A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev
A detailed cronicle of the top level political events leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union from c1983-1991.
Zubok’s emphasis on how the unintended consequences og Gorbatchev’s reforms, and the personal power struggles with Yeltsin led to the disintegration. Gorbatchev is portrayed as divided: His domestic policies were based on totally unrealistic ideological assumptions, in his foreign policy the same visionary ideas lead to liberation of Eastern Europe.
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Its access to superpower status was enabled by a system that allowed the state’s phenomenal concentration of resources to achieve a global projection of military might. This worked, however, only as long as the military power could be backed by a convincing ideological message and/or economic capacities. In the 1980s, when severe internal problems at the heart of the Soviet economy, its ideology, and society became apparent, Western observers feared that the Soviet Union might get a second wind. It did not. — location: 395 ^ref-39163
The idea of renovating the Soviet Union originated not with Mikhail Gorbachev, but with his mentor Yuri Andropov. For years after the Soviet collapse, many said wistfully: “If only Andropov had lived longer.” They meant that under his leadership the country could have been reformed yet be held together. In fact, Andropov made the idea of renovation possible and left his heir apparent Gorbachev with the task of promoting it. — location: 472 ^ref-3357
When one man said to him: “Let me tell you about myself,” Andropov replied without a touch of irony: “What makes you think that you know more about yourself than I know about you?” — location: 492 ^ref-26254
Nobody knew what to do with failed enterprises and their workers. The former could not go bankrupt and the latter could not be laid off. After a few months of uncertainty, the economy returned to the old mode. Leninist ideas had failed. — location: 722 ^ref-58669
The neo-Leninist vision assumed that possession of the means of production would make working people motivated and responsible for their output. Would it be enough to pull the Soviet people out of the swamp of corruption and indifference to output and quality? Gorbachev admitted that the passivity of people bothered him. Nobody could explain to him why, in those segments of the Soviet economy where self-financing and self-governance had been experimentally tried, production declined rather than increased. — location: 814 ^ref-31783
Gorbachev knew little about the Soviet budget, revenues, and financial mechanisms. When in 1983 he asked Andropov to have a look at the state budget, he received a firm “no.” — location: 851 ^ref-25211
In the Soviet Union, there were two kinds of money in circulation. One currency was virtual and was called beznal, which means “cashless.” It was a completely virtual accounting system between the state and state enterprises. All investments, credits, and other big transactions in the Soviet economy were paid by beznal. This money resembled issue bills and letters of credit in a market economy, yet the Soviet beznal was never meant to be cashed. The second kind of money was in nal (cash): banknotes and coins issued by the State Bank. They were used to pay salaries and wages to Soviet people, to pay in state stores, and for goods and services of the “shadow economy” and on the black market. The total amount of nal was loosely related to the amount of production and the cost of labor. — location: 853 ^ref-26953
All enterprises had to have double bookkeeping. They were strictly forbidden to use beznal allocations for salaries and wages. And they were not allowed to buy industrial equipment and raw materials with cash. — location: 866 ^ref-7937
Yeltsin had spent years battling with lack of food supplies in his Sverdlovsk region. His greatest achievement had been to establish a system of poultry farms near Sverdlovsk that supplemented the meagre diet of workers in the industrial plants and factories. Randalls supermarket amazed him. This was an average place where the poorest American could buy what even the top Soviet nomenklatura could not back home. In the sweltering Texan desert Yeltsin and his entourage entered an air-conditioned paradise. The aides saw Yeltsin brooding, as if he was thinking: “Does this cornucopia exist every day for everyone? Incredible!” — location: 2020 ^ref-37945
In 1989, according to the census and the nationality that people claimed, ethnic Russians numbered 145 million, over half of the Soviet population of 287 million. For decades they had been told that “their home” was the entire Soviet Union. Some 25 million of them lived and worked in Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic States, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. — location: 2330 ^ref-39629
Even Soviet troops in East Germany, the Soviet main asset, succumbed to the Deutschmark. All of a sudden Gorbachev faced another dilemma: to find hard currency to pay for the maintenance of Soviet forces there or to withdraw them. The second option would be humiliating and politically disastrous. The first option was impossible, as Soviet currency reserves were approaching zero. — location: 2606 ^ref-6086
They never recognized that the reforms of 1987–88 had created new actors—autonomous state enterprises, cooperatives, and commercial banks—which, instead of generating more consumer goods, cannibalized the existing state economy and hemorrhaged state finances. — location: 2946 ^ref-62893
The “Russian communists” still lacked a new language applicable to the mass politics unleashed by Gorbachev’s perestroika. Party documents from late 1990 were stilted instead of fiery; stodgy formulaic language instead of pithy appeals and slogans. Next to populist demagogues of that time, the Party apparatchiks were tongue-tied, shy and reactive. — location: 3621 ^ref-40643
In August 1989, the minister responsible for the Soviet gas industry, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and his deputies decided to create a state consortium, Gazprom, to take advantage of new liberties. The members of the Politburo were genuinely surprised. They asked Chernomyrdin “Why do you need such a headache?” The Party potentates still could not imagine why somebody would want to leave the Soviet nomenklatura and take full initiative and responsibility for a huge enterprise, including its possible losses. — location: 3631 ^ref-55600
He was not cynical enough to imagine that a communist nomenklatura could be transformed into the ruling class and the main stakeholder of state capitalism, something that was afoot in China at the time. — location: 3659 ^ref-55496
the Party had become a huge conglomerate of clans and people acting in their own interests. Many of them would have liked to remove Gorbachev from power and proceed, without any democratic experiments, towards state capitalism. Yet, as the Party Plenums and the Party Congress had demonstrated many times, Gorbachev had no reason to fear a coup from the nomenklatura. Despite their anger and frustration, nobody dared move against the General Secretary. They realized that, even if they voted Gorbachev out, he would constitutionally remain the commander-in-chief of the Army and in control of the KGB. Those institutions were key to Gorbachev’s power. — location: 3674 ^ref-19180
And this meant the biggest retreat of the Army since 1941–42. Some 650,000 Soviet troops, including 50,000 officers, tens of thousands of tanks, APCs, artillery pieces, aircraft and helicopters, hundreds of thousands of items of materiel and equipment had to be withdrawn from Central and Eastern Europe across thousands of miles back to the homeland. — location: 3683 ^ref-5955
At the end of 1990, the KGB was a formidable organization with 480,000 officers, a secrecy-clad vertical structure, and strict military discipline, the KGB had functioned for decades as “the Party’s arm with a sword.” Like the Party, the KGB penetrated all structures of the Soviet state, society, and economy. In Moscow alone, the KGB had between 65,000 and 89,000 officers. There were also secret agents and informants on the KGB payroll whose names and positions remained classified. The Committee had its own troops, was in control of borders and customs, provided secure communications and controls for the Party and the state, ensured the safety of strategic nuclear weapons, and more. — location: 3777 ^ref-23596
The KGB still evoked visceral fear in Soviet society, but not so for Gorbachev. The Soviet leader regarded the KGB as an essential and even natural part of his office and lifestyle. The KGB provided his personal security, information, communications, and even his household staff. The KGB Ninth Directorate officials accompanied Gorbachev, along with his armored limousine, on all his trips around the country and especially abroad, at great cost to the state budget. One could say that the Soviet President worked in a bubble created and maintained by the KGB for his exclusive needs and comfort. And this seemed to suit him well. — location: 3843 ^ref-33450
Chernyaev was struck once again by the phenomenon of the “two Gorbachevs” one was a world figure with a striking vision, the other was a lame-duck domestic politician, “out of ammunition” and unable to use his enormous executive powers. — location: 3993 ^ref-57412
The Ukrainian republic was still firmly under the control of the Party nomenklatura, and the calls for full independence came only from Western Ukraine and some members of the Rukh.83 Yeltsin came to tell them that, after the 300-year attachment of Ukraine to the Russian Empire and “the totalitarian regime” in Moscow, Ukraine was now free to choose its own path. — location: 4004 ^ref-65188
This was the paradox the Russian leadership in Moscow pushed for Ukrainian independence that the Ukrainian leaders did not actually want. — location: 4034 ^ref-39623
Scowcroft viewed Yeltsin as a creature of chaos produced by Gorbachev’s style of governance, “an ambitious opportunist of the first order and his credentials as a democrat are suspect at best.” — location: 4148 ^ref-43218
In his memoirs, Pavlov wrote that there were two kinds of people in the Soviet elites and the Russian government, who worked to destroy the Soviet Union. Some, such as Gorbachev and Ryzhkov, undermined the state and its economy out of ignorance and because of their short-term interests. Others were determined gravediggers of the USSR, such as Yeltsin, Popov, Sobchak, and many in Democratic Russia. — location: 4276 ^ref-21975
The last of Pavlov’s reforms caused the most uproar. On the evening of 22 January 1991, Soviet people learned from a television announcement that 50-ruble and 100-ruble bills, the largest in circulation, were no longer valid. Those bills had to be exchanged within three days in the branches of the State Bank with new banknotes of the same value, up to a maximum of 10,000 rubles. — location: 4313 ^ref-21258
Scowcroft liked the memo. Even if things went terribly wrong in the Soviet Union, he thought, the United States could not do much about it. “History will not blame us if the Soviet Union does not find a path to democracy but we will most assuredly be held to account if democracy fails to take root in East-Central Europe.” — location: 4509 ^ref-10638
Western observers concluded that many Russians simply supported Yeltsin because he was one of them: he drank, liked Russian steam baths, and jumped into icy water. This mass unreflecting support for Yeltsin came in myriad forms and ways. — location: 4962 ^ref-36473
Zhirinovsky also embraced the unabashed language of Russian chauvinism Russia for him was “the whole country within the boundaries of the USSR,” from Western Ukraine to Kamchatka, from Murmansk on the White Sea to the border with Afghanistan. Soviet sovereign republics, such as Ukraine, Belorussia and Kazakhstan, should be liquidated. Russia would be divided into administrative territories, while all ethnic minorities would be “under the protection of the president.”53 Zhirinovsky targeted the tail end of the Yeltsin phenomenon less educated people who were susceptible to the appeal of strong leadership, reacted to radical populism, and yet identified with the collapsing superpower. — location: 4991 ^ref-27877
Yeltsin explained to Bush that the Russian elections had demonstrated minimal popular support for the communist conservatives. Some 40 percent of the military had voted for Yeltsin, and “the army as a whole would not come out against the people.” — location: 5057 ^ref-36054
Gorbachev’s aides agreed that the situation, with two Presidents inside the Kremlin, was extremely abnormal and destabilizing. Anatoly Chernyaev saw in Yeltsin’s enthronement a systemic shift. a Russian tide was flooding the structures of the communist regime. The majority of Russians scorned Gorbachev’s leadership and his “socialist choice,” a synonym for the failed reforms and growing economic hardships. The Politburo and the Secretariat had become redundant; “they have no power even over Party members.” — location: 5108 ^ref-8479
Yeltsin suspected the KGB of attempts on his life, but he did not want to antagonize such a powerful force. — location: 5165 ^ref-15412
The Russian President addressed the KGB conference with a carefully drafted and surprisingly accommodating speech. He called for the creation of a strong executive branch in Russia, in which “an appropriate place must be found for the Committee for State Security.” The KGB, he said, should become “an effective institution of the democratic state” and focus on a new set of tasks, such as the “protection of the rights and freedoms” of citizens, assisting economic reforms, fighting organized crime, and “the prevention and neutralization of social and national conflicts within the [Russian] republic.” Yeltsin spoke out against any purge of KGB officers. “You have selected the best people. true patriots, resistant to corruption. It would be against the state’s interests not to use in full measure your potential for the cause of Russia’s rebirth.” — location: 5171 ^ref-17935
That same day, Yeltsin signed a decree prohibiting the existence of Party “cells,” in other words groups “in state organs, organizations, corporations, and enterprises located on the territory of the RSFSR.” The decree was, de facto, destroying the levers of the CPSU inside the KGB, the army, and other power structures.82 It also cut the symbiotic relationship between the Party and state apparatus. Yeltsin, of course, had no power to implement his decree. — location: 5187 ^ref-51554
The struggle between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the young economist was convinced, was turning the Soviet Union into a Latin American country, a weak state swaying from crisis to crisis. — location: 5269 ^ref-52731
On 5 June, after a six-month delay, Gorbachev flew to Oslo to give his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Chernyaev prepared a draft of Gorbachev’s speech with the main thesis: perestroika benefited the world more than it did the Soviet Union, so could the West please pay back in kind now when the country was in such a crisis, and prevent a calamity for everyone? Gorbachev told his aide to drop the issue of money. The Nobel laureate wanted to frame his address in terms of a grand strategy: without a reformed Soviet Union, Western powers would not be able to build a lasting and peaceful world order. Still, in his Oslo speech Gorbachev decided to appeal to Western leaders and the Western public to start a serious “conversation” at the G-7 meeting about how to help Soviet reforms at a “critical juncture.” — location: 5381 ^ref-5331
One expert from Nazarbayev’s entourage informed the Americans that Gorbachev remained uncomfortable with the concept of private property. he kept asking whether there was some way to achieve the same level of economic efficiency through collective ownership. He was concerned that “the mafia would buy up all the enterprises that went on sale” and disenfranchise workers’ collectives. — location: 5561 ^ref-58347
In 1944, when Stalin was in the Kremlin, the Americans had offered the Soviet Union the option of being a third founding member of the IMF and the World Bank, in an effort to include the Soviet Union in a future liberal economic order. Stalin had instead chosen economic autarky.20 In July 1991, Gorbachev was paying for Stalin’s decision. It was impossible to erase four decades of confrontation in just a couple of years, no matter how many concessions and how much charm the Soviet leader displayed. — location: 5861 ^ref-30772
Gorbachev, who modeled himself on Lenin, spurned Stalinist recipes of power. At the same time, he continued to behave like any Party apparatchik who assumed the KGB was part of the natural environment. — location: 6081 ^ref-13588
Nobody seemed to notice that Yeltsin had flip-flopped: from being a major destroyer of the Soviet constitutional order he had transformed into its main defender. Radio Liberty placed a correspondent inside the Russian parliament and broadcast Yeltsin’s words across the Soviet Union. A CNN cameraman captured him standing on the tank for the whole world to see. This coverage had immense significance in the unfolding events, placing Yeltsin at the center of “the struggle for democracy in Russia.” — location: 6384 ^ref-30753
Yeltsin acted very differently. he ordered his tank commanders to fire at the building of the Russian parliament when it resisted him, arrested all of his political rivals, and stayed in power for another six years. Kryuchkov and other fathers of the junta had launched emergency rule without any clear plan or a viable economic program, and, most importantly, without the determination to crush resistance by any means. — location: 6837 ^ref-46010
In October–November 1991, young Russian economist Yegor Gaidar convinced Yeltsin that, in order to build “a great Russia,” he should dismantle the Soviet Union. Yeltsin agreed on condition that the Russian Federation would succeed the USSR as a world power. — location: 7107 ^ref-56049
The strategic implications of its exit from the Union were of special concern. A total of 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in silos and forty-two strategic bombers on airbases were deployed on Ukrainian territory, with an estimated 1,800 nuclear warheads stored in special bunkers. The biggest missile plant in the Soviet Union, which produced SS-18 missiles, was located in Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk.24 Who would be in charge of this enormous nuclear capability if Ukraine were to become independent? — location: 7766 ^ref-42573
Bakatin also needed American assistance in transforming the KGB into something akin to the CIA. “This is one helluva country,” Baker marveled. “A month ago, the head of the KGB is arresting President Gorbachev, and now the head of the KGB is studying American legislation to model the Central Intelligence Agency!” — location: 7869 ^ref-60033
As for Estonia, said its Foreign Minister Lennart Meri, it was no more of a successor state to the USSR than Namibia. — location: 7898 ^ref-20379
Burbulis met Yegor Gaidar by chance, on the evening of 20 August, the decisive moment for the Russian government. The person who introduced Gaidar to Burbulis was Alexei Golovkov, one of Yeltsin’s advisors: he had traveled to Chile a few months earlier to meet General Pinochet and neoliberal economists.86 Burbulis quickly realized that Gaidar could offer him everything he wanted. While everyone else, including Yavlinsky, Nit, Bernstam, and Saburov, sought to alleviate or avoid the impending shock to the system, Gaidar considered it inevitable. — location: 8090 ^ref-51543
Stankevich hinted that if other republics opted for full independence, then the USSR’s permanent seat at the UN Security Council should belong to the Russian state. To compensate for this, Russia was ready to pay all Soviet debts. — location: 8315 ^ref-12580
The Russian Federation and Ukraine had a common industrial and scientific-technical complex. Most plants and laboratories in Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, and other industrial cities of Ukraine had clones and partners in Moscow, St Petersburg, the Urals, and Siberia. Ukraine’s businesses and households could not operate without Tyumen oil and gas; Donbass mines could not function without Russian wood; Norilsk aluminum smelters required Ukrainian bauxite. Soviet strategic missiles and most of the high-tech military weaponry were constructed in Ukraine or required “made in Ukraine” parts. For decades this economy had been managed, funded, and innovated from Moscow. The Ukrainian separatists wanted to end this state of affairs at any cost, yet those costs were huge. — location: 8723 ^ref-31469
Had the two leaders in Moscow, Yeltsin and Gorbachev, made a joint effort, they probably would have succeeded in steering Ukrainian politics away from secession. The republic was not united in what Ukraine’s independence would mean. And for the industrial regions of Ukraine, Kiev was not the center of gravity at all. They associated themselves with Moscow, Russian history, and Russian culture.83 For millions of people in those regions, with mixed ethnic origins and shared identities, Ukrainian “sovereignty” was something vague that could still imply a common country with the Russian Federation. Georgy Shakhnazarov thought those people should be mobilized to oppose Ukrainian separatism and support a common statehood. — location: 8729 ^ref-42960
He gave the impression that he had all the answers to Ukraine’s problems and knew how to proceed without hurting anyone. This would soon be revealed as a myth, yet Kravchuk remained in the eyes of many the father of the Ukrainian nation. Many Russians, on the contrary, viewed him as a cunning fox who fooled everyone, while sowing the seeds of future conflicts. — location: 8776 ^ref-37491
Dick Cheney and his deputies in the Pentagon proposed just that. This, they argued, was “an insurance policy” against “a retrograde Russia.” Without Ukraine’s enormous resources, population, and geography, a Pentagon official recalled, Russia “would never become the threat posed by the Soviet Union.”115 The Secretary of State, James Baker, however, continued to object. An immediate recognition of Ukraine, he argued, would “destroy any chance for confederal and even bilateral arrangements that would make a peaceful transition possible.” One had to be certain, he said, that Ukraine’s referendum would not trigger “further fragmentation” of a Ukrainian state. — location: 8914 ^ref-2438
Kravchuk redoubled his efforts to present the referendum as an existential choice between Soviet misery and future prosperity. The myth of Ukraine as “an economic superpower and breadbasket of Europe” that was feeding Russia and other republics, writes Serhii Plokhy, was “ingrained in the minds of the country’s inhabitants.” — location: 8932 ^ref-23955
Yeltsin’s legal advisor Sergey Shakhrai came up with a revolutionary idea. The USSR had been formed in December 1922 by four republics; three of them were represented in Viskuli; the fourth, the Trans-Caucasian republic, no longer existed. What if they now decided to dissolve the Soviet Union? Shakhrai was improvising as he spoke. Publicly, Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and even Burbulis had said many times that the Treaty of 1922 was the fig leaf that the Bolsheviks had used to camouflage their totalitarian policies. Now Shakhrai was proposing to use this fig leaf to destroy legally what Lenin had constructed by force. — location: 9065 ^ref-31315
But Mikhail Gorbachev was no ancient hero. He wanted to emancipate Soviet people from the legacy of oppression and conformism, yet did not learn enough from the great reformers of Russia’s past, such as Tsar Alexander II, Count Sergey Witte, or Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. Instead, his role model was Vladimir Lenin, the great destroyer of Russian statehood. — location: 9670 ^ref-25960
The fact that the first fully free elections of March 1990 took place in the republics, not nationwide, propelled the decomposition of Soviet elites along nationalist lines. — location: 9718 ^ref-54455
In March 1991, about 20 percent of people in the core republics of the Union thought that it would be better to live in separate republics rather than in a common state. This minority became the majority by August, most apparently in Ukraine, but also in the Russian Federation. Overwhelmingly, this was not the result of a sudden national awakening. Rather, it was a choice in favor of law and order, a distancing from the grotesque ineptness of the central authorities and the vacuum of central power. — location: 9731 ^ref-6516
the main institutions of Soviet statehood actually proved to be remarkably resilient and lasted until almost the end of the Soviet Union’s existence; even the eruption of democratic fury in August 1991 could not destroy them. The state apparatus was simply taken over by “the Russians”; the Russian Federation, instead of designing a new state out of thin air, inherited the bulk of the old central statehood. After a period of chaos, this statehood was recreated and reinvented during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. — location: 9772 ^ref-25880
Metadata
- Author: V. M. Zubok
- ASIN: B09HKL3NC3
- ISBN: 0300257309
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HKL3NC3
- Kindle link