Blame It on Pasternak

...The liveliest and most original (as its 51-column Index will signal to specialists) is The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire, a first-rate work of eyewitness and follow-up reporting by David Pryce-Jones, a former correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph...

...For example, he characterizes Budapest's 1989 decision to open its border with Austria, which precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Hungary's "revenge for 1956...

...One telling exchange the author reports took place in Moscow in "the relatively relaxed post-Stalin era," between himself and a "somewhat liberal" literary colleague...

...Baker's memoirs come to life in sharp vignettes of Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, separately or together at dozens of diplomatic encounters, attempting—often pairrfully—to adjust to fast-moving developments...

...But you're forgetting the effect all this would have on Poland" (at the time already much freer), the colleague rejoined...

...Grachev narrates Gorbachev's final quest for a new "union treaty" as a Passion Play ("Now Gorbachev would have to replace his [Nobel Prize] laurel with a crown of thorns...

...Poet Andrei A. Vozne-sensky, Matlock tells us, thought Reagan's visit to Moscow was "one of the greatest events in all of Russian history...

...What do you want...

...An end to Russian power...

...They did a few months later...

...Although Baker now feels sorry for Gorbachev (with Matlock, he believes the game was up in the fall of 1990, when Gorbachev rejected economic reform and embraced the hard-liners), he developed a personal affection for Shevardnadze that is quite touching...

...Prior to his elevation, Grachev had made a career in Soviet journalism and in the International Department of the Communist Party Central Committee...

...The essence of the USSR's symbiosis is captured in Andrei Sinyavsky's wonderful book, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural Histoty...

...29.50...

...Russia would be better off...

...Embassy to a second volume...

...However, his own hefty volume is enriched by much actual dialogue (presumably retrieved from memoranda of conversations), and by an emotional intensity that is surprising in a statesman with a public reputation for coldness...

...35.00...

...The villains are Boris N. Yeltsin, his "shadowy adviser" Gen-nady E. Burbulis, the leaders of non-Russian republics, and others who allegedly connived and doubtless acquiesced in the demise of the Soviet Union...

...As they were leaving the club, Sergei Zalygin, the editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, took Matlock aside and said: "Tell the President we agree with him...

...Gorbachev's 1987 book, Perestroika, makes embarrassing re-reading) David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb remains the best single book on the Russian revolution of 1988-91, not only for its vivid reporting but for its understanding of how much the revolution was driven by the unassimilated past (die unbe-waltige Vergangenheit that the Germans had to face after 1945...

...Like Gorbachev, Grachev simply cannot believe the Ukrainians "really" wanted to be independent of Moscow, whose rulers had brought them civil war, famine, the Chernobyl disaster, and the attempted coup of August 1991...

...Ambassador to the USSR from 1987 to 1991, gives us a long, leisurely account of those years and also chooses to carry the Russian story forward to early 1995...

...as if the empire of the Tsars had not been won by military conquest...

...If a thaw starts in Moscow, Poland will secede from the East bloc...

...Amalrik also worried aloud about the unpreparedness of the Soviet democratic movement to assume state power, but that is another story...

...As for the "whys," I found it easy to discount his Tory biases toward Russians, German liberals and detenteniks generally...

...He would then not have decided to defer treatment of the troubled U.S...

...And, after the Baltics, "the Ukraine and the Caucasus would go...

...The novel was not published in Russia till 1990, and David Lean's movie of it was only shown later...

...Amalrik understood the fragile symbiotic relationship among the concentric circles of Kremlin concern—the "decrepit" Party dictatorship at home, strong enough to stifle spontaneity but no longer capable of the vicious fanaticism of Lenin and Stalin...

...Most dramatic are the dialogues during the race for German reunification and the two-year, touch-and-go crisis over Lithuania...

...the restive peoples of Central and Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation...

...Kremlin "conservatives" playing for time, hoping to avert the final crisis in their own lifetimes, may have understood their real (dead-end) situation better than such Communist "reformers" as Nikita S. Khrushchev and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who proved intellectually incapable of devising a coherent strategy of extrication...

...In Autopsy on an Empire Jack F. Matlock Jr., an experienced Russian hand who was the U.S...

...the Cold War and the arms race that deformed the Soviet economy, perhaps irreparably...

...as if most of the non-Russian nations, including some not yet on the map, had not already bolted for independence once before, in 1918...

...Pryce-Jones is keenly aware of the historical and multinational dimensions of the events he narrates...

...the sullen non-Russian nations trapped in the USSR...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author...

...Each of the new books under review, though, adds other dimensions and/or different perspectives to Remnick's basic narrative...

...For your Pasternak you would let all of Russia crumble, Russia, which is now the greatest empire in the world...

...The Politics of Diplomacy, James A. Baker's memoirs of his years (1989-92) as Secretary of State, deals not only with the USSR and its successor states but with Iraq, the Middle East and various other foci of American foreign policy...

...It deals partly with Russia but mostly with the liberation movements in the former "satellites" and Baltic states...

...While Matlock's judgments are informed and sober, his book covers much the same ground as do Rem-nick's and a 1992 New York Times anthology of contemporaneous dispatches, The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire...

...His memoir is valuable less for what it discloses (a good deal of the book recounts Gorbachev's already meaningless audiences with foreign visitors) as for what it unintentionally reveals about the mentality of the perestroikists...

...222 pp...

...it took just four years, or three, depending on whether one traces its onset to late 1987, some time in 1988 or the early months of 1989...

...However, in a footnote to the U.S...

...It's a scandal that we haven't published The Gulag Archipelago yet...

...Sinyavsky argued that the state would not collapse if it allowed abstract art, if it published Boris Pasternak's DoctorZhivago, Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, and so on...

...The New Russian Tragedy," "An Empire Loses Hope " COMPARED WITH the fall of Rome, the collapse of the Soviet empire was merci-fully quick...

...To be sure, Matlock does have scores of illuminating tales to tell of his innumerable personal contacts with Gorbachev, his aides and other Soviet politicians, diplomats, journalists, and intellectuals...

...Grachev prefers not to recall (as Matlock does) the basically phony nature of Gorbachev's "union treaty" proposals in 1990 and early 1991...

...836pp...

...Final Days: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Soviet Union By Andrei S. Grachev Translated by Margo Milne Westview...

...On the last page of Doctor Zhivago (1957), Pasternak observed that "the portents of freedom filled the air throughout the postwar period, and they alone defined its historical significance...

...But his interlocutor "saw further": "After the East bloc, the Baltics would go?Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia...

...Gorbachev's press secretary during his last four months in the Kremlin was Andrei S.Grachev, who has produced a hagio-graphical account of those Final Days...

...Compared with the fall of the Romanov, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires during World War I, the implosion was peaceful, virtually bloodless...

...The author is most rewarding on the "whats...

...But he does tell us that, even at the State Council meeting of November 14,1991—two weeks before the predictable outcome of the decisive Ukrainian referendum on independence—Gorbachev was still pressing the republican leaders for a "unified state," for a central authority that "could administer the joint system of defense, carry out strategic missions, implement a united foreign policy...

...Pryce-Jones addresses two main questions: what actually happened (here he relies largely on his post faktum interviews with prominent as well as fortuitous participants), and why it happened (here his focus is both the individual countries and the central role of Gorbachev in not cracking down...

...So what," Sinyavsky replied...

...But back in 1967, when I first visited Andrei Voznesen-sky's apartment in Moscow and he turned on his tape recorder to foil the eavesdroppers, it played "Lara's Theme...

...Perhaps, in the larger scheme of things, Gorbachev's views never really mattered all that much...

...32.50...

...The circumstances suggest a high degree of inevitability and, in fact, Andrei A. Amalrik predicted the outcome in his 1969 book, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984...

...Indeed, Stalin had reason to fear that his presumptive heirs were "blind kittens...

...Specialists and ordinary readers might have been better served if, in a work perhaps half as long, he had concentrated on his personal memoirs and resisted the temptation to produce a history...

...687pp...

...edition, published in 1990, he added that the conversation "seems in retrospect less humorous than prescient...

...and push the country in the direction of a market economy...

...In contrast, the eminent Russian emigre historian of religious philosophy, Georgi Fedotov, recognized Ukrainian aspirations for freedom as legitimate and irresistible as early as 1947...

...Sinyavsky's original text, composed in 1988, described this as "the iron logic of the empire and the State...

...He describes, for instance, President Reagan lunching at the Soviet Writer's Club in 1988 and pointing out that the works of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn had still not been published...

...After Poland, Czechoslovakia would secede, and after Czechoslovakia, the entire East bloc would break up...

...Random...

...Since the "fall" he has returned to journalism...

...But we will soon...

...Grachev presents the USSR forged by Lenin and Stalin as the legitimate heir to the "organic" Russian civilization of the previous thousand years: as if the Bolsheviks had not murdered the Imperial family...

...Autopsy on An Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union By Jack F. Matlock Jr...

...His basic account of U.S.-Soviet relations mirrors that of Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, the coauthors of At the Highest Levels, for whom Baker seems to have been a primary source...

...But the greatest value of his book lies in the interviews with nearly all the "featured players," if not the top-billed "stars," of these dramas...

...The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989-1992 By James A. Baker III with Thomas M. DeFrank Putnam...