This is an impressive book: in the scope of its scholarly research, in the elegance of presentation, and in the creative integration of its complex subject matter. The collapse of the Soviet Union is a topic that will be studied and analysed for as long as there is life on this planet. The possible approaches to the subject are so diverse that it might be said that no single work can get the right balance; and if there were to be such a work, it would be a many‐tomed monster. So Wisla Suraska’s book is then quite extraoradinary. In a mere 150 pages of text she manages to dissect and persuasively analyse the dissolution of the Soviet Union from multiple perspectives: theories of totalitarian regimes, interpersonal relationships among Soviet leaders, Marxist theory, the rise of the KGB and concomitant decline of the Soviet army, international politics, and patronage networks within Soviet power structures and, of course, the personality of Mikhail Gorbachev. It makes for illuminating reading.
The West, of course, has consistently lionised Gorbachev, but Suraska puts the last Soviet leader firmly in context. He was, after all, a protégé of Yuri Andropov, a former General Secretary of the Communist Party, a former Chairman of the KGB, not to mention Soviet Ambassador in Budapest in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian Uprising. At least though Gorbachev had a loathing of bloodshed, but because he was “happily married and knew how to enjoy life”, he was “not made to run a despotic regime, let alone reform it”. But overall Gorbachev had an impossible task, for the fragmentation of the Soviet Union was, as it were, built into the system with its decades of accumulated “deep structural causes associated with the arbitrary nature of the regime”.
Suraska boldly draws apt, if startling, parallels between Gorbachev and Stalin in that both ran the country despotically, both downgraded the Communist Party by establising numerous committees and councils, and both reined in the power of the military: Stalin with his purges, show trials and the Gulag; Gorbachev, making use of the Matthias Rust affair as a pretext to clip its wings. Gorbachev’s actions had two significant consequences. First, it extended KGB political influence at the expense of its arch rival, the military. Second, the reform‐minded Soviet leader “certainly helped to make the world a safer place by undermining its greatest menace – the Soviet army”.
What emerges is a picture of the Soviet Union which reneged on its own founding principles by failing to deliver the world’s most advanced, scientifically constructed society. Suraska knows where to point the finger: it lay in great measure with a political failure to consolidate arbitrary rule, which was exercised by those in power virtually without check, and thus to create a civic society. It lay too with a failure on the part of the Communist Party to create more efficient administrative structures to support an industrial society. These failings led to a terrible consequence. The Soviet Union merely succeeded in demodernising itself, and so when it collapsed, it left hardly any worthwhile infrastructure out of which to build a new society. No wonder the writer Solzhenitsyn has declared that the USSR had forfeited the entire twentieth century, and at what cost. The human sacrifice runs into many millions even if one discounts the 20 million or so Soviet citizens who perished fighting Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Materially, Russia’s industries are for the most part mangled wrecks; its agriculture desolation.
No wonder Russians – perhaps in a sense especially Russians among all the former citizens of the Soviet Union – are at a loss to comprehend what happened to their country. As Suraska points out, most educated Russians are aware of the terrible things committed in the Stalin era and indeed practically every person over 50 has some kind of horror story about himself or a member of his family. She notes that:
When Russians are asked , “Who did it?”, the most common answer is, “The system did it.” But can a system do anything by itself? Next one will hear that the real culprits were not Russians: Dzerzhinsky [the founder of the Soviet secret police] was Polish, Stalin was a Georgian, Trotsky was Jewish, and so on. Even such a ludicrous line of argument cannot be pursued too far since it was Lenin who handed power to these baleful foreigners to do what they did. Wasn’t Lenin a Russian? Who are the Russians anyway?
These are questions that Russians cannot escape if they wish to continue as a political nation.
It is rather to be hoped that Suraska’s fine volume will be translated into Russian, for the book raises issues for Russians who are prepared to confront “the moral question [which] is the most difficult and the most urgent”. For Russians, above all the Soviet Union, disappeared, and virtually overnight. They may not share Suraska’s analysis, which draws on both a wide range of theories and probes the background of “mysterious” occurrences. For example, why did not the Soviet Union invade Poland in the early 1980s, why did the USSR simply let Eastern Europe go? To these issues Suraska brings important insights.
How the Soviet Union Disappeared is cogently argued. Its immediate appeal will be too specialists in Soviet/Russian history and international relations, but it has messages too for a wide range of social theorists of whatever persuasion, especially those who are interested in power in totalitarian societies that do not fit the normal theories. I wonder though if there will be other readers who like me now have the impression that the really interesting Soviet leader was not Gorbachev, but his patron Yuri Andropov.
