Intellectual honesty about Russia

By assisting Ukrainians to defend their country, the United States for practical purposes has placed us in a war relationship with the Russian Federation. (Yes, that's the official name of Putin's country.) I realized I was more than a little ignorant of how that massive, historic Eurasian state got from being the threatening Soviet Union of my youth to its current iteration. When the USSR was breaking up in 1989 to 1991, I was busy with domestic campaigns and a season of tech assistance to emerging majority rule South Africa. So I've got a lot of recent history to fill in now that Russia becomes central to us again.

Moscow-born historian Vladislav Zubok, a professor at the London School of Economics, writes a blow-by-blow account of the previously unimaginable in Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. The unraveling of the second most powerful state in the world involved an intricate dance of actions and inactions, political calculations and miscalculations, internal jealousies and external pressures; Zubok catalogues these exhaustively.

From a slightly more distanced perspective, what happened to the USSR is simpler.

• The state-run command economy installed by Stalin in the 1930s, which endured largely intact to the end, failed to meet the needs or answer the aspirations of Russians and the Soviet empire's associated states.

• The Communist Party of the USSR didn't have a fix -- and its leaders and functionaries plodded on grimly under Stalin's successors without coming to terms with the country's stasis.

• Somehow this sclerotic system elevated Mikhail Gorbachev to its top job as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. Gorbachev proved to have more innovative ideas for resolving Soviet stasis than his predecessors, but was also ignorant of the nuts and bolts of economic policy and given to naive illusions about how state power worked. He opened up the system, but Zubok passes on a metaphor for what followed:

'He and his followers have no map; their compass is broken. They are under the impression that the ship is sailing westwards, whereas in reality it is heading south. As the voyage becomes more and more difficult, the captain decides that his crew are unreliable saboteurs. So he turns to inexperienced passengers keen to take part in the voyage and lets them deliberate among themselves on the best ways to reach the Promised Land’.

That a person so inept at using power could have risen to the commanding heights of the Soviet Communist edifice is the greatest mystery of it all. One might have expected an authoritarian system would raise up a determined, cunning autocrat (such as Mr. Putin.) Instead, according to Zubok, Gorbachev was a hapless dreamer.

• Boris Yeltsin, with a lot of help from the incompetence of other political figures and Western leaders led by President GHW Bush, pushed his way to the top of the heap in the crack up, pushing out Gorbachev. He served his own interests by facilitating the dissolving of the Soviet Union into a dysfunctional federation of states. He then ruled the Russia that remained intact. In this era, the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe had bolted for the exits when a chance opened; the Baltic nations followed. The resulting Russian Federation was much diminished, a far cry from the czarist Russian and Soviet empires. And further defections and discontents followed.

• Back in the early 1990s, as the dissolution was happening, the current conflict with an independent Ukraine was foreshadowed; fully 80 percent of Ukrainians voted in a referendum back then to split off from Russia. Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin understood then that Ukrainian nationalism was a genuine force. Putin's Ukraine delusions about Ukrainian affection for Russia have a long history.

All the details of this evolution are there in Zubok's volume. I have to admit, collapse still seems a bit incomprehensible in Collapse. The economic context comes closest to making some sense of it all, but the political actors don't quite compute for this reader. No wonder a Vladimir Putin was able to seize control of the resulting rickety Federation. Nonetheless I appreciated reading more background because Russia matters all the more at present.

Zubok has summarized his best explanation for his enormous effort:

‘My book is not an exercise in ‘how the evil empire could have been preserved.’ Rather it is an attempt to be intellectually honest about what happened’.