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

him, was acutely aware of the dramatic changes in the post-war West, and the historical fork in the world economy that had popped up in the 1970s—what they called the scientific-technological revolution. Yet they still considered their 29
    history’s cruel tricks
    country to be on a different time line, for which the key dates were: 1917, the October revolution; 1924, Lenin’s death, followed by Stalin’s ‘usurpation’; 1956, the beginning of Khrushchev’s drive for reform socialism; 1964, Khrushchev’s sacking; and 1968, the Prague Spring’s suppression, which trampled, but did not lay to rest, the vision of a humane socialism. It was not just the superpower competition but a deeply felt urge to make socialism live up to its promises, to reinvigorate the party and return to the imagined ideals of October, that shaped both the decision to launch perestroika and, even more importantly, the specific form it took.
    In a delicious irony, very rigid political and concomitant economic structures were shaken to their foundations by what was erroneously assumed to have been the Soviet Union’s most rigid structure, Communist ideology.
    Marxism-Leninism, after a generational change, turned out to be the source of extraordinary, albeit destabilizing, dynamism. What proved to be the party’s final mobilization, perestroika, was driven not by cold calculation about achieving an orderly retrenchment, but by the pursuit of a romantic dream.
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    Reviving the dream
    We are firmly of the opinion that in the course of peaceful competition the peoples will be able to satisfy themselves as to which social system secures them a higher standard of living, greater assurance for the future, freer access to education and culture, more perfect forms of democracy and personal freedom. We have no doubt that in such competition Communism will win.
    (Nikita Khrushchev, preface, New Communist Party Programme , 1961) Gorbachev, unlike Brezhnev, strikes me as a true believer.
    (Milovan Djilas, 1988)
    Russia’s chaotic, wartime 1917 revolutions were propelled by a desire to remake the world, to overcome what was perceived to be the country’s false and hideous life, and achieve a just and beautiful life, through mass violence if necessary. By the 1930s, under Stalin, the revolutionary 31
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    dream for a world of abundance without exploitation had become an enslavement of the peasantry and a forced, headlong expansion of heavy industry, with millions of people called upon to sacrifice whatever it took to ‘catch and overtake’ the capitalists. Alongside the roar of heavy industry, there was also the stamping of jackboots: the Imperial Japanese over-running Manchuria; the Italian fascists marching through Abyssinia (Ethiopia); the Nazis annexing Austria and the Czech lands. The Soviet regime consumed the country and itself in terror, but also girded itself in the armour of advanced modernity—blast fur-naces, turbines, tanks, airplanes—and mobilized its hard-ened factory workers, collective farmers, camp inmates, and commissars for war.
    The Second World War was a defining moment for the Soviet Union. No other industrial country has ever experienced the devastation that befell the USSR in victory . The Nazi onslaught of 1941–5 levelled 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, about half the total for all combatants (the Germans lost 3.5 million soldiers; the Americans about 300,000). 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. Each year of the first post-war decade, approximately one million children were born 32
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    out of wedlock, as women unable to find husbands took