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The Reform of the Soviet System and the Demise of the Soviet State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Mark Kramer
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Abstract

Mark Kramer agrees with Cohen’s general argument and welcomes Cohen's rebuttal of the “retrospective determinism” that is so common in the literature on the subject, but he raises questions about the way Cohen defines and assesses the “Soviet system.” Kramer argues that it is important to distinguish between the Soviet system and the Soviet state and that the demise of the former did not have to be accompanied by the end of the latter. He also expresses concern that Cohen's article implies, if only inadvertently, that the Soviet system could not have survived unless it had been drastically reformed.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , Fall 2004 , pp. 505 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2004

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References

1 See, for example, my seven articles in three special issues under the general title “The Collapse of the Soviet Union, “Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 1 (Winter 2003); 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003); and 6, no. 4 (Fall 2004). All the articles in these special issues, plus a few other essays I have written, will be published as a book, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, by MIT Press in 2005.

2 By referring to the “Soviet Union” or “Soviet state,” I am not implying that the name of the state had to remain unchanged. On the contrary, a new name would undoubtedly have been adopted if the state had survived beyond 1991. Among the proposed new names was the “Union of Soviet Sovereign States,” as Cohen notes. Even a new name that lacked the word Soviet would have been compatible with the continued existence of the state. (For example, even though Egypt was renamed the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1972, this did not mean that the Egyptian state no longer existed, especially after the planned merger with Syria broke down in 1961.) In other words, my interest here is solely in the state itself, not in its name. Below, I will specify more fully what I mean by the “Soviet state.“

3 On this point, see Zlotnik, Marc, “Yeltsin and Gorbachev: The Politics of Confrontation,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 156–58Google Scholar.

4 In November 1991, after the newly elected Chechen president, Johar Dudaev, declared independence, El'tsin proclaimed a state of emergency in Chechnia and sent Russian troops to the airport near Groznyi, but he failed to win support for these moves from the Russian parliament. As a result, the Russian troops were quickly and humiliatingly pulled out. Even in the unlikely event that El'tsin did contemplate the massive use of force against Ukraine in the fall of 1991 (there is no evidence to suggest that he did), the debacle in Chechnia would undoubtedly have helped dissuade him from even attempting it. By December 1994, of course, El'tsin was willing to undertake a large-scale military operation against Chechnia, but the reasons for diat (to die extent they are known) lie well outside the scope of this discussion.

5 Beissinger, Mark R., Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State(New York, 2002), 371 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Jim Hoagland cites some telling examples of these erroneous predictions in his “As If It Never Happened,” Washington Post, 1 June 1997, C09. Many of the Chinese demonstrators were equally culpable of underestimating the regime's ability to launch an allout crackdown. See Tsou, Tang, “The Tiananmen Tragedy: The State-Society Relationship, Choices, and Mechanisms in Historical Perspective,” in Elster, Jon, ed., The Roundtable Talksand the Breakdown of Communism(Chicago, 1996), 232–33Google Scholar. Indeed, even as the Chinese army began moving in to crush the demonstrations, many of the protesters were still convinced that the soldiers would use only tear gas and rubber bullets. The onslaught that actually ensued came as a shock to the protest organizers.

7 It is worth noting, however, that, even after the aborted coup, some western observers still believed that an all-out crackdown was not only feasible but almost inevitable. As late as October 1991, Jerry Hough predicted that the Soviet Union would not disintegrate because “the Soviet military, like the armed forces in most countries, is willing to initiate the bloodshed to stop the disintegration.” Within weeks, his assertions had been thoroughly undercut. See Hough, Jerry F., “Assessing the Coup,” Current History 90, no. 558 (October 1991): 310 Google Scholar.

8 Bendix, Reinhard, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule(Berkeley, 1978), 27 Google Scholar.

9 For a cataloguing of many of these problems, see Byrnes, Robert F., ed., After Brezhnev:Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s(Bloomington, 1983)Google Scholar.

10 Kotkin, Stephen, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000(Oxford, 2001), 27 Google Scholar.

11 On this point, see Ellman, Michael and Kontorovich, Vladimir, eds., The Disintegrationof the Soviet Economic System(New York, 1992)Google Scholar; and Ellman, Michael and Kontorovich, Vladimir, eds., The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders'History(Armonk, N.Y., 1998)Google Scholar.

12 Cohen’s discussion of economic reform is the only part of his article that I find unconvincing. Although I fully agree that Gorbachev’s success in “discrediting long-standing ideological dogmas” was crucial in fostering opportunities for economic reform that would previously have been impossible, I do not agree that Gorbachev made good use of these opportunities. Cohen argues that “actual marketization, privatization, and commercialization of the Soviet economy were under way” by 1990-1991, but this assessment glosses over the highly adverse economic impact of Gorbachev’s policies. The Soviet leader’s mismanagement of the economy was evident from the very start. In May 1985, Gorbachev launched an anti-alcohol campaign that not only embittered much of the population and sparked a surge of bootlegging, but also had a grave effect on Soviet budget revenues. The resulting fiscal imbalances spurred soaring inflation. In the spring of 1986 Gorbachev led the Soviet Politburo in adopting a resolution “O merakh bor'by s netrudovymi dokhodami“ (On measures to combat nonlabor income) that prohibited all private economic transactions, including even die most innocuous activities, such as the sale of fruit, vegetables, and flowers grown on any private plots. At this early point it would have made great sense for Gorbachev to encourage entrepreneurialism and small business, but the Politburo resolution did just the opposite, nipping any such activities in the bud. These early blunders got the process of economic reform off to a bad start, paving the way for many subsequent mistakes, as in the fall of 1990 when Gorbachev devised a half-baked “compromise” between the so-called 500-Day Plan (a far from perfect document) and the program favored by Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov (an even worse document). If, as Cohen argues, “privatization and commercialization of the Soviet economy were under way” by 1990-1991, this had less to do with Gorbachev than with the efforts of well-placed elites (and a few others) to seize what they could before the opportunities for self-enrichment were foreclosed. See, for example, Johnson, Simon and Kroll, Heidi, “Managerial Strategies for Spontaneous Privatization,“ Soviet Economy 7, no. 4 (September-December 1991): 281–316 Google Scholar.

13 Far too much has been made of a conversation that Gorbachev and his future foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze reportedly had when strolling along the Black Sea coast in 1979. According to Gorbachev's recollection, Shevardnadze supposedly said that “everything [in the Soviet Union] is now rotten [vse prognilo],” and Gorbachev supposedly agreed (ia s nim byl soglasen). Even if the conversation did take place as alleged, its significance should not be overstated. Shevardnadze's purported comment is similar to the rhetoric that up-and-coming officials in any number of countries (including the United States) use when they are frustrated by the lack of any near-term opportunity to replace older or more established leaders. In the United States, for example, Democratic presidential aspirants often warn in dire terms about the risks of electing (or reelecting) a Republican president, and vice versa. This sort of rhetoric does not guarantee that the aspiring leader will undertake drastic changes of the system if he or she is eventually elected (or appointed) to the top post. By 1985 it was generally known that Gorbachev wanted to pursue a number of steps to make the system run better, but no one in the Soviet leadership anticipated—or could have anticipated—just how radical the changes he implemented would soon prove to be.

14 Iakovlev, Aleksandr, Sumerhi(Moscow, 2003), 459 Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 459-61. See also Grishin, V V., Ol Khrushcheva do Gorbacheva: Politicheskieporlrety piati gensekov i A. N. Kosygina—Memuary(Moscow, 1996), 69–70 Google Scholar.

16 It is interesting to recall that many Americans at the time had come to the opposite conclusion. Far from believing that the United States was pulling ahead, they were concerned about the country's purported decline. Joseph Nye summarized the prevailing mood in American society: “By 1989, half the American public believed that the nation was in decline. Only one in five Americans believed that the United States was the top economic power, even though it remained by far the world's largest economy. After President Reagan's military build-up in the 1980s, only a fifth of the people believed that the United States was ahead of the Soviet Union in overall military strength. About a third of the public believed that the country's nuclear arsenal was weaker than that of the Soviet Union, and half believed that the United States was behind in conventional military strength. A rash of books and articles published [in the United States] in the 1980s described the decline of nations, and American decline in particular.” Nye, Joseph S. Jr., Bound to Lead: TheChanging Nature of American Power(New York, 1990), 2 Google Scholar.

17 “Zasedanie Politbiuro TsK KPSS 30 ianvaria 1991 goda: Rabochaia zapis',” 30January 1991 (Top Secret), in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii, f. 89, op. 42, d. 31,1.9.