Review: Collapse by Vladislav Zubok

This was a disappointing read. The author gives little of the context necessary to understand the economic difficulties and political situation at the start of Gorbachev’s leadership (see, instead, Socialism Betrayed). The narrative centres on the personalities involved in the USSR’s collapse instead: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and US President Bush Sr (there was a surprising focus on the reactions of the United States — at times we got a near hourly breakdown of White House activity. Countries outside the West were nearly entirely absent from the book, perhaps due to Zubok's choice of sources.).

For all the author’s insistence that Gorbachev was a “neo-leninist” with strong sympathies with the intelligentsia, there was little intellectual curiosity about the philosophical debates and philosophical influences undergirding the USSR’s 1980s reforms (contrast again with Socialism Betrayed). Indeed, the author makes the USSR appear like a one-man show, when CPSU debate and governance was far more distributed.

When the narrative wasn’t honed in on the relative charisma of the key political players or regaling colourful gossip, it detailed nationalist sentiment and account balances. These aspects I found to be informative: separatism ended up being the final mode of collapse — if not the root cause of the collapse — and nationalism continues to drive geopolitics in Eastern Europe. Utopian socialists often insist upon the possibility of non-capitalist reforms, but the hard currency problems Gorbachev had to deal with, particularly in the wake of crashing oil prices, drove decision-making and concessions. While I remain persuaded that the USSR’s collapse was not inevitable (a position Zubok also takes), through Zubok’s book I gained a better appreciation for just how difficult the economy was to keep going (due in no small part to the catastrophic reforms implemented). However, it is also notable what Zubok chooses to exclude: the "second economy" that was so crucial of a factor in the USSR's collapse in Keeran and Kelly's account was nearly absent from Zubok's telling. 

Somewhat by chance, I read this work back-to-back with Isabella Weber’s book on China’s economic reforms, and the comparison between the two approaches is illuminating. The CPSU liberalized the finance industry and media before most of the rest of the economy, and as a result, quickly lost control of both the economy and of political legitimacy. The CPC retained control over media apparatus, banks, and key sectors of the economy, and as a result, was able to steer the economy through their desired reforms without lasting threat to their leadership. This exercise is, however, left to the reader. Zubok is more interested in ensuring that, counter to some Western narratives (including the Nobel Peace Prize committee), the reader understands Gorbachev to be a bumbling idiot.

Zubok's work leaves something to be desired as a reference. He is often too credulous of works that should be suspected of having clear bias, like memoirs by American politicians. Several citations I tried to follow lead to a chain of "as quoted in" references. He is sometimes sloppy when it comes to economics. In one egregious example, he writes that "the tax on alcohol procured one-third of Soviet GDP", which is nearly mathematically impossible.

Zubok tends to lose the forest for the trees. I was hoping for a political and economic analysis, but found myself having to construct this for myself from the very extensive material Zubok relays. Still, his beat-by-beat recounting of the last three or four years of the USSR's existence did give me a better understanding of the overall shape of that era of history.