 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Featuring extensive revisions to the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue--bringing the book completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse--this compact, original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the great historical events of the last fifty years.
Combining historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post Soviet Russia and he reminds us, with chilling immediacy, of what could not have been predicted--that the world's largest police state, with several million troops, a doomsday arsenal, and an appalling record of violence, would liquidate itself with barely a whimper. Throughout the book, Kotkin also paints vivid portraits of key personalities. Using recently released archive materials, for example, he offers a fascinating picture of Gorbachev, describing this virtuoso tactician and resolutely committed reformer as "flabbergasted by the fact that his socialist renewal was leading to the system's liquidation"--and more or less going along with it.
At once authoritative and provocative, Armageddon Averted illuminates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how "principled restraint and scheming self interest brought a deadly system to meek dissolution."
Acclaim for the First Edition:
"The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape."
--The New Yorker
"A triumph of the art of contemporary history. In fewer than 200 pagesKotkin elucidates the implosion of the Soviet empire--the most important and startling series of international events of the past fifty years--and clearly spells out why, thanks almost entirely to the 'principal restraint' of the Soviet leadership, that collapse didn't result in a cataclysmic war, as all experts had long forecasted."
-The Atlantic Monthly
"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."
--The New York Review of Books |
Average Customer Rating:   Very Good, Concise Analysis of Soviet Collapse This relatively short book is a strong analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Kotkin is particularly concerned with rebutting Western triumphalist accounts of the Soviet collapse and focuses on the people who really made the key decisions, the leading elites of the Soviet state. Kotkin points to 2 major structural features that undermined the Soviet Union. The first was the failure of the Soviet economy to keep pace with the burgeoning economies of the USA, Western Europe, and Japan. As early as the mid-1960s, intelligent Soviet economists were warning of economic stagnation. The second factor, greatly magnifying the effects of Soviet economic inefficiency, was the burden of Cold War competition with the USA and its allies. The Soviet state promised economic and social utopia, and despite real achievements in modernizing Russia and other parts of the Soviet state, delivered sluggish economic growth, massive corruption, an oligarchic party-state, and suppression of human rights.
Many Soviet leaders were aware of these problems, but the generational shift that occurred with the ascent of Gorbachev brought a real reformer to power. Unlike his predecessors, who were willing temporize and maintain power with very modest efforts at reform, Gorbachev was willing to take what were in the Soviet context truly radical steps. A pragmatic idealist, Gorbachev was motivated by a sincere desire to produce a humane form of socialism, but the ironic result of his efforts was to destroy the entity he wished to save from itself.
Kotkin lays out nicely how efforts at reform, notably the weakening of the Communist Party, undid some of the key bonds holding together the Soviet Union. He shows as well that many of the features of post-Soviet world were continuations of patterns well established during the Soviet years and that others, notably some aspects of the economic chaos, were the result of a weak central state. Kotkin makes a particularly interesting point that the nationalism that emerged with the breakup of the Soviet Union was partly a product of the way the Soviet Union was organized into national republics. Once the trans-Union bonds of the Party, the military, and the KGB had been broken, the national republics were the remaining formal governmental structures.
Kotkin sees the poverty and lawlessness that followed the end of the Soviet Union as essentially inevitable and argues that a democratic state will emerge in Russia only with the establishment of an effective central government and legal system. He also, however, offers measured praise for both Gorbachev and his successors. True to his essentially idealistic nature, Gorbachev ultimately chose principle over the maintenance of power. The dissolution of the Soviet Union could have been accompanied by the type of massive violence seen in the former Yugoslavia, a rather scary thought given the size of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Correct, but not complete I read this reasonable book, here in Brazil.This book is concise, but also is far from complete, about USSR's fall.On page 28, this book writes:"In 1982, one émigré defector derided the USSR as a 'land of cleptocracy'.On page 57, this page writes:"Belief in a humane socialism had re-emerged from within the system, and this time, in even more politically skilful hands, it would prove fatal."
I'm a brazilian and I know exactly, what means a cleptocracy, inflation and hyperinflation.Brazil is a cleptocracy and until 1994 was under terrible inflation.In late 1989 until march, 1990, Brazil was under hyperinflation and I know what really is a hyperinflation.I suffered by hyperinflation and now I realize that former brazilian president Fernando Collor was far better, than Gorbachev, in economical and political skills.Gorbachev was a great publicist and a writer of sucess - more than 5,000,000 copies of his book Perestroika translated in dozens of languages.Even so, Gorbachev was a terrible political and economical leader.Inflation of 500% in a month during some months and recession of -50%, in a year!Russian were POORER in 1995, than in 1965.
Oh! Thanks, Fernando Collor for his skills, in brazilian hyperinflation of 1990!Compared to Fernando Collor, Gorbachev was far worse as a leader.
This book shows that soviets, not americans, wiped out USSR.
This is a regular book.Even as an introduction, about the soviet collapse, this book isn't the best choice to buy.Being concise, short and correct, this book gots three stars from me. 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 according 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, the blemishes are minor and they are clearly separated from the presented narrative, which is simply superb in my view.
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