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From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR

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From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR Book Reviews become a dead end of deprivation and alcoholism. Paradoxically, the latter fear likely became more pronounced as the village became more male in composition. To young, ambitious women, few places seemed more stagnant during the Brezhnev years than the Soviet countryside. Finally, Natalya Chernyshova contributes a fascinating study of Soviet shopping. Ranging from the culture of the queue, to letters of complaint, to elaborate, semi- official networks for bringing foreign goods across the Soviet frontier, Chernyshova depicts a Soviet retail economy that is far more flexible and participatory than previ- ous accounts acknowledge. By the early 1980s, according to Chernyshova, the ability to buy what one wanted correlated strongly with personal satisfaction and fulfillment. Although Chernyshova’s emphasis on the dynamism of the retail economy belies the idea of stagnation, her conflation of shopping and happiness suggests no small degree of ideological decay, a central component of stagnation. Thus, like Fürst and Siegel- baum, Chernyshova both challenges and affirms the editors’ central interpretive line in Reconsidering Stagnation. ✣✣✣ Louis Sell, From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 408 pp. $27.95. Reviewed by Thomas W. Simons, Jr., Harvard University Louis Sell is a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer whose 27-year career included an extraordinary series of assignments that allowed him to witness the final decades of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. From the prelude of a student visit to Moscow in 1967, to State Department work on the U.S.-Soviet summit of May 1972, to the “dissident beat” at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late 1970s, to strategic arms negotiations in Geneva in the early 1980s, to chief of the bilateral relations section of the State Department’s Soviet desk in mid-decade, to chief political reporting officer first in Belgrade and then in Moscow during the final years, up to the collapse of 1991: Sell was present at a dozen key junctures of the waning Cold War. His Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, also published by Duke (in 2002), harvests his years in the Balkans. Here he draws on his rich Soviet experiences to fashion a judicious and accessible one-volume account of the USSR’s last decades and where U.S.-Soviet relations fit in, both at the time and in history’s rearview mirror. Yet it is more than a memoir, even if Sell’s own recollections provide one of its threads. They make the story vivid and often poignant. Anyone who has raised Amer- ican children behind the Iron Curtain will instantly recognize Sell’s three-year-son, in Louisville on a visit, trying to eat a banana without removing the peel, because he had never seen one before (p. 376). But the recollections are only one thread in a multilayered book. The backbone is an engaging, detailed narrative of Soviet develop- ments and U.S.-Soviet relations that draws principally on a highly impressive range of 249 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_r_00780 by guest on 25 September 2021 Book Reviews memoir and documentary sources, especially Soviet and many unavailable in English, that have appeared since 1991. Full disclosure: he and I were Foreign Service col- leagues working the same Soviet and Balkan beats, and our careers intersected often during these years; I, too, have retired to academic analysis and writing. By the same token, I can testify to the meticulous care with which he has constructed his narrative, and to how successfully it weaves together data from those sources and his own lived experience. It is this tapestry of the personal and the analytical that gives the book its charm and its value. Sell’s narrative is comprehensive. Prefaced by useful general background on the Soviet Union, it then treats every important development in Soviet life and politics and the superpower relationship over his two decades. From Able Archer 83 to Gennadii Zakharov via Vladimir Bukovskiy and Nicholas Daniloff, alarms and expulsions, “spy dust” and the rest of espionage diplomacy, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, East-West arms control in all its avatars—they are all here ably, chronologically, and coherently recounted. The only sequence that is hard to follow covers the years 1985–1986, the first two years under Mikhail Gorbachev. In this section, domestic events (Chernobyl, Andrei Sakharov) and foreign affairs (Geneva and Reykjavík in U.S.-Soviet relations) chase each other into something of a jumble. The reader who follows the story to 1991, however, will understand what happened, wie es eigentlich gewesen, in this large and critical segment of modern history. Sell’s own sensible judgments of historical cause and effect benefit from this care- ful sequencing. For the period through the demise of the USSR, he avoids swooping macro-judgments and instead carefully shows how specific and how contingent devel- opments actually were. I might have judged certain factors somewhat differently. Although Sell acknowl- edges that the dissident movement was successfully repressed, he insists, in line with Yurii Andropov (who served as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from November 1982 to February 1984 after having been director of the KGB state security apparatus for more than fifteen years), that otherwise the dissidents could have threat- ened the regime itself: “Just as a tiny leak, if not plugged immediately, can eventually sweep away a massive dam, the dissidents were the earliest precursors of a larger cur- rent that only a few years later swept away the seemingly immovable edifice of Soviet rule (p. 40).” I am not so sure; but then again, although I dealt with many Soviet, Polish, and Romanian dissidents, I was not a designated “dissident officer.” The book contains other examples of a natural desire to have the cake and eat it too, to do justice to the complexities and yet suggest implausible ways out. Was a “Chinese strategy” of freeing the economy and maintaining the dictatorship actually an option for Gor- bachev in a country in which two-thirds of the economy was in industry, compared to China’s 15 percent, which could be “parked” long enough to reap the growth ben- efits of agricultural liberation first? Is it fair to criticize Gorbachev for failing to create an institutional basis for reform, or for not implementing the “500 Days” economic reform plan, or for not realizing that the system needed to be replaced rather than re- formed, in a country in which party members and their families, dug in against reform, 250 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_r_00780 by guest on 25 September 2021 Book Reviews numbered perhaps 75 million? Issues such as these will be the stuff of historiographical discussions for years to come. Sell’s overall judgments are judicious and well within the emerging scholarly con- sensus about these years: The collapse of the Soviet Union was not inevitable and instead resulted from an accumulation of worsening structural weaknesses and Gor- bachev’s mistakes. The U.S. approach to the country and the relationship, Sell feels, was sound and basically successful. Negotiating from a position of recovered economic and military strength, the United States recognized the limits of its influence in a dete- riorating Soviet situation and made the wise choice to limit its positive efforts to sup- port Gorbachev. Similarly, U.S. diplomatic handling of the geostrategic consequences of the crisis, seeking as much arms control progress as possible and a united Germany in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was masterful. Among the many heroes of Sell’s story on both sides, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Secretaries of State George Shultz and James Baker stand out. There are many fewer villains. Sell recaptures the hopefulness of the 1990s and mourns its passing in a postscript on the years since then. Without naming villains, he fails to find heroes either. He ar- gues that, during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, the restrained U.S. policy that seemed wise under Gorbachev seemed to lack both adequate empathy for Russia’s suffering and the imagination to seize the moment to refashion the geopolit- ical landscape in creative ways that would include Russia. All of us involved in policy in those years ask versions of Sell’s question: How far was the United States respon- sible for the fading of those hopes and the advent of Vladimir Putin’s Russia? Here, too, however, I would answer that question with two other questions, emulating the familiar Ashkenazi Jewish ritual. First, is it realistic to call retrospectively for that kind of creativity in a decade when the Cold War was over, when the United States wanted some post–Cold War nation-rebuilding at home, and when, with 70 United Nations peacekeeping missions underway, many U.S. citizens yearned for the world to take care of itself? Second, did Putin’s Russia really emerge through another process of spe- cific and contingent developments, like the one that brought the Cold War to an end, but this time after the turn of the millennium? Sell has given us an enduringly useful account of the first process; it will be up to all of us to respond to his concluding qualms about the second; and it may take many years. ✣✣✣ Max Bergholz, Violence as a Creative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a Balkan Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 441 pp. Reviewed by Robert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh The frequent description of the Bosnian war of 1992–1995 as “the worst conflict in Europe since World War II” has had the perverse effect of deflecting attention 251 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_r_00780 by guest on 25 September 2021.
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