Product Description

In the Cold War era that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, nobody envisaged that the collapse of the Soviet Union would come from within, still less that it would happen meekly, without global conflagration.
In this brilliantly compact, original, engaging book, Stephen Kotkin shows that the Soviet collapse resulted not from military competition but, ironically, from the dynamism of Communist ideology, the long-held dream for "socialism with a human face." The neo-liberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia never took place, nor could they have, given the Soviet-era inheritance in the social, political, and economic landscape. Kotkin takes us deep into post-Stalin Soviet society and institutions, into the everyday hopes and secret political intrigues that affected 285 million people, before and after 1991. He conveys the high drama of a superpower falling apart while armed to the teeth with millions of loyal troops and tens of thousands of weapons of mass destruction. Armageddon Averted vividly demonstrates the overriding importance of history, individual ambition, geopolitics, and institutions, and deftly draws out contemporary Russia's contradictory predicament.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270769 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Library Journal
The director of Russian studies at Princeton and a published scholar in the field of Soviet studies, Kotkin has written a lively and provocative work on a subject that has already attracted much scholarly attention. His central question is, however, his own: why didn't Soviet elites defend their Union, using their vast military arsenal to bring about a cataclysmic super-Yugoslavia in the dying USSR? How could such a massive police state have died so quietly? He points in response to those same elites who, for over 30 years, constituted themselves as vast "loot chains," preferring to plunder their country of its wealth than risk losing everything in large-scale war. Through the medium of the Union republics, local elites led the charge for their own aggrandizement, thus "cashier[ing] the Union." As he delivers telling jabs, Kotkin spares no one neither Soviet politician-gangsters nor arrogant U.S. administrators and academics. This is a much more readable and lively monograph on the Soviet collapse than others, such as Michael McFaul's Russia's Unfinished Revolution (Cornell Univ., 2001), which has a more purely academic appeal. Kotkin's book should attract both the academic and the informed general reader. Robert Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ont. The director of Russian studies at Princeton and a published scholar in the field of Soviet studies, Kotkin has written a lively and provocative work on a subject that has already attracted much scholarly attention. His central question is, however, his own: why didn't Soviet elites defend their Union, using their vast military arsenal to bring about a cataclysmic super-Yugoslavia in the dying U.S.S.R.? How could such a massive police state have died so quietly? He points in response to those same elites who, for over 30 years, constituted themselves as vast "loot chains," preferring to plunder their country of its wealth than risk losing everything in large-scale war. Through the medium of the Union republics, local elites led the charge for their own aggrandizement, thus "cashier[ing] the Union." As he delivers telling jabs, Kotkin spares no one neither Soviet politician-gangsters nor arrogant U.S. administrators and academics. This is a much more readable and lively monograph on the Soviet collapse than others, such as Michael McFaul's Russia's Unfinished Revolution (Cornell Univ., 2001), which has a more purely academic appeal. Kotkin's book should attract both the academic and the informed general reader. Robert Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ont.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
In 1995, Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton, published "Magnetic Mountain," a groundbreaking study of Stalinist socialism as it developed in the gargantuan steel town of Magnitogorsk, in central Russia. In his portrayal of that perverse utopia, the author displayed the skills of a dogged reporter and a meticulous archivist. The same strengths are evident in this brief, lucid study, which draws upon dozens of obscure Kremlin memoirs, provincial records, and interviews with top-level officials and oligarchs to provide us with the clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape. Kotkin effectively describes how what was called "reform" was actually a continuing freefall collapse; he also expertly depicts the lingering networks and habits of the Soviet era, and how they have formed a post-imperial world in all its corrupt splendor.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

"The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape. Kotkin effectively describes how what was called 'reform' was actually a continuing freefall collapse; he also expertly depicts the lingering networks and habits of the Soviet era, and how they have formed a post-imperial world in all its corrupt splendor. "--The New Yorker
"This briskly written, elegantly argued book is a triumph of the art of contemporary history.... Eschewing the fashionable academic focus on social movements, and the related notion that the Soviet downfall was owing to an uncontrollable wave of popular support for democracy--and also countering the self-congratulatory idea that unrelenting ideological and military pressure from the West led to the USSR's demise, Kotkin concentrates instead on Soviet elites, persuasively arguing that the collapse was the outcome of Mikhail Gorbachev's 'pursuit of a romantic dream' of socialist reform."--Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly
"Among the quantities of chaff produced about Russia over the past decade, there was after all some wheat, especially memoir literature, and Kotkin has gathered it together in what is now our most comprehensive analysis of the Leninist endgame."--Martin Malia, The Washington Post Book World
"Concise and persuasive.... The mystery, for Kotkin, is not so much why the Soviet Union collapsed as why it did so with so little collateral damage."--Robert Cottrell, The New York Review of Books

Customer Reviews

A good summary
Mr. Kotkin is an excellent historian with a number of fine works on Russia and the USSR under his belt. In this one he offers a post-mortem on the terminal decline of the Soviet Union.

While it's refreshing to read a work that criticizes American cold war triumphalism and chest-pounding, it's important to evaluate all the causes. It seems that Mr. Kotkin is too narrowly focusing on internal and systemic factors, at the expense of external pressures and the interconnections between them.

There is, in my view, a direct link between the Reagan-era external crusade to destroy socialism and the USSR as a political-military power, on one hand; and on the other Yeltsin's internal coup-de-grace. It is not unreasonable to see Yeltsin as the Reaganites' point-man within Russia, finishing from within the demolition begun outside the walls.

That the Soviet elite would join the bandwagon, rather than fight for the system, is also not as stange as Mr. Kotkin seems to think. After all, these apparatchiki only joined the Party in this late period for what they could get out of it; and if they saw greater profit in turning against it they yet acted accorded to their actual values. Too much is made of ideology, when the USSR in the 1980s was the last place you could find elites who took Communism seriously. In fact, the vindictive anti-Communism of the 1990s seems in direct proportion to the ideological cheek-kissing necessary to ride the Soviet gravy train.

Thus the de-Communization process can be depicted as stealing milk from a cow, under Brezhnev, and selling it on the side; to legalization of the milk theft and its market profits, under Gorbachev; to the final selling off and butchering the cow under Yeltsin, with milk profits reinvested in oil and in Western money markets. The bureaucrats-turned-capitalists are acting entirely in character throughout.

As for the contention that the reforms "didn't work" because the bureaucrats became the new bourgeoisie, one must ask - did not work for whom? They worked for whom they were intended to work. And a bourgeoisie is always created from pre-existing classes, like the landed gentry-turned-speculators in 18th century England.

Though this is still a good review of the decline of the USSR, it puzzles over too many obvious questions, with the answers right before one. Mr. Kotkin lifts up the rock to see what's underneath, but there's no trick - nothing was hidden.

Book explains why the Soviet Union did not collapse amid a violent convulsion
The author's goal in this book, as he states in the introduction, is to explain why the Soviet Union did not erupt into a violent convulsion upon its collapse. Multi-ethnic empires rarely break apart without violent upheavel. Yet this one did. If your goal is to find out why this is happened this is a book you must read. Written by a leading scholar of the Soviet Union.

almost perfect
This is the best historical narrative I had ever read on the subject. It does jingle very well with my own recollections about this period. It is informative with a lot of details.

According to Mr.Kotkin the final stages of the collapse were two-fold: first commie-romantic-idiot Gorbachev destroyed whatever was remaining of the existing system while trying to improve it, and then the Soviet elite saw better prospects in joining Eltsin in finishing the system off instead of fighting for its meager spoils.

There are a few amusing/annoying/bizarre parts. First, Mr.Kotkin seems genuinely upset that the system did not even try to use its repressive powers to preserve itself. Second, the author simply could not make himself to accept Soviet elite's switch to Eltsin as a reasonable action. Third he often goes off into incoherent ramblings condemning all parties including his fellow sovietologists.

But again, these are all very minor blemishes, and they are clearly separated from presented narrative, which is simply superb in my view.