How the USSR Destroyed Itself
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
How the USSR Destroyed Itself_ Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union By David Sutler Knopf. 424pp. S30.00. The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Forty Years that Shook...
...Satter's method is to look at events through the eyes of Russian (and in one chapter Ukrainian) individuals, high and low, whom he has interviewed at one time or another...
...The doddering Soviet leader was so disoriented, he began reading confidential material before the journalists were excused from the conference room...
...From Stalin's time onward...
...The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Forty Years that Shook the World, from Stalin to Yeltsin By Fred Coleman St...
...Gorbachev, speaking in retirement, admits to him that he was too cautious, that he feared the example of Khrushchev's overthrow by the apparatus...
...There is a clear convergence between Coleman and Zubok and Pleshakov on the issue of Soviet relations with the outside world...
...A year earlier...
...Soviet writers were not permitted to present their own interpretations of Marxist theory, and for good reason: Its manipulation to legitimize the acts of those in power was the last thing that could be allowed to be called into question...
...Russia is certain to pose a serious challenge to the world in the years ahead...
...Martin's...
...Coleman maintains that each side magnified the threat of the other: "The Cold War was a war of illusions...
...Members of the last two groups, including such well-known writers as David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, were among the progenitors of The New Leader and initiated its long tradition of perspicacity about Sov iet reality...
...Therefore the West should resolutely push the expansion of nato and exploit party and regional differences in Russia (such as Chechnya), while somehow hoping for democracy and keeping up the pressure on the human rights front...
...Fred Coleman spices his story with interviews of every recent Soviet leader...
...Coleman answers that ever since Stalin's death Soviet Communism was in fact trapped in a contradiction between the urgency of reform and the impossibility of it...
...Despite a tendency to exaggerate the originality of their findings, the authors' observations on Soviet life and politics add poignant detail to the familiar historical outline...
...Satter shares the doubts about Yeltsin's democracy...
...29.95...
...Nikita Khrushchev, as others have said before, was "the last true believer...
...a correspondent for the Financial Times of London in the 1970s and '80s, then a writer for the Wall Street Journal and other news publications, describes the years of Soviet decline?from the middle of Leonid I. Brezhnev's era to the ouster of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the liquidation of the USSR in 1991...
...Having bested the vicious but pragmatic Beria and the cautiously careerist Malenkov in the post-Stalin power staiggle, Zubok and Pleshakov explain, Khrushchev-swung again to the revolutionary-imperial paradigm and its accompanying brinkmanship...
...Satter's firsthand accounts of corruption, privation and repression in the Brezhnev era jibe with myriad similar stories, making one wonder how the system survived as long as it did...
...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor Emeritus of Histoiy...
...Coleman also gives the first accurate picture of Gorbachev's assumption of power by a whisker in 1985: Immediately after the death of General Secretary Konstantin U. Chernenko, Gorbachev-called a pre-meeting of the Politburo...
...Its democracy, he feels, is a thin mask for arrogant political maneuvering and economic chaos...
...Honest observers will recount the tacts as they see them, even if those facts are at v ariance with their conventional assumptions...
...David Satter and Fred Coleman are Americans who between them have spent almost the whole past quarter-century cov ering the Soviet Union and its breakup...
...a formal meeting of the Politburo ratified the decision unanimously...
...then, after his deviousness and his grab for spheres of influence alarmed the West, he launched an era of "bipolar brinkmanship" that lasted through the Khrushchev years...
...This is life as it was experienced by those who got in trouble with a police state determined to preserve its power at any cost...
...As Zubok and Pleshakov put it, "Stalin's postwar foreign policy was more defensive, reactive and prudent than it was the fulfillment of a master plan...
...or the non-Communist Left of Social Democrats and Mensheviks...
...The simplest answer is also the most popular: Communism was throughout its history a fanatical "experiment" driven by a Utopian doctrine that brooked neither resistance nor criticism...
...Coleman, in Moscow off and on since 1964 for the Associated Press, Newsweek and U.S...
...when Stalin used the militant Yugoslavs to pressure other Communist parties into following his anti-Western line even as he was preparing to try to get rid of Marshal Josip Broz Tito...
...459pp...
...27.95...
...Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse " THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet empire is well on its way to becoming the subject of as many books as the whole 75 years of Communist rule...
...This was evident in his belligerence from the time of the 1960 U-2 spy plane affair to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when he thought he could prove that the Socialist system was able to compete with capitalism...
...The two journalists take the ideological understanding of Soviet behavior as their point of departure...
...What they have produced is the ultimate benchmark in Cold War revisionism, superseding generations of single-factor speculation about the role of ideology or power-grabbing in Soviet behavior...
...In a graphic Prologue on the forcible suppression of the Russian Parliament in October 1993, he declares that "the Russian tradition of settling disputes by force was reaffirmed...
...Yeltsin talks with him under a tree in the rain in 1989—when he literally had no office—to warn of coming threats to reform...
...David Satter, looking at the Soviet ordeal from the ground up, describes such diverse human tragedies as a coal miners' leader committed to tortures in a series of "psychiatric" hospitals...
...No matter...
...They highlight the Kremlin's sense of nuclear inferiority, and Khrushchev's oscillation between prudence and impetuousness in attempting to face down the U S. From Stalin'srulethrough Brezhnev's, Soviet society was in a state of siege caused less by outside threats than by considerations of internal power...
...running from the end of World War II to the toppling of Nikita S. Khrushchev...
...After Khrushchev's fall in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev and his successors—the psychological heirs of Malenkov—lapsed into a "senile Cold War" under a "multilateral permanent truce...
...For them, individual leaders are the key, including not only the boss but all the major Politburo members...
...University of Vermont...
...Both are angry men, too, venting their outrage over what they saw and heard but could not fully report under the old regime...
...In Brezhnev's time...
...That literal-ist view has been readily absorbed by Westerners lacking a good historical perspective on the peculiar evolution of theory and practice under successive Communist rulers...
...Many other fascinating pieces—from the archives, interviews, and the wealth of Soviet memoirs that have appeared since Gorbachev's glasnost—are added to the historical puzzle by Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov...
...They are young Russian historians at the Institute of the USA and Canada in Moscow who have made pioneering use of the Soviet diplomatic archives to produce a unique history of the Cold War...
...But one fundamental question is still not receiving adequate consideration: What actually was the system that suffered such an inglorious end...
...The choice depended on events and personalities, in the West as well as the East...
...All three of these books, in different ways, offer intriguing revelations about the Soviet regime...
...The power-politics assessment carries over in Coleman's narrative to a deep skepticism about post-Communist Russia under Yeltsin...
...Internationally...
...The result is one of the best narratives to date of the Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin years, along with the runup to them...
...Coleman addresses ideology more as a factor in the international power game...
...33Hpp...
...The next day...
...Inside the Kremlin s Cold War provides an interesting contrast to them in its assumptions and conclusions about the nature of the Soviet system as a whole...
...Expansion was driven by Great Power commitments (and often by stupidity and fear), rather than by ideology, ruthless determination and cunning...
...Satter...
...They confirm Beria's abortive scheme to give up Communism in East Germany in return for neutralizing the whole country, and the continuing Soviet fear of West German power underlying the Berlin crisis of 195N-61...
...Like a number of American conservatives, Satter links it to the 18th-century Enlightenment, in his eyes an amoral attempt to run a society without God (which leaves our Founding Fathers rather in limbo...
...This ideological illusion is dispelled by the Soviet regime's record of reinterpreting its tenets—particularly during Stalin's reign—and using totalitarian tactics to enforce the official line of the moment...
...Communist Party administrator Georgi M. Malenkov and police chief Lavrenti P. Beria were "cynics of power" and "techno-bureaucrats...
...Stalin shifted among his subordinates' views: Immediately following World War II he hoped for cooperation with the Allies...
...Coleman was present at a meeting between Chernenko and French President Francois Mitterrand...
...Individual Soviet leaders represented different terms in the complex equation: Off-and-on Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov and agitprop chief Andrei A. Zhdanov were ideologists, dedicated to the death struggle against capitalism...
...That authors looking back today at the USSR continue to differ about the meaning and role of ideology there is apparent in the three books under review—not only among them, but within each one...
...Coleman gives us top-level political journalism...
...News, ranges over the entire swath of domestic and foreign policy developments from Stalin's death in 1953 to the December 1995 elections, complete with a bibliography and notes...
...Although its subject matter is largely distinct from that of the Satter and Coleman works...
...Both, though, see Communism as a dogmatic secular religion, and hope Russia's wounds can be healed by the traditional form of religion...
...It would be fascinating to know Zubok and Pleshakov's thoughts concerning the post-Communist regime generally and its foreign relations in particular, but neither is hinted at in their present work...
...he draws on conversations with all the main Russian leaders and sets them in a clear context of unfolding events...
...In shackling the human energy it needed for its ambition to overtake the West, the Sov iet regime became its own worst enemy, and therein lay the seeds of its destruction...
...author...
...Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov are authors of a very different kind, in terms of their background as well as their approach and focus...
...His is a remarkable example of the human element a skilled reporter can capture, but it is highly episodic and needs to be read against a good history?Coleman's will do fine—in order to be fully meaningful...
...Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev By Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshukov Harvard...
...With three conservative members still away on trips, he got the nod as successor by four votes (including his own) against three...
...The Cold War, their books agree, was much more a matter of power politics than an ideological crusade...
...and unsuccessful border-crossers captured and brutalized by the KGB...
...The doctrinal basis of Soviet Communism has been taken for granted, too, by many who grew up in the system and assumed it was what it said it was, for better or worse...
...The people best able to appreciate the ideological cov er-up were those who had an independent interest in socialism and Marxism or in the early period of the So-v iet Union—usually Communist dissidents like the Trotskyists...
...family members trying to find the truth about arrested relatives...
...Satter's pages are replete with tales of the cruelty and stupidity of the Communist officialdom, while Coleman berates the West for not applying the pressure that, he believes, could have brought the Communist regime down decades before it finally collapsed...
...They supply illuminating details, for instance, about the formation of the Cominform in 1947...
...The former, apart from the World War II years, were more the excuse than the reason for maintaining a system of barracks socialism and totalitarian policing...
...Zubok and Pleshakov resolve the matter of doctrine versus power politics by joining the two elements: They posit a fused "revolutionary-imperial paradigm" that in turn rose and fell as a policy guide against the alternative line of pragmatic cooperation...
Vol. 79 • August 1996 • No. 5
