What Happened in the USSR and Why
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
What Happened in the USSR and Why Soviet Politics, 1917-1991 By Mary McAuley Oxford. 132 pp. $18.95. Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991 By R. Craig...
...Nation warns that Russia will remain a big power with its own security concerns...
...Or will this Everest be conquered...
...Martin's...
...McAuley tracks the familiar evolution of the Soviet Union in eight concise chapters...
...If so, what kind of system were they actually revolting against, as opposed to the illusions the official ideology had so long nourished...
...The new Russia will reject Communism's attempt to preserve the Russian empire and its wrongheaded plans of industrialization...
...These questions leap to mind when we think about past and present events in the former Communist realm...
...Will we be swept away by an avalanche...
...29.95...
...From Lenin's time to Gorbachev's he endeavors to view the Soviet position in the world the way the Kremlin leadership did...
...McAuley and Nation both demonstrate—McAuley more generally, and Nation in the course of exploring the successive phases of Soviet foreign policy—that the system changed over time in fundamental ways not necessarily intended by its founders or understood by its continuators...
...It is somewhere up in the clouds and no one knows how the ascent will end...
...the Communists merely thought more broadly and experienced more adversity...
...Each of these works has something distinct to say about the developments leading to the collapse of a fearsome power and the directions history may take in its wake...
...While McAuley and Nation survey the background to the watershed events of 1991, Felshman fills in the foreground...
...He doesn't explain how they managed to provoke and sustain an overwhelming alliance opposing them...
...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor emeritus of history, University of Vermont Was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 in fact a "new revolution," as the leaders of the upheaval and their admirers have repeatedly maintained...
...So is her explanation of the trouble Mikhail S. Gorbachev eventually created for himself by instituting reforms that helped to dissolve his own authority...
...his is a tale of bureaucrats, stand-patters versus innovators, maneuvering for position and power...
...Time will tell," he adds, "whither the Russian troika is now dashing, how the disintegrative forces unleashed by reform will eventually be contained, whether the new thinking [i.e., Gorbachev's dream of making the Soviet Union a "normal" country] ever expressed anything more than a misguided Utopia...
...None of the authors puts much stock in the old ideological world revolution theory...
...McAuley cautions that the post-Communist system is likely to be authoritarian, given the stultifying effect of Communist rule on democratic values that were not strongly rooted before the Revolution and the appropriation of the benefits of privatization by bureaucrats of the nomenklatura...
...276 pp...
...It may or it may not give up "the socialist ideal of equality, justice and freedom, an attempt which failed but which will come back on the agenda, not necessarily or even probably in Russia, in the 21st or 22nd century...
...Soviet Politics by Mary McAuley of Oxford University is a rapid overview of how the Communist system traveled from 1917 to the crisis of 1991...
...Felshman gives Gorbachev his due as a serious reformer, and hints that the temporary eclipse of Yeltsin in 1987 was the work of Yegor K. Ligachev and the conservative Communists, a blow that Gorbachev perhaps tried to soften...
...Felshman scarcely notes ideology at all...
...Each author sees Gorbachev as a leader who was trying to repudiate the Stalin era and get back to a version of Communism that was (to them as well as to him) both more genuine and more humane...
...Neil Felshman in Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and The Last Days of the Soviet Empire presents a nonexpert but nonetheless informed close-up by a skilled writer who originally plunged into the Russian scene to do theater history (on the first RussianAmerican musical comedy production...
...But (as does McAuley) Felshman overlooks the crucial episode in June 1987 where Yeltsin was passed over for elevation to full member of the Politburo, a snub that appears to largely explain Yeltsin's rancor toward Gorbachev ever since...
...22.95...
...McAuley recognizes that the Communist experience forged a "unique" society, but maintains that the specific ideology became only a "pretense...
...The story of Gorbachev's rise to the top, of his evolving reforms, and of his contest to the political death with Boris N. Yeltsin, is not new and makes no pretense of scholarly documentation...
...Craig Nation also covers the life span of the USSR, but with a special focus on "the Soviet quest for security...
...Still, Nation thinks, Russia could "contribute to the emergence of a more peaceful international order in which the forces of socialism and progress can evolve in their own way without the bad example of the USSR to constrain them...
...Black Earth, Red Star by Craig Nation, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University branch in Bologna, Italy, is a documented treatise on the twists and turns in Soviet defense policy from the Revolution to the August coup...
...The three books under review approach them from the different perspectives of their respective genres...
...More important, what kind of outcome should we expect, or possibly encourage...
...Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and The Last Days of the Soviet Empire By Neil Felshman St...
...This method brings out the priority of realpolitik in Soviet behavior...
...For Nation, the circumstantial and personal factors shaping Soviet behavior were essentially no different from security concerns in the rest of the world...
...The majority of outside historians of the Soviet era find that the closer they look, the harder it is to pin down any undeviating pattern of behavior from one period to the next...
...Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991 By R. Craig Nation Cornell...
...She is right about the depth of Gorbachev's constitutional changes in 1988-89, although she skips over the palace coup (the "September Revolution") he carried out to ram them through the Party's upper echelons...
...Felshman also concludes on an ambivalent note...
...341 pp...
...She shows how successive leaders responded to circumstances as they strove to build a strong state and a modern economy with misguided methods of command and coercion...
...It is well told, though, despite a few inaccuracies—such as crediting the Russian Republic with 80 per cent of the USSR's total population, when it was more like 50 per cent, and describing the "White House" that served as Yeltsin's headquarters through the August coup as one of the Stalin-style "wedding cake" buildings when it happens to be a clean modern structure built under Brezhnev...
...Her appraisals of Nikita S. Khrushchev the impulsive reformer, and of Leonid I. Brezhnev the gray bureaucrat, are particularly lucid...
...Nation and McAuley offer interesting speculations about the post-Communist future...
...He reminds us of the statement Yeltsin made in his autobiography about Gorbachev and reform "climbing a mountain whose summit is not even visible...
...its credibility slips, however, when Nation forgets Stalin's paranoia and opts for the revisionist explanation of the Cold War as an offended Soviet Union's response to American provocation...
...Both McAuley and Nation tend to question the new conventional wisdom that, because the 70-year Communist experiment did not succeed, there is nothing but a Reaganite-That cherite future in store for the ex-Soviet republics—even if it hasn't worked very well for us...
...The end product, by the 1980s, was a peculiar version of modern society, burdened by bureaucratic centralism, ideological sham, and the costly pursuit of superpower parity with the Western capitalist alliance...
Vol. 76 • January 1993 • No. 1
