Perhaps not the most gripping narrative on the fall of the Soviet Union (the author is an academic), Kotkin's book nonetheless merits reading because it advances an important thesis about the causes of the collapse: the Soviet Union could probably have survived, albeit as an increasingly poor and dysfunctional nation (cf. North Korea), if Gorbachev had not fatally undermined it. The last General Secretary believed, as Kotkin notes - and as Gorbachev himself admitted at the time - in the dream of "socialism with a human face.” He undertook a fundamental remaking of the Soviet government, including the creation of a parliament with real power, in the name of this dream. When the various satellite states and soviet republics decided to use perestroika as a justification for leaving the Union, Gorbachev's own principles prevented him from sending in the tanks, and the hard-line communists who opposed him were all too old, marginalized, or alcoholic to overthrow him. The hyperinflation, widespread poverty, and outrageous corruption that beset Russia in the post-Soviet '90s represented, Kotkin further argues, a continuation of the institutional breakdown of the 1980s. Vladimir Putin was in a sense the first genuinely post-Soviet ruler of Russia, insofar as he ended the institutional dysfunction of the Russian parliament and began cracking the heads of the most egregiously corrupt oligarchs. ARMAGEDDON AVERTED was published in 2003 and it would be interesting to see an afterward on events since Putin's rise to power.

A thrilling story of idealism and the tragic quest of making a just and free society.
There are many lessons to be taken from the fall of Soviet Union, especially the current political climate, in which we are now facing very similar problems of the post-WW2 world.

This book goes by very fast, and I will have to listen to it again. But I am going to put some quotes here for my reflections.

"Liberalism is more fundamental to successful state building than democracy. Democratically elected office-holders, in multiparty systems, often behave like dictators unless they are constrained by a liberal order, meaning the rule of law"

"liberalism entails not freedom from government but constant, rigorous officiating of the private sphere and of the very public authority responsible for regulation. In short, liberalism means not just representative government but effective government"

"Civil society and a liberal state were not opposites but aspects of the same phenomenon. That government was not the enemy of liberty but its sine qua non. That private property without good government was not worth what it otherwise would have been. In short, that good government was the most precious thing a people could have"

"Remember the mesmerizing maps of Eurasia covered with miniature tanks, missile launchers, and troops representing the Soviet military that appeared on American television for Congressional debates over Pentagon appropriations? This hyper-militarized USSR, during the troubles of perestroika, did not even attempt to stage a cynical foreign war to rally support for the regime. Remember the uproar over Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait—right amid the Soviet drama—and his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction? Iraq’s capabilities were trivial next to the Soviet Union’s. Remember the decades of cold-war warnings, right through the 1980s,about the danger of a preemptive Soviet first strike? Even if Soviet leaders had calculated that they were doomed,they could have wreaked terrifying havoc out of spite, or engaged in blackmail. Remember the celebrated treatise equating the Soviet and Nazi regimes? The Nazi regime, which never acquired atomic weapons, held on to the last drop of blood. Remember the wrath that Franklin Roosevelt incurred for ‘handing over’ Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta? Roosevelt had not a single soldier on the ground. Gorbachev had 500,000 troops in Eastern Europe, including 200,000 in Germany after the unification. The Warsaw Pact command and control structure remained operational right through the end of 1991"

"How much worse it all might have turned out, if a strong leader and faction of the Moscow elite had shown ruthless determination to uphold the empire, or, even after the situation had ceased to be salvageable, had indulged in malice or lunacy. Much had changed in the world since the 1940s, but the bloodbath of Yugoslavia’s demise in the 1990s certainly gives pause. Historically,such a profoundly submissive capitulation, as took place in the Soviet case, was a rarity"

" Long-distance trains and urban mass-transit systems still functioned, but Soviet-era hospitals and schools were decaying or closing, while power grids were ageing and not being replaced. In more remote areas,Soviet-built airports were overgrown with weeds and riv-er boats rusted along once popular routes to dilapidated summer camps...Life expectancy at birth was in decline (essentially since the 1970s), and the population was shrinking. Untreated toxic wastes continued to flow into contaminated rivers and water tables "

"Meanwhile, police troops of the Interior Ministry had ballooned to twenty-nine divisions, and the tax police as well as the new Emergency Ministry personnel were militarized, like US SWAT teams, as if Russia were fighting a society-wide domestic war. "

"In fact, its hundreds of thousands of nuclear,chemical, and biological weapons scientists and technicians, acting with or without the government’s blessing,could have altered the strategic balance of any world region. ‘Only the intense pride and patriotism of Russian nuclear experts has prevented a proliferation catastrophe’, concluded a team of concerned scientists, who added that, ‘virtually everything else in Russia is for sale’ "

"This turn of events may have exposed, and even helped unloose, the instability inherent in the second world economy. Capitalism is an extremely dynamic source of endless creation, but also of destruction. Interconnections bring greater overall wealth but also heightened risks. And the USA—bearing a titanic national security establishment not demobilized after thecold war, exhibiting a combustible mixture of arrogance and paranoia in response to perceived challenges to its global pretensions, and perversely disparaging of the very government institutions that provide its strength—makes for an additional wild card. "

Great overview of how the reform of the Soviet Union turned into its dissolution. The role of the US in carrying out this process is not completely understood by the population as a whole. By ensuring cheap oil through much of the 1980s, Moscow lost a critical source of revenue to fund its 1970s adventurism. Then when the edifice collapsed, Washington claimed that it was the military arms race. While the west did try and export democratic values in the aftermath, as the author demonstrates absence of liberal values like respect for property values and the civil rights and welfare of the citizenry, doomed Russia to a return to autocracy. An important book for anyone interested in the end of the Cold War.

This is a very perceptive short summary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author has quite an insightful analysis of the subject. However, the book lacks concrete examples, personalities and incidents, so that the subject remains curiously abstract.

He attributes of the collapse, in part, to the ideological optimism of the actors about the possibility of a humanistic socialism.

Hubristic world powers, present company included, had best take warning

Финоменальная книга!!!!
Какой же он молодец!!!!
Взгляд на события транзита СССР в Россию.

Сторонний взгляд точнее, беспристрастнее. Коткин - ученый и он фиксирует событие как беспристрастный наблюдатель.

Интересна оценка наших бывших руководителей - Ельцина и Горбачева.
И начинаешь понимать, что транзит не завершен. Что что революция, начатая, видимо, и до 1970 года, не закончена. Россия еще идет по своему пути, только нащупывает свою идентичность.

A relatively quick read that gives an overview of the collapse of the Soveit Union.

Both more and less than what I expected.
Kotkin is almost jubilant about the "creative destruction" called privatization, and he does not provide enough coverage of the awful oligarchs that pilfered most of the old USSR's remaining economic assets.
Even though he mentions a few of the irregularities that married the economic liberalization process.
I also think he massively underestimates the role of Ronald Reagan's policies and influence.
He also parrots a lot of the same, tired globalist neoliberal economic mantras that are frankly obsolete.

Unfortunately, this book is summed up in its first chapter. Plugging through to the end is worth it, though, there are tidbits and stories that flesh out the experience. What makes this worth the read is that the story doesn’t end with the collapse of the U.S.S.R., it goes forward and explains the troubles Russia still faced in the future. It’s insightful, well written and full of good information.

Very readable account that is focused almost entirely on Russia (I had hoped for more on the other republics). Kotkin is perhaps too keen to avoid the idiocies of right (THE EVIL EMPIRE CAN NEVER REFORM AND MUST BE DESTROYED!!!!) and left (AMERICAN ECONOMISTS LED DIRECTLY TO RUSSIAN OLIGARCHY!!!!), and so ends up with the strange position that whenever the USSR ended, it had to lead to massive theft and suffering. You can't blame anyone--not evil Russkies, not evil neoliberals--for what happened. Now, okay, I don't want to blame Milton Friedman for the state of Russia today, but I'm also pretty sure that things could have gone differently.

Speaking of Putin, the epilogue is deeply depressing reading, all about how Putin and Medvedev could make everything better, and how magnanimous of was of Putin to give up the presidency. Perhaps time for a new epilogue, or just time to re-issue the book without any epilogue whatsoever.

Sovietology for the 21st century. While making some valid and intriguing oints here and there, for most of the book the author gives vent to his dislike of socialism. Not just soviet socialism, mind, but any form of socialism. Plus, he can't hide his intense dislike of Russia. I would have given it just the one star, but it's rather well-written so it gets two stars from me

Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted is the story of the Soviet collapse written by a scholar of Soviet history. I was most interested in his views about the role played by Gorbachev. According to this author, Gorbachev was a brilliant tactician but a lousy strategist who basically brought down one the greatest empires in history because he couldn’t think clearly. It would have been very easy for the top brass to have followed a Sampsonian way, and just tear down the temple over everyone’s ears. It would have been very easy for the collapse to have turned nuclear. That it didn’t happen is also attributable to Gorbachev to some extent. Then the story of the Yeltsin years is even more gripping. I always assumes the fire sale privatization of key Russian assets, in which the future oligarchs bought them for an average of 1/40 of their actual value was not just insiders taking advantage of a weak state, but an actual policy to end state control over the economy. I was incensed by the way the second round of privatizations consisted of banks run by oligarchs buying the assets whole using the actual funds deposited by the governments and using the assets as collateral. The insignificant stature of Putin at this time and how he played a weak hand masterfully was also very interesting.

This is an interesting book written shortly after Putin came to power, which attempts to show that the collapse of the USSR was caused by a number of factors - endemic to the system, that would have inevitably caused it collapse. The author claims that Khrushchev and Gorbachev similarly tried to reform the system - both were idealists of sorts. The truth, according to the author, is that it was only by abandoning the system could the system be reformed. The humanism and idealism of the Revolution could only be actualized by the dismantling of the system of centralism, which was based on an authoritarian political system, that was very democratically limited. The strictly top-down system could never be humanist, even if there was guaranteed employment, cheap housing, and so forth, because there were no structures protecting the individual, such as a strong independent and fair judiciary, or a free press.

The author repeats a couple of times that the West was lucky that no-one in the chaotic post Soviet days decided to use force to try to avert the collapse - given the USSR's nuclear arms/rockets/etc, the result could have been a global catastrophe.

Quotes from the book:
"...reform was collapse, and ...the collapse would not be overcome for quite some time..." "...less promising people...fought violently over the massive spoils of Communist-era offices, state dachas, apartment complexes, and vacation resorts." "...the sudden onset, and ...inescapable prolongation, of the death agony of an entire world comprising non-market economics and anti-liberal institutions." "...why did the ...Soviet elite...fail to defend either socialism or the Union with all its might?" "...how and why the Soviet elite destroyed its own system..." "...in October 1973, the Arabs and Israelis ...went to war for the fourth time." "...wen Egypt agreed to a ceasefire in late October, the coordinated cutbacks in oil output too, on a life of their own." "Oil prices rocketed up 400 per cent in 1973..." "Between 1973 and 1975, US GDP dropped 6 per cent, while unemployment doubled to 9 per cent." "The US's entire industrial heartland of the eight Great Lake states --Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, as well as Pennsylvania-- was devastated." "...the end not of industry per se, but a wrenching changeover to what was called flexible manufacturing." "...stagflation--high unemployment (stagnation) plus inflation--confounded America's leading economists, and Watergate paralyzed and disgraced Washington." "The USSR had risen to become the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas..." "In the 1990s...the oil (and gas) money would go into private offshore bank accounts and hideaways on the Spanish and French Rivieras." "If socialism was not superior to capitalism, its existence could not be justified." "Economic growth in the US...hit a phenomenal 52.8 per cent in the 1960s; ... median family income rose 39.7 per cent over the decade." "Already in the early 1950s, and especially after ...Khrushchev had denounced Stalin in 1956 and Poland an Hungary had erupted in revolt, Eastern Europe weighed down the Soviet leadership." "Relative to the West, the planned economy performed inadequately, but it employed nearly every person of working age, and the Soviet standard of living, though disappointing, was tolerable for most people (given what they did not know owing to censorship and travel restrictions)." "...many party officials nonetheless retained considerable faith in the possibilities of socialism and the party itself." "No other industrial country has ever experienced the devastation that befell the USSR in victory. The Nazi onslaught of 1941-5...leveled more than 1,700 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages, and obliterated about one-third of the USSR's wealth. Soviet military deaths numbered at least seven million..." "Soviet civilian deaths probably numbered between seventeen and twenty million, making its combined human losses near twenty-seven million. Almost an equal number of people were left homeless. Another two million perished from famine between 1946 and 1948." "...the war broke the regime-imposed isolation. Millions of Red Army soldiers advanced beyond Soviet borders, and most were stunned by what they saw." "This substantial population with first-hand experience of the outside world frightened the Soviet leadership." "Even returning POWs and slave laborers...were made to pass through special screening; many disappeared in the ...Gulag." "Few inhabitants inside the Soviet Union learned of the revolts in the Gulag or of the forest-dwelling anti-Soviet partisans." "...the party's grand historical teleology had to be abandoned. As the predicted date of 1980 for the transition to Communism passed, ideologues replaced Khrushchev's Utopian promise with the here and now of 'developed' socialism." "National themes did become ...more prevalent in the non-Russian republics, paralleling the 'national Communism' of Eastern Europe, but nationalism was nowhere allowed to displace the official socialist ideology..." "Russia's ...revolution, having originated in a ...quest for egalitarianism, produced an insulated privileged class increasingly preoccupied with the spoils of office for themselves and their children. The existence of a vast and self-indulgent elite was the greatest contradiction in the post-war Soviet Union, and the most volatile." "...the reformist generation dilemma: how to bridge the gap between socialism's ideals and its disappointing realities, within the context of the superpower competition." "...the Soviet steel industry...produced 160 million tons annually, far more than any other country." "...the economy's most advanced sectors (defense), whose exports might have paid for purchasing consumer goods, were targeted for drastic downsizing." "Compared with their parents and grandparents, the Soviet population was better fed, better clothed, and better educated. Comparisons, however, were were made not with the Soviet past...but with the richest nations in the world, and both the leadership and population expressed increasing impatience." "Widespread fictitious economic accounting was foiling planners to the point where the KGB employed its own spy satellites to ascertain the size of the Uzbek cotton harvest, but the spy agency itself suffered from internal falsifications." "All previous life was revealed as a lie." "...the same process that had targeted Stalin began de-sanctifying Lenin, meaning the Soviet system in toto." "Most people under the age of 30 -- one quarter of the Soviet population--were simply not interested in reforming socialism." "...most party officials, even those who had reformist inclinations, did not know how to address a public reconfigured as voters." "...with the party's central control mechanism [Secretariat] shattered and its ideology discredited, and the tentacles of the planned economy disrupted, Gorbachev discovered that the Supreme Soviets of the republics began to act in accordance with what he had unintentionally made them: namely, parliaments of de facto Independent states." "...although the gargantuan KGB collected voluminous information, glasnost removed people's fears and neutralized its capacity to intimidate." "In 1980-1, during Solidarity, the Soviet politburo pressured the Polish leadership to crack down, but internally Moscow recognized that its ability to implement the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine--the use of force to maintain loyal socialist regimes in Eastern Europe--was exhausted." "For four years, [Gorbachev] ...strut the world stage like a grand statesman transforming the international system, imagining his country would soon be accepted as part of the West." "...Gorbachev had never planned to 'lose' the [Warsaw] bloc. Overtaken by events, he began pressing for guarantees that NATO would not absorb East Germany or expand eastwards. But, in May 1990 US President George Bush pressed the issue of German unification within NATO." "...the Soviet leader's aides pitched the 'sacrifice' of Eastern Europe as essential for improving relations with the West, which they argued was itself an imperative, since the USSR could no longer afford the superpower competition." "Running in the Moscow district, Yeltsin won election to the 1989 Congress in a 90 per cent landslide." "The KGB conducted an international smear campaign against [Yeltsin] ... and tapped his telephones..." "...in March 1991... With an 80 per cent turnout, tree-quarters of the electorate supported a 'renewed Union.'" "...the Union's demise was 'national in form, opportunist in content'..." "...the central elite, rather than the independence movements of the periphery ...cashiered the Union." "About 90 per cent voted in favor [of independence for Ukraine in a referendum on 1 December 1991]; there were large pro-independence majorities in the ethnically Russian provinces of Eastern Ukraine." "...even ideologue[s]...got swept up in the pursuit of property. The KGB and the army began wheeling and dealing commodities... The Central Committee, still railing against the market, also established private businesses. ...officials signed over to themselves deeds for state dachas, vehicles, anything under their watch, at bargain prices, if they paid at all." "As... a rapid turn to the market became official policy in Russia, the seizure of the state-owned wealth of the USSR evolved into frenzy. Most ...peole had anticipated the onset of American-style affluence, combined with European-style social welfare. After all, these were the rosy images of the outside world, transmitted by glasnost, which had helped destroy what was left of their allegiance to socialism. But instead, the peole got an economic involution and mass impoverishment combined with a headlong expansion of precisely what had helped bring down the Soviet Union--the squalid appropriation of state functions and state property by Soviet-era elites." "Nothing revealed the bankruptcy of the late Soviet Union more than the bankruptcy of post-Soviet Russia." "...critics bitter about the fall of the Union accused Washington of a ...'global plot' ... to strangle Russian industry." "Inflation declined from 2,250 per cent in 1992, to 840 per cent in 1993, to 224 per cent in 1994, and by September 1996 to an annualized rate near zero..." "Russia's...transition...was a chaotic, insider, mass plundering of the Soviet era..." "...Russian officials used their positions of public power to pursue their private interests." "...vastly greater sums of capital fled Russia than the IMF ever loaned to it. Most large-scale exporters violated Russia's currency repatriation laws, but more nimble ones took advantage of the tax treaty that the Soviet Union had signed with Cyprus--... as a means tor the KGB to channel clandestine funds--which no one had repealed." "...the gas monopoly...was granted tax exemptions worth $4 billion in 1993 alone. Staggering fortunes were amassed, beginning at the top and extending down intricate 'loot chains' to the lowliest beneficiaries." "The lawlessness throughout officialdom was paralleled by an increase in lawlessness on the streets." "...criminal groups...working for the state engaged in the greatest extortion." "...this was 'pre-corrupt', a condition whereby everyone to varying degrees was a violator, but only the weak were targeted."
"'Loans for shares', a poorly disguised, cynical ploy to create a top business elite loyal to the Yeltsin regime (facing re-election), discredited privatization even among many of its defenders." "...thousands of Soviet-era firms were looted independently of their ownership status or the privatization process. Privatization did little to enable rank-and-file shareholders to defend their paper property rights." "Russian GDP, in a mere half-decade did shrink a eye-popping 50 per cent, according to official measurements." "...the Soviet legacy worked as a hindrance to full marketization, and as a safeguard against utter catastrophe. Soviet-era industry still dominated Russian employment, but major shifts occurred. For one thing, two-thirds of GDP was now in private hands." "...Russia's banking system functioned not to make household savings available for productive investment but, periodically to wipe savings out, and, with a big invisible hand from Western banks, to facilitate extensive money laundering and capital flight. Perhaps $150 billion of domestic capital fled Russia during the 1990s, an amount close to four times the IMF loans extended as 'aid.'" "...all post-Communist countries, whether subjected to state-led gradualism or elements of shock therapy, saw GDP fall off a cliff." "Democracy came to Russia atop the debris of the Soviet Union's expressly anti-liberal state, the institutional twin of the industrial planned economy." "Democratically elected office-holders, in multiparty systems, often behave like dictators unless they are constrained by a liberal order, meaning the rule of law." "The Soviet Union was governed by men, not laws. That was the very reason the Soviet executive power had an extremely difficult time governing itself." "...individuals elected or appointed to positions of state authority pursued private gain...the commitment to the public good that had existed in the Soviet Union--for health care, education, children's summer camps--eroded...demoralizing rather than empowering society." "...one could trace a movement over the years 1989-94 of officials from high Communist Party posts first to elected regional soviets, then to the new regional executive bodies, which appropriated the local Soviet-era Communist party headquarters sporting the best offices and communication equipment." "For the post-Soviet KGB, which still occupied the same armada of buildings in historic central Moscow, there were no more ideological nonconformists to persecute." "Anti-terrorist (and terrorist) operations claimed substantial man hours, but so did clandestine surveillance on the state elite, and the compilation of damaging dossiers on businessmen and politicians for cash." "...the Presidential Security Service (PSS) ...established a private firm, which specialized in the blackmail of the president's enemies and the assistance of court favorites." "Russia's entire economy ($350 billion) was valued at little more than total US health are fraud." "Its elites were under constant, illegal surveillance..." "...even Russia's best newspapers and TV stations yielded their integrity for cash and political expediency..." "...the October revolution was accompanied b deeply felt ideals, which endured all the nightmares, and ... a quest to recapture those ideals would not only arise from within the system, but, given the above-mentioned institutional arrangements [such as the Communist Party being indispensable to the integrity of the Union] destroy it." "...in 1967...[Gorbachev and his Czech friend Zdenek Mlynar] ...talked of a renewed socialism devoid of Stalinist 'distortions', the enchanted fable for the educated, Marxist idealists of their cohort." "...Gorbachev and his Establishment quest for humane socialism ...emerged from the soul of the Soviet system." "...the institutional dynamic that tied the fate of the Union to the fate of socialism--the party's simultaneous redundancy and indispensability to the federal Soviet state." "'Blame' for Russia's 'failure' was craftily shifted to the International Monetary Fund (whose organizational chart had the US Treasury Secretary at the top)." "Life expectancy at birth was in decline (essentially since the 1970s), and the population was shrinking." "In 1983, one perceptive scholar, surveying the hollowing of Communist ideology, predicted that Russian nationalism 'could become the ruling ideology of state'."