By Patricia H. Kushlis
FP has done it again. Why the editors of this respected US foreign policy magazine decided to lead off their July/August 2011 issue with Leon Aron’s Alice-in-Wonderland-like contribution entitled “Everything You Think You Know about the Collapse of the Soviet Union is Wrong” is mind-boggling.
The only truly accurate piece of this idiosyncratic look at the past is that Aron, unlike many neoconservatives and Reaganesque acolytes, argues that Reagan’s increases in the US military budget and his commitment to STAR Wars were not the reasons for the Soviet Union’s demise – that, rather, the Soviet Union did not cave from pressure from outside but from forces from within. Agree. But there ends my agreement with Aron’s views.
He continues by explaining that there were no good reasons for the collapse – from economics to the war in Afghanistan – except that is, for the desire of Russians to “build a moral Soviet Union” – a philosophical idea of the moral man. then near the end, Aron segues into a brief application of his analysis of the Soviet collapse to the Arab Spring before returning once again to Moscow and finally concluding with the current Russian intelligentsia’s desire to “inch toward another perestroika moment” because of the moral bankruptcy of the Putin regime and the society and economy it has spawned.
Excuse me please.
This sounds like an analysis dreamt up by someone swaying in a hammock by a lake with the “National Interest” in one hand and a vodka tonic in the other.
To begin at the beginning: there were Western experts who did foresee the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. Several were Europeans but others were American. Their advice, however, was ignored by - or did not penetrate - the upper reaches of the George H.W. Bush administration. Bush’s agenda was to support Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at all costs because US relations with the Soviet Union had never been so good. Meanwhile, too many in the American media were enthralled by this polished Soviet leader and his photogenic wife. But to assert that “virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw . . .” What balderdash.
One of the most notable Americans who foresaw the Soviet collapse was President Carter’s former National Security Advisor and Soviet nationalities expert – Zbigniew Brzezinski who had predicted the implosion at least a year – if not more - before it happened. I read Brzezinski’s rationale (e.g. nationalities) in an article when I was press attaché (please note I was an American official at the time) at the American Embassy in Helsinki and I know it was published well before August 1991.
I also read Bernard Lewis’ book, The Emergence of Modern Turkey because I was looking for parallels between the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and what was happening next door and across the Baltic Sea in the late 1980s.
I was never much of a journal keeper throughout my Foreign Service career but I did write one from mid-1989 until June 1992. Many of my entries focused on the breathtaking changes I observed taking place in the Soviet Union or former Soviet Union during that time.
So . . .
Here is a snippet from the entry I made in that journal on November 4, 1989 after hearing Gorbachev speak at Finlandia Hall one cold and windy afternoon shortly before the Berlin Wall fell:
- Debate rages in Washington as to what this man is up to, why, and how long he’ll last . . . People who come from the Soviet Union all say the Soviet Union is an economic disaster. . . Stalinist tactics may have forced the crude industrialization of the 1930s, but they do not produce the innovative high tech revolution of the 1980s. . . . I believe the persuasive sincerity of the speaker (Gorbachev). But can he succeed? What form will the Soviet Union take? How will it get there? And more: Europe today is in ferment as Eastern European countries rush to redefine their relationships with Moscow. So too are the peripheral (Soviet) Republics as they press for greater economic autonomy and long for full independence. Where is this all leading? What kind of power constellations will characterize the new Europe?
November 19, 1989, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I wrote:
- Will Gorbachev last the winter? Will the Soviet Union survive socialism? Can the system be reformed? The coal miners in the Donbass are on strike. . . . The Baltics are trying to separate. They look to do so peacefully - first economic autonomy then political. Whose orbit will they be drawn into? Sweden/Finland?
November 26, 1989:
- Is the Soviet Union capable of moderate politics after seventy years of Marxist suppression? Czarists, nihilists, anarchists all back on the streets.
December 17, 1989 re the Baltics:
- When does the US stop dealing with the Baltic Republics out of Moscow (US Embassy Moscow)? . . . The Lithuanians plan to declare independence in 1990. The Moldavians are on the verge of revolt. The Russian minority there is very nervous. 37% of Soviet conscripts are non-Russians according to a NATO Journal article by US demographer Murray Feshbach, our most respected demographic expert on the Soviet Union. . . . Religion and ethnicity are on the rise. These are divisive, not unifying elements. “Mother Russia” has no appeal to the minorities who want independence.
May Day 1990:
- We went to Leningrad over Easter. First time back in the Soviet Union in almost a decade. . . . The city is an economic disaster. There are two currencies: ruble and western. . . . Intourist guides have certainly changed: freely admit the economic plight. We walked back to the subway with our guide to Tsarskoye Selo, he told us he would then have to try to find something to eat. . . . many fewer police on the streets – lack of money. The city has none. . . . The city’s infrastructure is about to collapse. The tram tracks are surrounded by dirt, the paving bricks have separated. . . . only the churches’ golden domes and the mosques’ minarets are being regilded or repainted. They glimmer in a sea of decay.
There’s more, but enough to make the point, I hope, that Dr. Aron’s rendition of this story is shot full of holes. US diplomats serving in the Soviet Union and at Embassies in nearby capitals did know that the Soviet Union was falling apart and that the regime would not last. They were reporting what their eyes saw and their ears heard. Factored in were discussions with a variety of people including independence leaders – who were the “dissidents” of the 1980s. Access to Soviets for westerners living or traveling in the country was likely never so free.
Furthermore, the Soviet media bubbled with stories of the unfolding events – particularly print publications. Soviet broadcasts, newspapers and magazines were being recorded or copied and rapidly translated into English by the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and made available for US public as well as government consumption.
Aron, however, apparently missed this and a lot more. According to his biography at AEI - that wonderful neoconservative think-tank that brought us the Iraq War and other great foreign policy blunders - Aron left the Soviet Union in 1978 at the age 24. Did he not return to visit friends in the 1980s and witness what was happening?
Furthermore, in this article – and presumably in his forthcoming book on the same topic, Aron wraps himself in aggregate economic data presumably assembled by Soviet authorities to tell us that the Soviet GDP was expanding over this same period so therefore, economic hardship could not have been the reason for the collapse.
Here’s what he wrote in FP: “Soviet incomes increased more than 2 percent in 1985, and inflation-adjusted waged continued to rise in the next five years through 1990 at an average of over 7 percent.”
Who’s kidding whom – and as importantly why did the FP editorial staff buy it? Did Aron ever walk Moscow’s streets during the 1980s? Go to a market? A state store? Stand in line for meat or shoes? He must have realized that the ruble was worthless – and that’s not how goods changed hands anyway. Does he not understand the importance of the black market in a Communist country? Did he ever visit the “restive” regions that spurred the breakup? Meet with regional independence leaders? Did he not interview knowledgeable reporters from other countries who had worked as journalists in the Soviet Union and were traveling back on regular reporting trips? Amazing, if not - but from this article it doesn’t sound like it.
Politically Troubled Waters
Moreover, Aron has the gall to suggest that “from the regime’s point of view, the political circumstances were even less troublesome. After 20 years of relentless suppression of political opposition, virtually all the prominent dissidents had been imprisoned, exiled, forced to emigrate or had died in camps and jails.” Oh, come on. To argue that Gorbachev or the hardliners who attempted to overthrow him didn’t recognize troubled political waters when they saw them is nonsense.
Here, for instance, are just two additional excerpts from my journal to help set the record straight. This first dated March 26, 1990:
- The situation in Lithuania gets worse by the day. Today the Soviet Army took over more buildings and arrested “deserters.” . . . The Lithuanians have been eloquent and non-provocative. The Soviets are acting like a bear in the china shop.
Then on May 13, 1990, I wrote:
- The Soviets have no solution to the Baltics save military take-over and this will be domestically unpopular. The Popular Fronts are too connected. Draft dodging too widespread. . . . It depends, how the mess unravels. The lid will blow.
Clearly Aron also doesn’t remember that Gorbachev traveled to that bastion of political stability and fealty to the Soviet Union, Lithuania in January 1990, two months before the Lithuanians unilaterally declared independence, to try to talk them out of it. That trip, by the way, was reported in the western media including The New York Times. It also demonstrated how poorly Gorbachev and many Russians – except notably Yeltsin - understood the Baltics and miscalculated the power and interconnectedness of the minorities and Popular Fronts (national independence movements.)
Here’s the second excerpt which I wrote on November 4, 1990:
- The Estonians call it an occupied country. They are right. The Red Army wanders the streets in uniform speaking Russian. Last year they were kept off the streets. Now they are there to show the flag. However, only the Estonian tricolor flies and there are no Communist slogans anywhere. . . The devolution of the Empire is progressing, like a rolling stone down a sharp incline. The Estonians will be among the first to go. The Russians won’t make it easy. Are the car accidents of nationalist leaders accidental?
What’s the Arab Spring got to do with it?
Aron’s sudden meandering into the Arab spring and man’s quest for dignity even in the Middle East near the end of the article is foremost a distracting riff. Did he have no editor to wield the black pen and tell him so?
But moving on to the final conclusion – that according to Aron who apparently spent a few days in Moscow recently, the heady days of the 1980s have returned to Russia’s intelligentsia and that these days will usher in a perestroika-style Russian spring because the “moral imperative of freedom is reasserting itself.”
This, I’m afraid, is just plain wishful thinking. Yes, there are major problems in the Russian Federation today. Yes, one can certainly describe Putin’s regime as authoritarian and characterize Russian democratic roots as shallow. But to think that the Russian intelligentsia, bloggers on LiveJournal or members of Russia’s opposition groups – as Aron suggests - are strong enough to change the course of the country’s politics harking back to a heady 1980s that Aron likely only vicariously experienced is, well, stretching the point beyond reasonable doubt.
Pass the vodka, blini and some caviar please.
See also: Patricia H. Kushlis, WhirledView, The Collapse of the Soviet Union: What the US Knew and-When-It-Knew-It, December 12, 2011.