Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok

    Collapse explains the grainy details of the last years of the Soviet Union, focusing on the major actors: Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Unlike Tolstoy, Zubok writes that "history is never a sequence of inevitabilities," and focuses far more on the choices individuals make than the circumstances that influenced those choices. That said, Zubok is clear that any leaders of the Soviet Union would have found themselves highly constrained in the late 1980s by the poor performance of the Soviet economy. For Zubok, this fact was not an inevitable cause of the destruction and disintegration of the USSR, but created a crisis that required a response. Gorbachev's response destroyed the USSR.

    To manage the Soviet economy, the states used two kinds of money. One was the beznal, a completely cashless form of money that was used as a virtual accounting system between the state and state enterprises. The big transactions in the managed economy were done in beznals, sort of like major credits, and they could never be cashed. Normal people used nal (cash), which were physical banknotes used to pay for salaries and wages and then used in stores for goods and services. The system empowered the USSR to spend billions of beznal without creating inflation. The main threat to Gorbachev in 1988 was the results of his own economic reforms, causing disruptions to production, housing construction, and supply chains. Gorbachev's reforms included a legalization of private business, allowing state enterprises to produce according to demand they sought to fill (after satisfying government contracts, and allowing foreign investment in the Soviet Union. One such reform is the beef industry reform, which gave peasants the options to lease and form cooperatives while continuing subsidies. However, by giving peasants the option not to transport food to the cities, they chose not to transport the food, and failed to deliver one-third of their harvest and wasted or lost another third.

    While Gorbachev pursued economic reforms, he also pursued political reforms, becoming more of a social democrat than a communist. He degraded his own power in favor of a more democratic form of government by single-handedly destroying the nomenklatura process of putting party officials in control of government, firing between 800,000 to 900,000 party officials in just a year. In 1987, Gorbachev called for democratization and by 1989, the people of the Soviet Union had their first election to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union. So in a very short time, Gorbachev gave up his dictatorial powers as Secretary-General. Zubok compares this to the captain of a ship, without a compass or a map, fires his crew and takes on the passengers as a new crew to reach their destination. Gorbachev passed economic levers from central regulators to local enterprises. He passed the political levers from the Politburo to the Congress of People's Deputies and from local Party organizations to local Soviets. The attempted "democratization" of power ended up playing out merely as the creation of a power vacuum. 

    In the 1989 elections, Party leaders lost their seats to complete unknowns in the Slavic core of the country. In Moscow and Leningrad, workers and intelligentsia voted against the Party candidates, none of whom were elected. Boris Yeltsin was elected as an independent against the Party-nominated leaders of a big automobile plant with 89 percent of the vote. Gorbachev declared the election a success as a triumph of democracy and declared that the Politburo needed to stop intimidating people. Gorbachev was elected as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, making him politically independent of Party elites. However, his power was diminished overall; having inherited the authority of Stalin, Gorbachev threw it off to take on the lesser power of an elected official. Gorbachev struggled with the transition from Party to parliamentary leader, where he faced opposition. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell, and from that point on, Gorbachev struggled to regain the initiative. Until then, Gorbachev had been the initiator of events, but after that point, he faced change initiated by masses of people on the Ground in the GDR, new democratically-elected politicians in the USSR, and by Westerners tampering with the entire process. He also faced leaders of the Party in the republics declaring themselves Presidents, just as he had done. This happened with Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Kazakh SSR and Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. 

    The most dangerous and rebellious republic was the one at the center of the USSR, the Russian RSFSR. Their new parliament quickly entered a crisis with the Union parliament over the price of meat, and quickly started raising the price of oil that they "exported" to the other republics, also increasing Russian pensions to deal with inflation. Gorbachev then asked the Soviet Union legislature to give him additional presidential authority to negotiate with the republics and implement market reforms. The Russian parliament responded by passing a law making Gorbachev's decrees void on the territory of the RFSR. Pressure grew on Gorbachev to declare an emergency, which he did.

    As the Russian parliament and Yeltsin gained power, Gorbachev showed himself unwilling to use force against them. On March 28, 1991, Deputies to the RSFSR Congress faced 40,000 armed soldiers outside the Kremlin when they demanded Soviet leadership withdraw troops from Moscow, voting 532 to 286 to declare Gorbachev's stationing of the troops to intimidate them as unconstitutional. Gorbachev refused to lift the emergency, but did agree to remove the troops. The opposition rallied its supporters in Moscow and had over 100,000 people attend a protest in which many thought the troops would fire at them. But instead, the troops and riot police did nothing and pulled out from Moscow the following morning. Yeltsin was now a major player since it was clear that Gorbachev was going to negotiate with him, not destroy him. The major political question became one of a Union Treaty that would re-establish the relationship between the republics and the center in a more decentralized way.

    Focused on enemies outside the Party, Gorbachev was blind to enemies within, plotting against him. On August 18, 1991, while at a dacha in Crimea, Gorbachev was informed that the KGB guards protecting him would now be guarding him as a prisoner, and his phone lines were cut off. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Armenia had already declared independence from the Soviet Union and inflation exceeded 300% per year. Party leaders were sure that Gorbachev was losing all power and that more republics would secede. Gennady Yanayev took the role of President during the coup, with Sergey Akhromeyev and Dmitry Yazov as military leaders along with Vladimir Kryuchkov at the KGB. Critically, Boris Yeltsin decided to condemn the coup plotters, who surely would have arrested him if they succeeded, and appealed to the citizens of Russia that the coup was against Gorbachev, and that Gorbachev should be returned as the true legitimate leader of the Soviet Union. The coup failed to gain the full support of the army and KGB and the leaders surrendered or committed suicide after less than a week. Ultimately, failing to arrest Yeltsin was the biggest mistake of the plotters, along with failing to project power over the airwaves, using state TV only to show pre-recorded censored news and clips from the Swan Lake ballet. The coup plotters never really intimidated anyone, despite the reason for the coup being that Gorbachev wasn't being intimidating enough. At a critical moment, Yanayev hosted a press conference in which he visibly trembled and journalists mocked him and the other plotters. Meanwhile, Yeltsin was climbing on top of tanks to shake hands with the soldiers inside, projecting absolute confidence. On the second day of the coup, August 19, KGB colonel Vladimir Putin was working as an aide to Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak, and told his boss that he couldn't work for both sides in the conflict, and that he would submit a request to be discharged from the KGB. Kryuchkov, the KGB head deeply involved in the coup, surprised him by agreeing to discharge Putin. In the end, the coup plotters surrendered, and Yeltsin was totally triumphant, able to "free" Gorbachev while also getting Gorbachev to agree to more democratic reforms, such as suspending the activities of the Communist Party. He dissolved the USSR People's Congress in September and gained nothing in return.

    With a total vacuum of power above the republics, the real negotiation began among the four biggest remaining republics with nuclear weapons on their territory (although not usable without Moscow): Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The three Slavic republics ended up meeting in Minsk, where they ratified independence for all three from the Soviet Union and planned to confederate in another, meaningless way. Yeltsin wanted to work it so that Ukraine would be the proximate cause of the breakup, and waited until Ukrainians overwhelmingly voted for independence. That way the breakup wouldn't be blamed on the Russians. This may have been the final nail in the coffin, but the USSR was dead by this point in December 1991. It is bizarre to think that the USSR ended with three core Slavic countries, especially Russia, "seceding" from it.

    With Russia seceded from the USSR and the USSR unable to pay its bills with no tax revenue going to it, he started working on the army to come over to Russia. This worked because of the fact that Yeltsin had the money to pay them and Gorbachev did not. The same happened with the diplomats and the embassies. After achieving the initial legal framework of having Russia secede from the USSR, the Russians transitioned to inheriting the USSR and just taking over its institutions exactly as they were before. Perhaps this has to do with why Yeltsin was unable to bring in Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan into a united country, which he had always thought was possible. Once those national aspirations were out of the bag, there was no bringing them back in. Ultimately, for Zubok, it was the weakness of the center, not the power of the republics, that ended the Soviet Union. In March 1991, only 20 percent of people in the core republics wanted to live in separate republics instead of a united state. This became a majority in August, most dramatically Ukraine, but even in Russia. It was not a true choice to live apart, but a choice for law and order in a smaller state instead of chaos in a large one.

    There are two major comparisons to make with the fall of the USSR. The first is China at the same time. I had already been very familiar with the idea that China succeeded where the USSR failed by implementing only economic reforms, but not political reforms, and enacting repression on those that protested. What I really only encountered in this book was the importance of the nationalist ambitions from the republics that caused the end of the USSR. It is really important in understanding the fall of the USSR that it came along national lines. Not every ethnic group got a republic. The ones that became independent were the nations that lived in the borders of pre-established national republics in the Soviet Union for over a half-century before the fall. This reifying of the nation by the USSR directly led to its downfall in 1991.

    The other major comparison is the United States today. The USSR is an excellent example of the dangers of an anti-establishment figure in tearing apart a state. However, the fact that the United States has no national republics is a big difference with the USSR. The states themselves are the closest proxy, but a benefit of being a New World power is that they don't have any specific ethnic or national composition like Armenia or Lithuania. However, one wonders what happens when a country is on a decline and someone decides to shake things up.

Miscellaneous:

• Russia has always made ridiculous state profits off of alcoholism. In 1985, writes Zubok, the tax on alcohol procured one-third of Soviet GDP.
• While Gorbachev's predecessor, Yuri Andropov, was Secretary-General (1982-84), he at one point looked into splitting up the Soviet Republics along non-ethnic lines to staunch nationalism in the republics that ultimately led to the division of the USSR, but never enacted the plan before he became ill and died. 
• Two great quotes before the chapter on the August 1991 coup:
• "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute." - Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, 1809
• "People can forgive [authorities] everything except weakness." D. Volkogonov to Boris Yeltsin, December 1994.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett

    This was an amazing, one-of-a-kind book. War and Peace is an absolute epic and Constance Garnett's translation, despite being over 100 years old, is totally readable and enjoyable today. I thought Tolstoy did an incredible job blending history with narrative, fiction with fact, and humor with drama. The book is long with a huge number of named characters, which can make the beginning a little difficult without consulting family trees for the characters. But after a little while I didn't have anymore problems and understood who all the characters were and how they were related to each other.

    The book covers the period from the Battle of Austerlitz to the Battle of Borodino. In that seven year period, Napoleon went from being reviled across Europe and Russia to being respected to being reviled again. With his victory at Austerlitz, Napoleon was the dominant power in Europe, but with his victory at Borodino, his forces were mortally wounded and would never recover. Being set in that period, there is sort of a "Bridgerton" vibe, since the characters are all plotting marriages among the nobility. Also interesting about the noble culture is that, despite being at war with the French, all the nobles speak French more than Russian, and some struggle in Russian.

    Tolstoy has a great talent for alluding to universal experiences so naturally in his writing. For example, "'Yes, that all happened!' ... he said, with a happy, childlike smile to himself. And he fell into the deep sleep of youth." Or this one: "When Pierre had gone, and all the members of the family were met together, they began to criticise him, as people always do after a new guest has left, and as rarely happens, all said nothing but good of him." He also does fantastic descriptions of war, illustrating the way that you can see an artillery shell explode far away before you hear it and the adrenaline rush of the cavalry charge. But he also does great descriptions of the not-so-glamorous aspects of military life, about the feeling of being deprived of liberty, and of how "Here there was none of all that confusion of the free world, where he did not know his proper place, and made mistakes in exercising free choice." He's also comedic, giving us a whole internal monologue of a woman in society wondering her impact on a man and thinking of how impressed she is with him followed by a look in his mind: "'The poor girl is devilishly ugly,' Anatole was thinking about her."

    Tolstoy is through and through a Russian patriot. He writes that, "every Russian gazing at Moscow feels she is the mother; every foreigner gazing at her, and ignorant of her significance as the mother city, must be aware of the feminine character of the town, and Napoleon felt it." Moreover, he despises Napoleon, calling him "the most insignificant tool of history, who never even in exile displayed one trait of human dignity," while referring to Kutuzov, the Russian commander-in-chief, by saying that "it is difficult to conceive of an historical character whose energy could be more invariably directed to the same unchanging aim," and that one cannot "imagine an aim more noble and more in harmony with the will of a whole people," and "so completely attained as the aim towards which all Kutuzov's efforts were devoted in 1812."

    In the middle of the book, we start to learn why Tolstoy really wrote the book, which is to denounce the historians who emphasize the "great men" of history and analyze history as the decisions of certain powerful people moving the world. He reflects deeply on cause and effect, power, and free will. One great example from Part 9:

When the apple is ripe and falls—why does it fall? Is it because it is drawn by gravitation to the earth, because its stalk is withered, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?

Not one of those is the cause. All that simply makes up the conjunction of conditions under which every living, organic, elemental event takes place. And the botanist who says that the apple has fallen because the cells are decomposing, and so on, will be just as right as the boy standing under the tree who says the apple has fallen because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. The historian, who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and was ruined because Alexander desired his ruin, will be just as right and as wrong as the man who says that the mountain of millions of tons, tottering and undermined, has been felled by the last stroke of the last workingman’s pick-axe. In historical events great men—so called—are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event itself.

Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

Another passage, on the nature of power, as seen from the mayor of Moscow:

    Every governing official in quiet, untroubled times feels that the whole population under his charge is only kept going by his efforts; and it is this sense of being indispensably necessary in which every governing official finds the chief reward for his toils and cares. It is easy to understand that while the ocean of history is calm, the governing official holding on from his crazy little skiff by a pole to the ship of the people, and moving with it, must fancy that it is his efforts that move the ship on to which he is clinging. But a storm has but to arise to set the sea heaving and the ship tossing upon it, and such error becomes at once impossible. The ship goes on its vast course unchecked, the pole fails to reach the moving vessel, and the pilot, from being the master, the source of power, finds himself a helpless, weak, and useless person.

Tolstoy declares that power "is a relation of a certain person to other persons, in which that person takes the less direct share in an act, the more he expresses opinions, theories, and justifications of the combined action. But, he states that power is not the cause of the movement of peoples, but just a part of that movement, and "the conception of cause is not applicable."

    Tolstoy rejects the idea of true free will over and over again. Everything is the result of some uncomprehensible sequence of events and actions. He says it would all be more obvious to us the law of history did not relate to man, since "A particle of matter cannot tell us that it does not feel the inevitability of attraction of repulsion, and that the law is not true. Man, who is the subject of history, bluntly says: I am free, and so I am not subject to law" [emphasis added]. What little free will exists is something like a dark matter in history, like the "undefined force[s]" that move the planets, generate electricity, etc. and "forms the subject matter of history."

    I'll finish up by saying this was an even better book than I expected, and I expected a lot from a book that is considered a classic. It is a beautifully told, genre-defying epic and I could not get enough of it.

Shackleton's Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer by Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell

    This book was a cool take on the business-school-style leadership advice manual by building a framework of how to lead all around Sir Ernest Shackleton, Antarctic explorer. The book succeeds by tying in lessons with a chronological story of Shackleton's life and early voyages building up to his climactic Endurance expedition to attempt to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton failed--his ship became stuck in pack ice for months, and when the ice finally thawed, the ship sank. He led his men on a long journey in life boats through ice floes to a small, barren island, from which Shackleton again departed in a life boat to find help in South America, where he made an overland treck across mountains to a whaling station. Above all, Shackleton was a truly decent person who could also bring out the decency in others. He was an optimist. The authors quote Napoleon: "a leader is a dealer in hope." Despite failing to achieve his mission, Shackleton succeeded in bringing every man home safe and several even volunteered for a future expedition with him. 

    The journey of the crew of the Endurance was a brutal one. Antarctica is covered by a layer of ice up to three miles thick. Although it only snows one or two inches per year, fierce winds whip up dry snow in a sandy consistency that burns. The mean annual temperature is -70 Fahrenheit, and temperatures under -120 Fahrenheit have been recorded. The crewmen used Burberry boots designed for five pairs of socks as well as Finnish boots made of reindeer skins, but they wore out quickly on the ice. They had balaclava helmets that covered their ears and snow goggles tinted greenish yellow to precent snow blindness. Their journey coincided with World War One. They departed on August 1, 1914, but as England mobilized Shackleton offered to return the ship and place it at the disposal of the Admiralty. But First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill insisted that the expedition proceed, and they entered open seas.

    Shackleton was a leader on the personal level. He was well liked because he showed everyone his respect and attention--no one had to "earn" his respect. He also understood his role as the leader in setting the mood of the group. When the ship was trapped in the ice, Shackleton projected confidence and strength while he developed his plan for the thaw. As a result, his crew spent the time reading books, playing sports on the ice, and were generally cheerful. They trusted him also because they knew how well-prepared he was in advance of the voyage, earning himself the nickname "cautious" Shackleton. The men even used that time to develop elaborate igloos for their sled dogs ("dogloos") and created a spectacular "Dog Town" with tapered spires and elaborate porticos before it was destroyed by crashing ice floes. Shackleton used the men's competitiveness to enhance their training, sponsoring prizes for races between the different sled dog teams. When Shackleton noticed the weakness of a specific man, he remedied it without insulting his pride, such as when one was extra cold, ordering hot drinks served to all so as not to stigmatize him. Shackleton enjoyed poetry, especially a line from "Prospice," by Robert Browning: "Sudden the worst turns the best to the brave."

    A leader is judged not by his performance but by the performance he elicits from those who follow him. Shackleton achieved the best performance possible from his men by doing his part thoroughly, showing them respect and care, and above all putting forth a calm, optimistic demeanor that would inspire them. He did not allow himself to get lost in doubt or self-pity, at least not in front of those he led. He is truly an example for leaders at all levels. Thanks to Frank for the recommendation.

Miscellaneous Fact:

• Supposedly, Shackleton advertised for the Endurance expedition with this: "Men wanted to Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success." However, the ad is apocryphal.