Why Did the “Evil Empire” Collapse?
By Vladislav M. Zubok, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 22, 2021 9:57 am ET
And yet, three decades on, these widely believed explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union are less persuasive. The cost of Soviet military commitments, for example, wasn’t insupportable in 1990: The U.S.S.R. withdrew from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe with its army in good order and still the largest in the world. Soviet military expenditures stood at 15% of GDP and were remarkably cost-effective compared with those of the West. Oil prices plummeted near the time of the collapse, but that shock wasn’t decisive, as Soviet oil and gas pipelines to Western Europe remained a crucial long-term asset. Soviet foreign debt stood at $65 billion in 1991, a big jump from a few years earlier, but Moscow had to pay only $3.9 billion in arrears.
Nor was it pressure applied by the West that led the Soviet leadership to conclude that reforms to the communist system were overdue. Those of us who lived inside the Soviet Union in its later years—after Stalin’s terror had subsided and communism had lost its dynamism—expected the system to yield younger leadership that would initiate reforms. One can easily imagine an alternate history in which the Soviet system evolved, perhaps as China’s has done, with its statehood intact. But instead, history gave us Mr. Gorbachev. Within five years of his ascension, the Soviet Union came apart at the seams.
Mr. Gorbachev saw reform of the Soviet system as an idealistic experiment: He wanted to undo what Stalin had done and combine Soviet “socialism” with democracy. This turned out to be a dream without a viable strategy. He decentralized the country’s economy, with state ministries giving new autonomy and some measure of company profits to managers and employees of state companies. Rather than stimulate enthusiasm and productivity, however, this arrangement unleashed profiteers who cannibalized the economy without creating new goods.
Mr. Gorbachev’s political decentralization similarly backfired. He had forced the Politburo and regional party chieftains to cede supreme political power to a complicated system of “people’s councils” (Soviets) that he hoped would become a “school of democracy.” But these unwieldy bodies instead became vehicles for national separatism and populism, making the country ungovernable.
Finally, Mr. Gorbachev “democratized” Soviet finances, with reforms authorizing private banks and enabling the uncontrolled printing of rubles. Inflation soared, goods disappeared from stores, people’s savings turned into piles of paper, and Soviet financial stability, long precarious, melted away.
The spiral was far from inevitable. Had the Kremlin been more cautious and pragmatic, it could have pushed radical market liberalization without dismantling the authoritarian system —much as China had done. Under the circumstances, however, an avalanche of problems and discontent shook loose. I lived in Moscow at the time and can recall the anger people felt toward Mr. Gorbachev. He combined ideological reformist zeal with political timidity and a refusal to use force, visionary foreign policy with an irksome inability to act with resolve when chaos broke out. He opened the country to change but seemed intent on imposing yet another utopia on the Soviet people, who were tired of utopias.
Many Russians—including provincial communists, nationalists and liberals—turned for leadership to Mr. Yeltsin, a man of action and a risk-taker. He ignited what was essentially a Russian separatist movement, pledging to fight “for democracy” but also for the supremacy of the core republic among the 15 entities that made up the Soviet Union. The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic declared its sovereignty and independence in June 1990 and asserted that Russian laws superseded federal laws.
By that time the Soviet “empire” was already battered in its borderlands: The Baltic republics wanted independence, and the South Caucasus exploded. And now Russia, the core of the Union, also wanted “out”—and to take with it all the oil, gas, gold and diamonds, as well as Moscow as a capital and even the Kremlin. Mr. Yeltsin became the first president in Russian history in June 1991, and his separatist course became a crucial factor in the dissolution of Soviet statehood. Meanwhile, Mr. Gorbachev’s approval dropped below 20%, as many Russians blamed him for their declining living standards amid his lofty talk.
At that time, many Soviet elites, including Mr. Yeltsin, traveled to Western countries and experienced “supermarket shock.” The opulence of Western consumer goods provided a painful contrast to the Soviet Union’s barren shelves and underscored the dismal failure of Mr. Gorbachev’s perestroika. As a result, thousands of Soviet elites began to defect from the Communist Party and stampeded to join a Western market dream. Along with market liberalism and anti-communism, Mr. Yeltsin and his entourage borrowed from the West an idea that the Soviet Union was “a totalitarian empire.” It mattered little to them that Mr. Gorbachev’s political liberalization had already dismantled and eroded the old communist system. They sought to destroy whatever remained of the Union, at any cost.
In August 1991, Mr. Gorbachev agreed to grant Mr. Yeltsin’s Russia far reaching authority so long as it remained part of a union (which was no longer communist). This new union would be a weak confederation, without the Baltic republics, dominated by an assertive Russia and most likely including a semi-independent Ukraine. Mr. Gorbachev’s ministers, whom he had not consulted, staged a coup to abort the agreement. The coup ended in a farcical surrender of the KGB, army and police to the defiant Mr. Yeltsin and his followers.
Mr. Yeltsin immediately seized power, pushed Mr. Gorbachev aside, banned the Communist Party and disbanded the central government. Eventually, he appropriated the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the press to print rubles. Ukraine voted for its independence in December, after which Mr. Yeltsin met with the Ukrainian leader and declared the Soviet Union null and void. He removed Mr. Gorbachev without ceremony, and nobody stood up to defend the man who ended the Cold War but lost his country.
An internal tug of war in Moscow dismantled the Soviet system and engulfed the federal state—not a tidal wave of triumphant liberalism. That truth was evident even in 1991. On the 30th anniversary of Mr. Gorbachev’s epic failure to reform the Soviet Union, many will no doubt raise a glass. Yet a Europe “whole and free” is divided again. Many Americans worry about the future of the liberal world order and even their own democracy. They can still make a difference through elections. Russians aren’t so fortunate: The demise of Gorbachev’s reforms served as a springboard for the rise of Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Zubok is a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union,” published by Yale University Press
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