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.
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