THE CONVERSATION PIECE

Tag: russia

  • Review: Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. New York, NY. Oxford University Press, 2001.

    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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  • Review: De Madariaga, Isabel. Catherine the Great: A Short History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

    Isabel De Madariaga’s Catherine the Great: A Short History provides the reader with an account of the crucial narrative contours of the rise and reign of Empress Catherine II of Russia. The work is a survey of a period of Russian history that is critically important yet largely overlooked. While not a detailed study or examination, De Madariaga’s Short History attempts to familiarize the reader with those salient historical episodes and developments that, taken in aggregate, coalesce into the Catherinite epoch. The clear object of De Madariaga’s work here is to give readers a reasonable summation of Catherine’s reign that can serve well as a stepping stone for further research and reading. The author executes these goals with a powerful sense of history and a clear command of the material. 

    Throughout A Short History, in dealing with Catherine II’s reign, De Madariaga casts the Empress in a consistently sympathetic light. The Catherine that is portrayed herein is a reluctant autocrat or a reformer in absolutist clothing. While some attention is given to various diplomatic and military crises, the overall emphasis of the work is placed on Catherine as an intellectually curious ruler with constitutional inclinations dealing with the obstacles of the entrenched, vested interests of the gentry that keep her from enacting her most liberalizing policies. Of all the aspects of Catherine’s rule, the most time and detail are given here to the various legislative and administrative reforms she was able to complete. The intellectual appetites of Catherine are discussed at length. Though De Madariaga never attempts to deny that Catherine ruled in  the one nation that had codified and legitimized Serfdom just as it was being phased out in the rest of Europe, an effort is made to signal to the reader just how enmeshed in enlightenment thought Catherine was during her rule. Her frequent correspondence and friendship with figures such as Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire are highlighted throughout this summative work. It is clear that the author wants to draw attention to the degree to which Catherine contemplated systems of government outside of Tsarist autocracy or considered modifications thereto. It is recounted with some repetition how intimately familiar she was with Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Care is taken to inform the reader that Catherine even wrote some 700 pages of notes thereon. One could almost argue that the central burden of the work is to provide a counterargument to the prevalent narrative of Tsarism, even Tsarinaism, as unidimensional despotism; De Madariaga insists that, while Catherine shared many things in common with her autocratic successors and forbears, she was indeed a complex figure and presented, in policy choices and in concrete reforms, shades of a liberalizing tendency and even hints of constitutionalism. However, in her generous treatment of Catherine’s rule, De Madariaga seems to largely overlook the fact that nothing at all was ever done to improve the lives of the Serfs during her rule. 

    De Madariaga uses enlightenment German cameralism as a lens through which to appraise Catherine’s hints at reform. The legislative commission, as well as the Instructions, are both evidence of cameralist influence. She portrays Catherine as laying out a foundation of precedent for future reform and liberalization in Russia through the inauguration of corporate rights for each of the free estates. She admits that Catherine’s legislative achievements fell short of her aims but insists that her desires for reform were genuine. Her defense of the lack of reform during Catherine’s reign is partially based on the idea that Catherine herself was not to blame for the continued bondage of the Serfs; her ability to enact policies that would threaten the power or wealth of the nobility was limited by her political reliance on the former for legitimacy and support. Her goal for administrative reform was, according to Madariaga, essentially a complete reworking of the entire administrative apparatus of regional, provincial, and local government. The Legislative Commission that Catherine convened called for the appointment of representatives from each of the social estates, except the Serfs (except for 90 percent of the population). This, along with the creation of juridical and legal avenues for townspeople and free peasants to advocate for redress of grievance, none of which existed before, are certainly to be lauded, but whether these are reasons enough to justify giving Catherine the benefit of the doubt as much as Madariaga does in the text is uncertain. 

    Significant attention is also paid to the scale of legislative reforms attempted during Cathrine’s reign. The twin Statutes to the Townspeople and the Nobility formed the bulk of a chapter that, while providing the reader with detail and analysis, seemed to wander in the weeds a bit in terms of facts and figures and other indulgences in hyper-specificity and tedious detail. The reasonable reader of history cannot deny that, prior to Catherine, even the nobility had no formal representation in the Russian body politic; the old duma of the Boyars was dissolved long before her reign. It is understandable that the author would thus decide to dedicate significant time to the uniqueness of the political representation permitted by the legislative commission. It also bears mentioning that this representation, however unprecedented and quasi-democratizing, was limited, imperfect, and entirely confined to the free estates; Serfs were given no concessions. A criticism of Madariaga’s framing here can be made based on the fact that she largely neglects to emphasize how nearly all of Catherine’s reforms systematically ignore the plight of the Serf, even after the Pugachev uprising. 

    One area of the book that seems comparatively underdeveloped is the space devoted to Catherine’s rise. While the first chapter does establish the basic historical context in which Catherine’s seizure of power occurs, certain elements and aspects are glossed over. A prime example of this is Madariaga’s terse treatment of the plot hatched and executed to remove Peter III from power by taking his life. “According to the available evidence she was not informed of the plot to murder her husband; on the other hand she must have realized that if he remained alive he would be a constant threat to her hold on the throne, and that her supporters were unlikely to let him live.” (3) This kind of hedgy and equivocating statement alerts readers quite early on to Madariaga’s desire to spend more time on the admirable aspects of Catherine II, which are many, to the possible detriment of a more balanced view overall. While the work stops short of outright hagiography, this example of downplaying unsavory aspects of Catherine’s personality in favor of sympathetic traits is not the only one present in this survey.  In Madariaga’s dealings with Catherine’s innovations in the field of ethnic resettlement and assimilation, there are yet more jarring examples of the deliberate absence of seemingly warranted criticism. Only one paragraph is devoted to the creation of the Pale of Settlement and the double tax on Jews living in the Empire. “Yet, in spite of the broadly tolerant character of Catherine’s legislation, one of the most repressive features of nineteenth-century Russian policy towards the Jewish community dates from her reign. This was the setting up of the so-called Pale of Settlement” (141). In an earlier paragraph on the same page, De Madariaga describes the origin of Catherine’s “tolerant policy toward the Jews…” as coming from her lack of religious zealotry. Only a few paragraphs later, she describes the disproportionate tax levied on the Jewish townspeople and residents. Her insistence on coupling admissions of targeted ethnic repression with professions of Catherine’s tolerance read as incongruous and indicative of a wider pattern of emphasizing the positive aspects of Catherine’s reign and minimizing or explaining away the negative ones. 

    De Madariaga devotes considerable time to discussing the tenacity and single-mindedness with which Catherine faced the succession of crises that assailed her government. From the diplomatic intrigue, the clandestine plots to bet on a successor other than the Empress, the various Wars with Turkey, and the confusing geopolitical evolution of alliances to the massive cossack and peasant uprising led by Pugachev, each challenge Catherine faced is represented in Madariaga’s work with a detailed description of the methods the Empress used to overcome them. A picture of Catherine as a dedicated, serious ruler who relied on loyal military figures like Potemkin yet kept enough of her own initiative and strategic acumen to maintain herself in an advantageous position emerges from the narrative. Her willingness to bet on risky military solutions to diplomatic problems is presented, such as her adoption of the policy of armed neutrality to deal with the threats from the British Navy. Catherine’s Imperial character begins to truly show when she demonstrates to the other European rulers her complete willingness to commit Russian men and material to the projection of hard power in the Black Sea and elsewhere. In evaluating De Madariaga’s portrayal of Catherine as a ruler, it is important to note that the aspect of her reign that is most comprehensively dealt with, and that which has the most space dedicated to its exploration in the text, is Catherine’s various legal, administrative, and social reforms. While many dimensions of Catherine’s reign are confined to one chapter or only a page or two, the legislative and administrative reforms that she enacted are analyzed and described in a number of separate chapters. Understanding Catherine as a policymaker, influenced by Enlightenment thinkers yet still largely wedded to absolutist ideals, is made possible by the author’s detailed study of the Instructions and the dual Statutes to the Townspeople and the Nobility. 

    In distilling the grand narrative of Catherine’s thirty-year reign into an eminently readable and largely enjoyable survey, De Madariaga succeeds in producing an engaging, thoughtful account of a pivotal era in Russian History. While acknowledging Catherine’s penchant for favorites, the book refrains from a gossipy, tabloid depiction of her love life. Catherine is treated largely as any contemporaneous sovereign would be; an analysis of her policy decisions, the changes during her reign, and the impact she had on the course of Russian history are included. A certain respect for Catherine as an intellectual, as a strategist, as a stateswoman, and as a human being, is obvious in Madariaga’s treatment of the Empress. Madariaga explores the life of a sovereign who, rising through a coup, with no legitimate claim to the throne, went on to rule for more than thirty years, presided over the rise in influence of Russian military power, instituted the most comprehensive administrative reforms in Russian history as well as the first steps toward representative government, albeit imperfectly, fostered the emergence of the thitherto dormant Russian intelligentsia, and led a life of passion, learning, and romance. While the work is less than even-handed in its assessment of the downsides of Catherine’s rule, it never fails to take Catherine’s reign seriously and to impart to the reader the importance of the victories, reforms, and velleities of a complex and contradictory ruler. Ultimately, Isabel De Madariaga’s Short History is engaging, far-reaching in its areas of focus, and detailed in its examination of the reign of Catherine the Great.

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