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The Collapse of the Soviet Union (Part 1) Introduction

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The Collapse of the Soviet Union (Part 1) Introduction IntroductionKramer SPECIAL ISSUE: The Collapse of the Soviet Union (Part 1) Introduction ✣ The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was remarkable because it occurred so suddenly and with so little violence, especially in Russia itself. Even now, more than a decade after the fact, the abrupt and largely peaceful end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union seems nearly miraculous. History offers no previous instances in which revolutionary polit- ical and social change of this magnitude transpired with almost no violence. When large, multiethnic empires disintegrated in the past, their demise usu- ally came after extensive warfare and bloodshed.1 As late as mid-August 1991, just before an attempted coup d’état in Moscow, few if any observers expected that the Soviet Communist regime—and the Soviet state as a whole—would simply dissolve in a nonviolent manner. Many long-standing Western theo- ries of revolution and political change will have to be revised to take account of the largely peaceful upheavals that culminated in the breakup of the Soviet Union. Despite the enormous signiªcance of the Soviet collapse, Western schol- ars have not yet adequately explained why and how it occurred. Although a plethora of articles and books on the subject have been published over the past eleven years, the cumulative results of this research have been modest.2 The basic chronology of events from 1985 through 1991 is well-known, but the details of many crucial episodes (such as the failed coup of August 1991) are as murky as ever. There has not yet been a systematic, in-depth assessment 1. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conºict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 514–516. 2. Most of the items that have appeared will be cited in a bibliographic essay in the third special issue on this topic (Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, forthcoming). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 3–16 © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039703320996704 by guest on 25 September 2021 Kramer of the major factors and circumstances that precipitated the breakup of the Soviet state. Nor has there been a wide-ranging comparative analysis of the demise of the Soviet Union. The dearth of comparative research is surprising. Several important books examining the performance and decline of large em- pires from the past were published in the 1980s and early 1990s.3 Although the Soviet Union was not an “empire” per se, it did possess many of the same characteristics.4 The dissolution of the USSR is certainly worth comparing to these earlier cases of imperial collapse as well as to the more recent fragmenta- tion of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Thus far, however, only a small num- ber of political scientists and historians have pursued this line of inquiry.5 3. Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Charles A. Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Geir Lundestad, ed., The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Marc Ferro, Histoire des colonisations: des conquêtes aux indépendances, XIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuill, 1994); Geoffrey Parker, The Geopolitics of Domination: Territorial Supremacy in Europe and the Medi- terranean from the Ottoman Empire to the Soviet Union (New York: Routledge, 1988); Henri Grimal, La décolonisation de 1919 a nos jours, rev. ed. (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1985); Franz Ansprenger, Auºösung der Kolonialreiche (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981); Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers; and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Nine more recent additions to the literature are Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Alexander Demandt, ed., Das Ende der Weltreiche: vom Persen bis zur Sowjetunion (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997); Richard Lorenz, ed., Das Verdämmern der Macht: vom Untergang grosser Reiche (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000); Michael Cox et al., eds., Empires, Systems, and States: Great Transformations in International Poli- tics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); David B. Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Alex- ander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 2001); David Armitage, ed., Theories of Empire, 1450–1800 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and James Muldoon, Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 4. There is a vast literature on the concept of “empire” and the utility (or lack thereof) of efforts to come up with a deªnition. For a cogent overview of the major issues involved, see Lieven, Empire, pp. 3–26, as well as the bibliographic notes on pp. 445–449. Other sources adduced in footnote 3 above and footnote 5 below also provide helpful conceptual discussions. Additional sources worth consulting on this matter are Maurice Duverger et al., eds., Le Concept d’empire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1980); Shmuel Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963; republished by Transaction Books in 1993 with a new introduction by Eisenstadt); Mark R. Beissinger, “The Persisting Ambiguity of Empire,” Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 11, No. 2 (April–June 1995), pp. 149–184, esp. 149–164; and Mark R. Beissinger, “Demise of the Empire State: Identity, Legitimacy, and the Deconstruction of Soviet Politics,” in Crawford Young, ed., The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The Nation-State at Bay? (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), pp. 97–124. Beissinger rightly emphasizes that subjective perceptions underlie what we mean by “empire” and thereby make it a malleable concept over time—a concept dependent on prevailing attitudes. 5. Until 1997, the only preliminary attempts to address this question were in Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good, eds., Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Snyder, Myths of Empire, pp. 194–244; and some of the essays in Lundestad, ed., The Fall of Great Powers. In 1997 three other edited works appeared: Demandt, ed., Das Ende der Weltreiche; Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); and Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building—The Soviet Union and the Russian, Otto- 4 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039703320996704 by guest on 25 September 2021 Introduction Much of the existing literature on the breakup of the Soviet Union has tended to depict the outcome as inevitable. Those who believe that the result was preordained are apt to assume—implicitly or explicitly—that the choices made by Soviet policymaker from 1985 on and the unexpected circumstances that arose at key points ultimately made no difference. Such a mechanistic conception of the Soviet collapse may be superªcially appealing, but it is far too simplistic. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was an intricate and highly contingent process and was frequently spurred on by chance occur- rences and twists of fate. Choices did exist. Dramatic events often seem inevi- table in retrospect, but the reality almost always is more complex, as it was in this case. The past ªve to six years have witnessed some valuable additions to the literature on the collapse of the Soviet Union, and these have helped to ªll some of the gaps in our understanding. Nonetheless, many aspects of the de- mise of the USSR have remained mysterious. For scholarly reasons alone we need to have a better understanding of the reasons for the collapse. A careful assessment of this phenomenon is also likely to have practical beneªts, in part because numerous features of the Soviet Union are still present in most of the man, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), which is much briefer than the Dawisha and Parrott volume. The essays in the Demandt book explore the demise of numerous empires from the past, with comparisons in several cases to the Soviet Union. Both the Dawisha and Parrott book and the Barkey and von Hagen book look more at the consequences of the Soviet collapse than at the causes, but they do contain a few important chapters that focus on the causes. Neither book, however, provides a systematic comparison of the Soviet collapse with the dissolution of past empires. Dominic Lieven includes a comparative chapter on the Soviet Union in Empire (pp. 288–339), but it is less in- sightful and much briefer than the meticulous analysis he provides of the Tsarist Russian empire. Even briefer is Robert Strayer, “Decolonization, Democratization, and Communist Reform: The Soviet Collapse in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of World History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 375–406, which offers some interesting observations (mainly on pp. 377–383) but does not develop them. Valerie Bunce’s short monograph Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of the Socialist State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) provides an illuminating though prob- lematic comparison of the breakup of the Soviet Union with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, emphasizing what she sees as the vital role of institutions in the fragmentation of mul- tiethnic federal states under Communist rule (an argument that follows very closely on earlier work by Yuri Slezkine, Philip Roeder, Victor Zaslavsky, Rogers Brubaker, and others).
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