bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1992) — Fall 1992 // Automne 1992, pp. 43–45
The Changing Soviet Union: Implications
for Canada and the World edited by Peter
Dobell, Toronto: James Lorimer and
Company, 1991, 166 pp.
Soviet Economic Policy Under Perestroika
by Leonard Geron, New York: Council on
Foreign Relations Press, 1990, 126 pp.
The Soviet High Command 1967-1989:
Personalities and Politics by Dale R.
Herspring, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990, 322 pp.
The Rise of Nations in the Soviet Union:
American Foreign Policy and the
Disintegration of the USSR edited by
Michael Mandelbaum,New York: Council
on Foreign Relations Press, 1991, 118 pp.
The Changing Western Analysis of the
Soviet Threat edited by Carl-Christoph
Schweitzer, London: Pinter Publishers, 1990,
318 pp.
Writing in The New York Review of Books last November, Peter Reddaway suggested that works of Sovietology published before the failed August coup would now invariably be judged by how far they pointed to, or least allowed for, perestroika’s abrupt dénouement in the late summer and fall of 1991. While no study of contemporary events should be condemned for failing to predict the future, it is nevertheless fair to expect that analyses written in what proved to be the twilight of the Gorbachev era should provide at least some insight into the forces that brought about its demise. On this score, the record of the books under review is at best mixed.
Current, policy-relevant insight purportedly abounds in the volumes edited by Michael Mandelbaum and Peter Dobell. Both are the product of conferences held in the fall of 1990: The Rise of Nations in the Soviet Union is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on “Soviet Nationalities and American Foreign Policy” in New York City at the end of October; The Changing Soviet Union reports the findings of an international conference held in Ottawa one month later. While the New York meeting was a cozy gathering of some thirty (mostly American) academics, the Ottawa conference drew more than ten times that number of scholars, public servants, politicians and businessmen from Canada, the United States, and the USSR. This difference in scale and scope is reflected in the published product. The Mandelbaum collection offers a concise and coherent blend of analysis and policy recommendations; Dobell’s volume is overly ambitious and hence falls short on insight and readability.
The papers from the New York symposium would doubtless meet with Reddaway’s approval. They point to one of two possibilities for the Soviet future: crack-down or collapse. There is no moderate “middle way”. Quite apart from its prescience, the strength of this collection lies in the contributors’ clear mastery of their subject. Sergei Maksudov and William Taubman trace the historical roots of Moscow’s contemporary imperial dilemmas in a fascinating overview of the linkages between nationality policy and foreign policy since Tsarist times, while Ronald Grigor Suny describes the social, economic, political, and cultural trends that evolved through seven decades of Soviet power to shape the nationalities crisis of the 1990s. Ironically, Moscow’s attempt to co-opt the non-Russians through titular republics demarcated and administered along national lines ultimately accelerated the centre’s collapse by providing its “captive nations” with an infrastructure ready-made for self-assertion.
The immediate causes of that assertion in the late 1980s, the symposium authors contend, were Gorbachev’s profound misreading of the nationality question and his disastrously misguided approach to reform. As Alexander Motyle points out, instead of reinvigorating the system by introducing accountability, Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost “thoroughly delegitimized” the key pillar of regime stability — the Communist Party — “and revealed the Soviet Union to be little more than an empire”. The resulting power vacuum, compounded by the economic chaos of perestroika, “literally forced” the republics and autonomous regions of the Soviet Union “to seek refuge in independence”, ’, making “total collapse”, in Motyl’s view, “inevitable”. Western policy makers are urged to face up to this reality by curbing their habitual support for Gorbachev and embracing the inexorable rise of the republics — advice that has stood up quite admirably since the volume appeared.
Dobell’s book covers much of the same ground, and its conclusions about nationality issues and the likelihood of Soviet collapse are every bit as grim — due in part to the fact that Alex Motyl was a prominent participant in the Ottawa conference as well. There is greater breadth here, however.
Extracts from presentations by Timothy / Colton and S. Frederick Starr provide valuable background and analysis on the problems of democratization and the prospects for civil ; society in the USSR (including a few welcome words of optimism on the subject from Dr. Starr), while chapters on market reform and the climate for foreign investment help to flesh out the economic picture. Chapters on security issues, Arctic cooperation, and a thoughtful meditation by ’Zbigniew Brzezinski on the collapse of communism round out this slim volume which, with superior editing, might well have stood out as a first-rate introduction to the dilemmas and implications of the Soviet reform, circa 1990. Unfortunately, the style in which the material is presented — lengthy quotations from the conference speakers, stitched together by a half-dozen editors who are obviously not specialists in the field — lacks elegance, and is at times downright awkward. Thus, while the volume contains much that is interesting and relevant, readers seeking coherent and comprehensive insight into “the changing Soviet Union” will be somewhat disappointed.
On the narrower topic of perestroika’s foreign economic dimension, Leonard Geron’s booklet offers a clear and thorough account of developments through the summer of 1990. Although the possibility of disintegration receives only passing mention, Geron correctly foresees not only that Soviet economic conditions are unlikely to improve any time soon, but that there is relatively little that the West can do to help in the absence of a Soviet commitment to far-reaching reform. His detailed summary of four years’ legislation designed to open up the Soviet economy to international trade and investment points to mass confusion and continued uncertainty; perestroika, he observers, has “exhausted itself”. To be sure, such conclusions scarcely warrant a newsflash in the post-Soviet world of 1992. Nevertheless, as we seek to unravel the puzzle of “what went wrong” with perestroika, Geron’s essay should remain a useful starting point for understanding why efforts at foreign economic reform proved no more successful than the domestic variety.
Apart from economics, few subjects are more topical in the study of the former USSR then the state of civil-military relations. Despite the failure of the August coup, the accelerating economic freefall and resulting social unrest have rekindled fears about military intervention in the political arena. Dale Herspring’s study of the Soviet High Command neither anticipates nor speaks directly to such concerns. This is hardly surprising, since the manuscript was completed nearly a year before the collapse of Moscow’s East European empire first brought the military opposition to Gorbachev boldly out into the open. Indeed, read in light of more recent developments, Herspring’s volume makes one positively nostalgic for the relative stability of the 1980s. The book is not without contemporary relevance, however. Herspring seeks to explain the Soviet military’s quiescence (through early 1989) in the face of “new thinking” about international security that turned traditional Soviet military doctrine on its head and culminated in Gorbachev’s December 1988 announcement of unilateral reductions in the Soviet armed forces. In a consummate work of Kremlinology based on a true mastery of the relevant sources, Herspring contends that the military’s support for Gorbachev reflected its understanding of the link between economic reform and the development of advanced technologies vital to the conduct of modern warfare. Significant departures in the realms of doctrine and arms control and even an overall reduction in resources were deemed acceptable in the near-term, Herspring argues, as a means to the larger and a more effective, high-tech Soviet military by the 21st century. Gorbachev’s economic reforms, of course, have since failed to live up to their side of this bargain; Defence Minister Yazov’s prominent participation in the coup attempt last August suggests that Herspring’s analysis is not far off the mark.
It is more difficult to draw out the current relevance of Carl-Christoph Schweitzer’s The Changing Western Analysis of the Soviet Threat. An unevenly updated English translation of papers originally prepared in German in the autumn of 1988, the collection is valuable primarily as a work of contemporary history that gives a flavour of the West’s profound uncertainty about Gorbachev at that time. Separate chapters compare American, British, French, Dutch and West German perceptions of the Soviet threat in the 1950s and 1980s with a view to discerning prospects for continuity and change in the future, but many of the conclusions already appear dated. The volume is thus further testimony to the dizzying pace of change in the former USSR, a pace that renders even Reddaway’s modest standards of predictive power increasingly difficult to achieve.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1992) — Fall 1992 // Automne 1992, pp. 43–45. Read the rest of this issue →
