves in the bargain? . . . [The critics] refrain that,
by slavishly following the Wests prescriptions Russia had ruined
itself, becoming a West manqu, mistook reformist rhetoric for
institutional realities. The critics, insisting that Russia should follow
its own path, seem not to have noticed that for the most part Russia
did just that. Critics also failed to make plain that, in an unsentimental
world consisting of powerful countries with liberal systems, their
defense of Russias institutional traditions condemned Russias
people to fall well short of their aspirations for prosperity.

Kotkin repeatedly stresses that the institutions and personnel

inherited by post-Soviet Russiaa massive and dysfunctional antiliberal state . . . a non-market and time-warp economy, a sprawling
internal security apparatus maintained by the KGB, and hordes of
Soviet-trained elites arrayed in patronage groups [who] were only
tenuously connected to the rest of societywere bound to thwart
initial attempts at free market reform. The underlying cause of
Russias difficulties, Kotkin argues, was the Soviet bequeathal. He
notes that the terrible burden imposed by the Soviet legacy was often
overlooked because the opponents of reform proved far better at
framing public debate than [the] proponents . . . In a great irony, it
was not the Soviet past but reform that was compelled to stand trial.
Kotkins conclusions about the Soviet collapsethat it was a
highly contingent phenomenon and that the peaceful nature of it
was by no means inevitableare impressive and convincing. He rightly
emphasizes how much worse it all might have turned out if a strong
leader and faction of the Moscow elite had shown ruthless
determination to uphold the empire or . . . had indulged in malice or
lunacy once the situation became unsalvageable. Kotkins
observations about the post-Soviet era, especially the daunting
obstacles posed by the seventy-four-year legacy of Soviet rule, are
equally cogent.
In a few instances, however, Kotkins contentions are either
dubious or in need of serious qualification. For example, he gives far
too much credence to the notion that Yuri Andropov was the
progenitor of the Gorbachev era. Although it is true that Andropov,
like Gorbachev, wanted the Soviet system to run more efficiently, the
similarities between the two men end there. Andropov was a staunch
advocate of internal repression and aggressive foreign policies
(including the invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968,
and Afghanistan in 1979), whereas Gorbachev pursued far-reaching

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liberalization at home and retrenchment and conciliation abroad.

Aleksandr Yakovlev, one of the chief architects of glasnost and new
thinking under Gorbachev, emphasized that Andropov was an
authoritarian leader [who] wanted to transform the country into a
giant socialist barracks. It is impossible to regard him as the forefather
of perestroika.4
Kotkin also goes astray in asserting that by 19801981 the Soviet
Union had repealed the Brezhnev Doctrine and never intended to
send troops into Poland.5 Newly declassified documents show that,
on the contrary, the first step the Soviet Politburo took in August
1980, after forming a special commission to deal with the Polish crisis,
was to authorize the mobilization of a sizable number of Soviet
divisions in case military assistance is provided to Poland. From
August 1980 until the fall of 1981, Soviet leaders were fully prepared
to send these divisions into Poland to help the communist regime
introduce martial law. (Fortunately, when the Soviet Politburo tried to
force the matter in December 1980 and April 1981, the Polish
authorities warned that the entry of Soviet troops would cause a disaster
and that it would be better if Polish state security units imposed
martial law on their own.) Although the scenario for the entry of Soviet
troops into Poland in 1980 and 1981 would have been different from
the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when Soviet troops intervened
against the existing regime, the notion that the Brezhnev Doctrine
was dead by 1980 is
fallacious.
Kotkins
This futile overture, coming much
explanation of
too late as Gorbachev himself may why Gorbachev
have realized even as he proposed it, declined to use
large-scale violence
symbolized the Hamlet-like impulses to preserve the
Union is
that characterized the final two years Soviet
sound, but he fails
of Gorbachevs reign.
to point out how
conf licted
Gorbachev was
about this decision. On the one hand, Gorbachev was desperate to
preserve the Soviet Union and wanted to restore order through allout force if necessary; on the other hand, he could never quite bring
himself to proceed with a full-scale crackdown. Evgeni Shaposhnikov,
the final Soviet defense minister, recalled that in November 1991
Gorbachev broached the possibility of using the army to set up a new

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THE DEMISE AND RESIDUE OF THE SOVIET UNION 345

government, subdue the opposition, and hold the Soviet state

together.6 This futile overture, coming much too late (as Gorbachev
himself may have realized even as he proposed it), symbolized the
Hamlet-like impulses that characterized the final two years of
Gorbachevs reign. He authorized preparations in 1990 and 1991 for
the imposition of martial law, but when the time came either to shed
blood or to permit the state to unravel, he opted for the latter, if only
by default.
Kotkins decision to focus on elite politics throughout his book
is fully justifiable, but it causes him to miss one crucial aspect of the
disintegration of the Soviet Union. Had it been up to the elites alone
in 1991, most of the country might have stayed together. Kotkin
acknowledges that Yeltsin wanted to preserve the Soviet state after
the hard-line coup in Moscow was rebuffed in August 1991. Although
Yeltsin promptly recognized the independence of several small
republicsthe Baltic states, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldovahe
initially hoped that the rest of the country, especially Ukraine, would
remain part of a confederation led by Russia. At that point he did not
yet realize that popular sentiment in Ukraine had been drastically
changed by the coup and the resulting delegitimization of the Soviet
regime. But over the next few months, as it became clear that
Ukrainian voters would overwhelmingly support independence in a
referendum on the first of December 1991, Yeltsin had to change
course. A week after the Ukrainian referendum, he arranged for the
signing of the Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords that sealed the fate of
the Soviet Union.
This decisive shift of the public mood in Ukraine must be
factored into any explanation of the Soviet collapse. The unwillingness
of high-level officials to use large-scale violence if necessary to keep
the Soviet state intact was a vital part of the story (as the classic
theories of revolution have long posited), but the surge of proindependence sentiment in Ukraine is what ultimately drove Yeltsin
to Belovezhskaya Pushcha.
Finally, although Kotkin properly highlights the detrimental
impact of the Soviet legacy in post-Soviet Russia, he goes too far in
asserting that truly radical reform was simply not possible, given
the social and institutional landscape inherited from the Soviet
period. The experiences of Poland and Estonia in the 1990s showed
that even states with onerous institutional legacies could adopt sound
policies, emphasizing rapid macroeconomic stabilization and broad
liberalization. The experiences of those states also confirmed that
the choice of policies made a profound difference. Whereas Poland

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and Estonia achieved relative prosperity in a suprisingly short time,

nonreformers like Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia, as well as inept
reformers like Russia and Moldova, were mired in hardship and
decline.
In a book of such sweeping scope, a small number of factual
mistakes are bound to arise. In a few places the chronology of events
is off (Polands massive borrowing from the West occurred in the
1970s, not the 1980s; the Chernobyl accident took place well before,
not after, the release of Andrei Sahkarov; the Warsaw Pact was
dissolved in mid-1991, not late 1991; Russias referendum in 1993
was held in April, not March) and a small number of other slight
inaccuracies crop up (e.g., the number of Russian nuclear, biological,
and chemical weapons scientists cited on page 190 is much too high
several times higher than the authoritative figures compiled by U.S.
intelligence agencies and weapons laboratories).
Despite these minor lapses, Armageddon Averted is a superb book,
full of astute observations. In the space of barely two hundred pages,
Kotkin touches on a large number of crucial topics. His reflections
on the late Soviet era and the post-Soviet period are rich and
engrossing. He has made good use of research by other Western
scholars and newly available memoirs and documents. Although a
few of Kotkins interpretations and claims are dubious, his book
provides a lucid and persuasive explanation of why the Soviet Union
held together before Gorbachev, why it broke apart in late 1991, and
what the breakup meant for post-Soviet Russia. The largely peaceful
collapse of the Soviet Union was a monumental event, and Kotkin
deserves enormous credit for helping us understand both the process
and its aftermath.
Notes
1

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 514.
2
Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992); and Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995).
3
On this point, see Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, eds., The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System (New York: Routledge, 1992).
4
Interview with Yakovlev in Priglashenie k sporu, Literaturnaya gazeta (Moscow),
no. 19 (15 May 1991): 3.
5
See my recent analyses of this topic and my translations of declassified documents
in Soviet Deliberations During the Polish Crisis of 19801981, Special Working Paper
(Washington, DC: Cold War International History Project, May 1999); Jaruzelski,
the Soviet Union, and the Polish Crisis: New Light on the Mystery of December

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THE DEMISE AND RESIDUE OF THE SOVIET UNION 347

1981, Colonel Kuklinski and the Polish Crisis, 198081, and In Case Military
Assistance is Provided to Poland: Soviet Preparations for Military Contingencies,
August 1980, all in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 11 (Winter 1999):
531, 4760, and 8694, respectively; and Poland, 198081: Soviet Policy During
the Polish Crisis, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 5 (Spring 1995):
1, 116128.
6
Shaposhnikov first disclosed this incident during a talk he gave at Harvard University in October 1994. He discussed it at greater length in the second edition of
his memoirs, Vybor, 2d ed. (Moscow: PIK, 1995), 137138.