Stephen Kotkin is not sympathetic to the promises of socialism, a fact that is made abundantly clear throughout the 220 pages of Armageddon Averted, a historical autopsy of the decline and fall of the U.S.S.R. However, he is surpiringly even-handed and measured in his treatment of the principle actors in the collossal drama that unfolded during the last few years of Gorbachev’s rule and the Yeltsinite parade of nepotism, venality, and elite self-enrichment. While some of Kotkin’s politics clearly influence his diagnoses, which is true for all historians, he doesn’t dissemble or disguise his faith in the capitalist system, which is refreshing and makes it easier to make allowances for bias when assessing his work. No mere laundry list of everything evil and awful about the late Soviet system, Kotkin presents a thoughtful, analytical examination of what he sees as terminal illnesses having infected the Soviet body politic. In so doing, he brings a novel perspective in his assertion that, contrary to popular periodizations of the phenomena, the collapse did not end with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., but continued throughout the 1990s and into Putin’s early rule.
In Armageddon Averted, Kotkin makes an effort to rebuff certain assumptions and tropes that have melted into the popular understanding of the Soviet collapse. For example, Kotkin challenges narratives that continue to have some weight: that Russia’s transition to capitalism didn’t work because oligarchs stole everything (there is some truth to this), or that privitization and market reform didn’t work at first because of mistaken advice from the West, or predatory loans from the IMF, among others. Kotkin seems unable to mention Russian oligarchs without downplaying the scope of their influence on Russian political and economic life. These narratives, and others are subjected to scrutiny throughout parts of the work. They are replaced by a consistent postulation that is reiterated time and again in the work; that endemic liabilities and inherent problems of design caused the failure of the Soviet Union. A central question that Kotkin attempts to answer is why, when the Soviet Union possessed untold military capability and nuclear ordnance, was none of its might employed to try to hold onto power and territory. Significant time and page space is dedicated to exploring the fact that the Soviet Union seemed to, to quote Dylan Thomas, “go gently into that good night” rather than make use of war as a Clausewitzian “politics by other means.”
Kotkin lays much of the blame for the Soviet Union’s dissolution on Mikhail Gorbachev. In a chapter titled ‘The Drama of Reform,” he opines: “Thus, the “real drama of reform,” obscured by fixation on the conservatives, featured a virtuoso tactician’s unwitting, yet extraordinarily deft dismantling of the Soviet system—from the planned economy, to the ideological legitimacy for socialism, to the Union.”(84-85) The purportedly inadvertent shift from a unitary system to a federal one is described as occuring after Gorbachev, for political reasons, purposely marginalized the Secretariat. According to Kotkin, Gorbachev had this conception of the political conflict between a reforming impulse and a conservative impulse, in Soviet high office, as being the essential explanation for why Perestroika faced obstacles. Kotkin insists that, ironically, Gorbachev’s very attempts to reform and save the system are what lead to its rapid deterioration and destruction. When hamstringing the Secretariat, Gorbachev had the image of Krushchev’s ouster by the party apparat fresh in his mind; a reformer is expelled from power by entrenched, conservative bureaucrats, this is the lesson that was absorbed.
At the same time, while Gorbachev is situated at the decision making nucleus at the heart of the late-stage Soviet behemouth slouching towards destruction and dissolution, Kotkin presents him in a nuanced manner without ever oversimplifying the nature of his role. The Gorbachev presented in Kotkin’s book is a man grappling with the growing gulf between his own ideological loyalties and the obvious contradictions of a system he tries desperately to reform, change, and finally terminate. This is not a completely unsympathetic portrayal. Kotkin makes sure to emphasize the amazing political skill and adroit calculus the final General Secretary uses to push Perestroika and Glasnost through an often recalcitrant party and state apparatus. He also painstakingly points out the fact that Gorbachev, when confronted with failure and defeat, the seccession of the satilite republics and impending fall of the Russian Soviet Republic, he deliberately chose to avoid projections of hard power to prevent dissolution or simply retaliate. While Kotkin expresses his ideological, political, and social qualms with the system Gorbachev tried to save, he also gives credit to the leader’s restraint.
Significantly less of the book is dedicated to the Yeltsin presidency and its incubation of Putin’s political career. The focus is predominately on Gorbachev’s 1985-1991 reign, although Yeltsin’s rise is mentioned and several snapshots of his rule are included, such as the bombing of parliament in 1993, or his drunken antics. If there is any aspect of Armageddon Averted that might benefit from additional attention it would have to be Yeltsin’s presidency, and his relationship with Putin. Most of Kotkin’s book is exceptionally well-written and clearly well-researched. The occasional flippant sentence might chafe certain readers like “But analysts who continued to attribute Russia’s boom to the dumn luck of sky-high oil prices needed to spend a weekend in Nigeria, where they should inquire about the middle-class bonanza (200).” This is both funny and callous and maybe funny because of the callousness, but it seems out of place in a serious examination like Armageddon Averted. Occasional glimpses of what seems like anti-russian sentiment are shown as well, with sentences like “….anti-corruption struggle, which in Russia always risked becoming a settling of political and economic scores (204).” This is certainly a true statement, but it is not uniquely true for Russia; it happens all over the world, including in our great nation. A fair, I think not undeserved, criticism of Kotkin’s treatment of Russia’s problems is that he seems to hint that corruption is somehow congenital to Russians at times (even if it is). Kotkin describes, in the chapters on privitization post-Gorbachev, a carnival of frenzied, kleptocratic officials enriching themselves at the expense of the Russian people and state.
The difficulties of Russian legal reform, working from the inherited juridical architecture that survived the Soviet collapse, are explored in some detail in the chapter “Democracy Without Liberalism?” The transition phase from late-stage Sovietism to fledgling Yeltsinite “democracy”, in its physical plant, was a kind of liminal zone between then and now; Soviet infrastructure was absorbed wholesale to serve the new dispensation; the massive, sprawling KGB compounds in Moscow were simply repurposed, along with most of the other offices. Kotkin uses this as a metaphor for his argument, which is extended throughout much of the book, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to structural, institutional shortcomings, and that a critical mistake of the Russian Federation was that it used what remained of Soviet institutions, likely from political and economic inertia, to form the foundation of the “new” system.
“Russia’s challenge was not cultural or economic but institutional, a problem of governability, especially of its governing institutions.” (168) A major theme of Kotkin’s book is demonstrated here in miniature. One might even say the central burden of the work is to locate the main problem of the late Soviet empire in its institutional composition, that the system itself was doomed. Kotkin also places importance on what he deems a misplaced faith in the reformability of party-led socialism on the part of Gorbachev and his generation. The post-Stalinist conviction that Lenin had been different, that Stalin was a deviation from the promise of socialism plays a role here. Kotkin writes: “In fact, Lenin had not been less dictatorial or less ruthless than Stalin. But the myth that Lenin had been different, the myth of a redeemable party-led socialism, turned out to be of overriding importance. It had, in the post-Second World War conjuncture, the dissolving impact on Soviet structures that the First World War had on the then intact Habsburg state.”(174)
One argument that Kotkin posits repeatedly throughout Armageddon Averted is that Soviet Socialism, no matter what the specific conditions of its existence, was fundamentally, absolutely, unreformable. He even goes as far as to say it was “proved” that it was impossible to reform the system. This line of argument is easy, with historical hindsight, to make with an air of certainty, but not without a certain obvious weakness, namely, that the proposition —Because A (the collapse) happened under B conditions (Gorbachev’s rule) then C (the system is irredeemably doomed; unreformable) is the only possible outcome for any other scenario—simply doesn’t hold logical water. The fact that the reforms initiated by Gorbachev failed to reinforce Soviet socialism against the pressures causing its destruction is evidence of the unviability of Gorbachevian reform Socialism, not of an abstracted universal certainty of failure regardless of internal and external conditions, which Kotkin seems to imply here.
Perestroika is presented as a success in the sense that it, contrary to its stated aims, put a metaphorical dagger in the staggering body of Soviet socialism, and allowed the festering elite bureaucracy to feed itself on the remains. “In this light, perestroika should be judged as a stunning success. Reform socialism also, unintentionally, incited Soviet elites to tear their system apart, which they did with gusto. In this light, too, perestroika was a success.”(181) One can sense thinnly masked delight at Kotkin’s repeated highlighting of the inadvertent nature of Perestroika’s counterproductive results. Kotkin conveys the fact that, unlike the common assumption that the Soviet elite was displaced by the rapacious opportunists who profited from privitization, the Soviet elite was largely preserved during the transition, becoming, in large part, the Yetsinite elite. The widespread corruption that had been a blight on the Soviet system simply continued after the transition to the Russo-market anti-liberal 90s system.
In the epilogue of Armageddon Averted, Kotkin gives readers a short analysis of the Putin years, Russia’s startling rise to economic relevance, and Medvedev’s presidency. The relationship with China is emphasized and comparisons are drawn between the two large powers whose authoritarian market economies both took off in the 2000s. The legacy of Soviet bureaucratic bloat is portrayed as mostly erased by the Putin era economic resurgence, or at least made irrelevant. Overall, the book does an excellent job of giving readers a powerful impression of a system in its death throes and the difficult transition that followed its demise. His clear, lucid historical writing illuminates the contours of Soviet degradation and inertia. Kotkin’s command of the subject matter is impressive, and though he is not ideologically hospitable to the ideals of Marxism or socialism, he manages to keep a sense of balance when discussing the downfall and dissolution of one of the most powerful Empires in human history, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
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