Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000

Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin Read Free Book Online

Book: Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin Read Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen Kotkin
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, Politics
or downplayed the increasing imbalances with the US, and after his death the country could have continued on the same path. 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). The Soviet Union was not in turmoil. Nationalist separatism existed, but it did not remotely threaten the Soviet order. The KGB
    crushed the small dissident movement. The enormous intelligentsia griped incessantly, but it enjoyed massive state subsidies manipulated to promote overall loyalty.
    Respect for the army was extremely high. Soviet patriotism was very strong. Soviet nuclear forces could have annihi-lated the world many times over. Only the unravelling of the socialist system in Poland constituted an immediate danger, but even that was put off by the successful 1981
    Polish crackdown.
    Perestroika, however, was born not simply in tangible indicators, but in the crucial psychological dimension of 27
    history’s cruel tricks
    the superpower competition. 14 Among Soviet elites, there was panic at the scope of Western advances as well as humiliation at the country’s deepening relative backwardness. There were, in addition, unmistakable signs of internal defection in elite ranks. By the 1970s and early 1980s, large swathes of the Soviet Union’s upper ranks, including academics, were travelling to the West, and, whether patriots or cynics, they usually came back loaded down with boom boxes, VCRs, fancy clothes, and other goods. The highest officials had such items discretely imported for them, while their children, the future generation of Soviet leadership, pursued coveted long-term postings abroad in the not very socialist occupation of foreign trade representatives. Many party posts, which served as vehicles for enrichment, were being sold to the highest bidder. In 1982, one émigré defector derided the USSR
    as a ‘land of kleptocracy’. 15 Soulless indulgence, on top of a loss of confidence, had taken deep root, and this frightened loyalists most of all.
    Socialist idealism
    How does a dictatorship, particularly one without even the discipline of private property and a strong judiciary necessitated by a market economy, control proliferating ranks of its own functionaries? After 1953, when Stalin died, mass terror ceased to be practicable, and anyway it had never prevented malfeasance. In the ensuing decades, 28
    history’s cruel tricks
    Soviet leaders continued to struggle trying to curb the behaviour of officials. Khrushchev relied upon client networks and toyed with possible term limits for party posts before being ousted. Brezhnev also favoured clientelism, pitting ever-growing informal ‘family circles’, or groupings of officials, against each other, but he proclaimed a post-Stalin ‘stability of cadres’, which became an invitation to licentiousness. Andropov launched campaigns to tighten discipline, and dozens of death sentences were handed out for bribe taking or the abuse of authority, but the overwhelming majority of official misdeeds went unpunished. How could it have been otherwise? In the fulfilment of tasks, rule violations were not only condoned but also encouraged, and determining which violations were permissible, to what degree, and in which circumstances, was arbitrary. If every transgression were to have been punished, almost all of Soviet officialdom would have had to have been executed or jailed. 16
    All of this was well known, of course, but many party officials nonetheless retained considerable faith in the possibilities of socialism and the party itself. Indeed, the party, not just the economy, was the target of perestroika.
    And the party was, simultaneously, also the instrument of perestroika. Gorbachev, as well as the like-minded officials and academic advisers he assembled around

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