This is the most bittersweet, most astonishing story in history, I think, so I’m compelled to read books about it, telling me the same story which I already know, again and again.

I don’t want to repeat the same things I said in my reviews of Revolution 1989 by Viktor Sebestyen or Down with Big Brother by Michael Dobbs. So I’ll be brief, as this excellent no nonsense book by Stephen Kotkin is.

Why do I think this is such a towering, Shakespearian tragedy? Well – it’s the almost completely peaceful (that’s the sweet part) decline, fall and death of the only serious alternative to capitalism (that’s the bitter part).

The USSR killed communism so very dead that any further alternative to capitalism might take another 500 years. And the guy who can most take the credit for this was a true believer in communism. For irony fans, this is a real treat.

By the 1980s Stalin had been dead for 30 years so he couldn’t be blamed any more. Thing was, the Soviet economy just didn’t work. And they had this horrible period where their leaders were walking corpses and kept dying. Brezhnev died in 1982, Andropov in died 1984 and Chernenko died in 1985. So they went for Gorbachev, who was 54, instead of another decrepit octogenarian.
Gorby was a true believer. He thought communism could be saved if only he could get it back on the right track.

Only a few of Gorbachev's politburo colleagues shared his socialist romanticism, but even fewer matched his craftiness.

He came up with glasnost (let’s be honest about the USSR) followed by perestroika (let’s reorganise the whole economy). But

Glasnost turned into a tsunami of unflattering comparisons

And perestroika reorganised communism into the grave.

Gorbachev served up the severed head of his superpower on a silver platter and still had to employ all his artifice to cajole two US administrations to the banquet.

SOVIET JOKE

There was a rather solemn joke told in the 1980s.

Lenin is on a train. The train grinds to a halt. Lenin jumps up and orders everyone out of the train, organising them into parties to try to push the train forward on the tracks.

Stalin is on a train. The train grinds to a halt. Stalin orders the train driver to be shot on the spot.

Brezhnev is on a train. The train grinds to a halt. Brezhnev pulls down the window shades and looks steadily at his companions and says “Gentlemen, let us assume the train is still in motion.”

SOVIET MAPS

How dishonest were the Soviets? In the 1980s:

Even geographical locations that could be indicated on Soviet maps were still being shown inaccurately, to foil foreign spies, as if satellite imaging had not been invented, while many cities were entirely missing

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL, PART 16

The USSR had more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy or blackmail the world, and a vast storehouse of chemical and biological weapons. The Soviet Union also had more than five million soldiers, deployed from Budapest to Vladivostok… It experienced almost no major mutinies in any of these forces. And yet they were never fully used – not to save a collapsing empire, nor even to wreak havoc out of spite.

A major riddle persists : why did the immense Soviet elite, armed to the teeth with loyal internal forces and weapons, fail to defend either socialism or the Union with all its might?

Yes, for once in human history the guns were not turned on the people. When a collection of drunken old farts tried to stage a coup to get rid of Gorby and reinstitute communism they made one tv announcement and the people saw what they were, which was drunken old farts, and ignored them, and they all slunk away. Followed quickly by the USSR, if a mighty empire can be said to slink away.

It's quite a complicated story and Prof Kotkin tells it very well.

Concise summary of the fall of the Soviet Union with a focus on how this happened without the bloodshed that might be expected from an alliance with immense military power. The analysis focus on the role of instututions and the tensions between the state and the communist Party. It explains that Gorbachev's shifts towards democracy and a few market economy lacked the liberal instututions (such as rule of law) that allow democracy and free markets to function, and they were also constrained by the unwillingness of Soviet elites to abandon either socialist dreams or corrupt practices. Ultimately the USSR was hollowed out as it chose not to militarily enforce communist control on the fractures within the union. When a coup was attempted by party conservatives, it was botched.

Although the analysis is interesting, the concise in length is not always replicated in the writing, which is often dense, prone to mid-sentence digressions, flashy but opaque turns of phrase and standalone sentences full of jargon.

An analysis of the Soviet Union's collapse that holds Gorbachev principally responsible, since the author holds that the USSR could have continued for quite some time with a Communist Party in charge if that government was willing to continue to use violence and control information to secure the status quo. The economic situation was not good but not a crisis, the population was sufficiently content.

I found the book hard going as it was not a gripping presentation, more for the specialist than the general reader. It assumes knowledge of the major (and minor) political players (fortunately I had just read The Invention or Russia, which explained clearly who these people were, though I didn't always remember well enough). Also, the first two-thirds of the book have a dismissive tone toward other interpretations that I found unappealing - his bibliography, however, lists books specifically for offering different interpretations. The last third was the most interesting to me. I give it 2 1/2 stars not for flaws of content or argument, but because I didn't enjoy it and struggled to keep going.

It was really hard for me to follow this author. I had to reread a decent chunk of it. While he covered everything I wanted to learn about (how did the USSR collapse, how did they transition to a market economy, what was the relationship between Gorbachev and Yeltsin), I didn't learn as much as I wanted to learn on the topic because it was hard for me to understand him. He assumed the reader had a moderate level of understanding of the Russian political system and the different roles of government officials. He would use sarcasm and sometimes used analogies for things that weren't really comparable. It's too bad because he's clearly very knowledgeable.

Readable and interesting. An overview of the final years of the Soviet system, its peaceful dismantling, and the struggles and gradual improvement since.

Virtually everyone seems to think that the Soviet Union was collapsing before 1985. They are wrong. Most people also think the Soviet collapse ended in 1991. Wrong again.

Just over thirty years ago today (December 26, 1991), the Soviet Union was no more. It was 74 years old. In this summary, Kotkin states that the causes of death were not just the results of increased military expenditure by the United States and the shortcomings of a centrally-planned economy - he says that the Soviet Union was "lethargically stable" as late as 1985 - but Gorbachev's attempts of reform, and consequently a system that was beyond reform.

Why reform? Why wasn't there an elite pushback until much later? The first two chapters describe this. The Soviet Union's ideals were borne out of a competition, or an experiment to provide a system that was in some way superior to capitalism - and if that was underachieved, then why bother? Kotkin provides a broad overview of 'why' here, but also including some of the grotesque details of ordinary life. The surge in oil prices of the 1970s, combined with the discovery of massive oil fields, provided an influx of foreign currency that kept the Soviet Union going for longer - but allowed structural reforms to be delayed or ignored - the strains of maintaining satellite states, or environmental degradation, a decaying healthcare system, and a lack of consumer goods built up further.

Enter Gorbachev. He was, to quote Milovan Djilas, a "true believer". He would not be satisfied with what was. Yet Kotkin also raises the point that the general public also believed, and that no one had any idea of what would transpire over the next twenty or thirty years.

The next two chapters concern the Soviet Union's move to a "halfway house". The vast state-owned complexes had autonomy in quantity production, but not in cost on prices setting. Quality of goods was still poor, owing to outdated equipment and the maintenance of factory complexes, lumber yards that should have been shuttered years ago, and then suddenly fell apart. Imagine a country where everywhere had the yawning economic collapse of Gary Indiana, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, or Springfield, Ohio in the 1990s and it did not ever end.

In Kotkin's telling, the risk of reform was that there was no safety net, no ideological cushion to break the fall. Khrushchev, in his experiments in the 1950s, could point to a return to "Leninism", where Gorbachev pointed to the entirety of the system itself. The empire crumpled in on itself by 1991, but the collapse continued for some years.

That's the business of Chapters 5 and 6. Boris Yeltsin was in charge of instituting a market economy, he did not understand nor could he control. The former Soviet elites began to loot state assets, most notably in the catastrophic "loans for shares" deal. Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin's vice-premier, only acted to "rationalize" this systemic opportunism. The idea of legal guarantees private property backed by an honest civil service, bedrocks of small-l liberalism, were long gone, and might never have existed.

I keep heading back to Kotkin's account, as a nonspecialist, as it is a useful summary of the multiple factors leading to collapse. Now there is an embittered legacy, some disillusioned dreamers, and a propped up story from by right-wing authoritarians and their useful idiots.

This is less a history and more of an extended essay on what caused the fall of the Soviet Union. Kotkin's thesis is that it was reform what done it -- Communism is incompatible with liberalism, so the moment Gorbachev opened the door with perestroika and glasnost, the frame collapsed and brought down the whole house with it. It's an interesting thesis that makes more sense than the typical American, "Reagan scared them to death," view, but Kotkin severely downplays the importance of Solidarity, Afghanistan and other issues that were plaguing the Soviets at the time. Even based upon the evidence that he puts forth to support his view, you could make a compelling case that the Soviets' problem was structural and was bound to be exploited by opponents of central authority eventually, even if Gorbachev hadn't given them an opening.

This is not so much a recent history as a pro-government argument, using Russia as an example of how the wealthy in any society will exploit any weakness (or absence) of functional government by attacking individual rights and liberty- particularly property rights.

My "Russian History book club" selected this and all agreed this is a short and fast read, compromised by remarkably awful writing and a rambling, unfocused structure. Paragraphs and sentences are too long to quote here but consistently wander long, tortured routes around so many contradictory asides that it was occasionally impossible to follow. Maybe those more familiar with the subject can keep track more easily than we did. For example, introducing a town where Gorbachev lived, first as a backward village lacking utilities (specifically functional sewers), and then on the next page referring to it as an "elite spa town" where he befriended Andropov, made us have to read, re-read, check notes and re-read, repeat.

This is not a book for the casual reader interested in current affairs. The author summarizes the thirty year collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of post-Soviet Russia in just two hundred pages, but there is an expectation that the reader is familiar with Russian and Soviet history, especially the institutions of government, as well as the workings of both micro and macro economics. That being said, it is an insightful look at this era of Russian history and if nothing else, further dispels the canard that "Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot." I found the most interesting part of the book to be the author's analysis of how "democracy" and "liberalism" are not the same thing. "Liberalism" with democracy gives us American Presidents and British Prime Ministers, while "democracy" without liberalism gives us Putin. It also led me to believe that the current division in the Ukraine is probably about more than what language people speak.

A chronicle of something I didn't think would happen in my lifetime - the title is a sizzler, but not so the book. It is crammed with facts and well documented sources.

I feel "mixed feelings" might be the largest understatement for my opinions on this book.

First off, I strongly dislike the author, Stephen Kotkin, as a conservative historian who recently has been hellbent on describing Russians as helpless, authoritarian-seeking people. Through a podcast conducted by a conservative think tank called the Hoover Institution, Kotkin laid out one of the most hackneyed and eye-rolling arguments on a "new Cold War," and he uses phrases like "cancel culture" to describe treaties being canceled by Russia. Great. With this being said, my expectations for this book was essentially at zero.

Despite all this, the book is honestly not an entirely bad read, and I think Kotkin does a good job framing the Soviet collapse into a larger picture. Starting from the origins of collapse, he looks at stagnation and the dynamics between socialism and capitalism, framed in the context of the 1970s oil crises and beyond. He notes Gorbachev's failures to reform and how those failures are inherently connected to his admiration of Leninism. He discusses how the post-Soviet landscape inherited the Soviet legacy, a fact that both showed deep problems in the new Russia and showcased why many Soviet leaders simply shrugged off the Soviet downfall. Bureaucrats and leaders alike simply refilled in a void left by the Soviet Union and controlled the economy, leaving little to have to be changed. For an American audience, Kotkin does a good job framing the Soviet economy as a giant "Rust Belt." His writing really makes me wonder, as someone living in the American Rust Belt, if industrial collapse here was a good thing in the long run, at least for middle-class America. Overall, an interesting interpretation.

Where the book can lose me is the upholding of liberal capitalism from an entirely first (and to an extent second) world perspective. Sure, capitalism looked more enticing after the postwar boom, yet this was simply capitalism with a human face. This ties back to the "Rust Belt" analogy as a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" predicatment. If you're the USSR, trying to keep jobs in industry through the planned economy only hurted you because of no diversification in an ailing economy. If you're the United States, the economy changes from an industrialized economy to a vast field of jobs where people answer emails and talk in meetings, pushing manufacturing out of the country and putting the industrial burden on the Third World. To me, Kotkin kind of understands this, particularly in Gorbachev's willingness to succumb to the West's offers like a baby enticed by keys jingling in their face. Yet, at the end of the day, classical liberalism is not a perspective to Kotkin, but a truth. This politicization is fine, but when capitalism being this great system is central to your argument, reading the book in a post-2008 recession and COVID recession context makes the book's praising of the market in America and elsewhere feel quaint. Granted, Kotkin upholds government intervention, but then implies in chapter seven the problems of Americans who challenge liberal institutions, as if the United States Constitution is some perfect document (it isn't) and the government's systems are too prefectly running to be criticized (they're not).

Long review, but I needed to type this to get out my conflicting feelings for a book that, for the most part, kept my attention (Language choice was a bit off to me. General audience? UNdergrad students? Who uses "willy-nilly" and "assiduously" in the same chapter?). In other words, I made it through the book just fine. Three stars for that.

A good overview of the Soviet collapse. Kotkin argues that the Soviet collapse began in the 1970s and that the massive economic problems of the new Russian Federation was an inevitable result of the Soviet economy, in particular the old, obsolete industrial base and equipment. He manages to tell this quite complex story in a short, engaging form. The title is however a bit misleading, as Kotkin barely explains his hypothesis that we were lucky that the Soviet collapse was a relatively one and didn't end in nuclear armageddon.