How the West was wrong

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There is a temptation, which I well understand, to avert one?s eyes from contemporary Russia.

The spectacle of economic collapse is so vast, the prospect of improvement so remote, the necessary reforms so horribly complex, that many prefer to throw up their hands in despair, to blame it all on ?Russian culture? and to talk about something else.

To his credit, Stephen Kotkin has chosen the opposite tack: he prefers to stare at Russia with his eyes wide open, describing precisely what he sees. Kotkin is an American historian of Russia, best known for his book on the construction of the industrial city of Magnitogorsk, a masterful depiction of daily life in Stalin?s Russia.

He has now applied the same historians? techniques ? close attention to the evolution of institutions, the behaviour of ?lites, the shifts in the power structure ? to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first decade of ?reform?. He avoids easy answers: blaming the West, blaming capitalism, blaming ?Russian culture?. Instead, he locates the origins of the present chaos in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Soviet economy began to slide drastically behind that of the West, and Soviet infrastructure began the deterioration of which we see the results today.

The result is the most competent short account of the collapse and the aftermath that I have read to date. Although Kotkin?s arguments are not quite as original as he sometimes implies, they are presented with clarity and logic. He points out, as others have done but perhaps not forcefully enough, that it is a mistake to imagine the Soviet Union collapsed because of an uncontrollable wave of popular support for democracy, or because Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had always harboured a secret love for the West: Gorbachev was trying to save the communist system, not destroy it.

He conceived of glasnost as a method of improving production, through a more honest discussion of the system?s failings, while perestroika amounted to no less than the creation of socialism with a human face. In fact, Gorbachev?s belief in the system was so profound, and so naive, that he clung to it to the very end, failing to see what was happening. It was he who doggedly prevented the conservative wing of the Communist Party from stopping the system?s collapse, firmly believing them to be ?anti-reform?.

If Gorbachev was no democrat, Kotkin also points out that the subsequent capitalist reforms were nothing of the sort either, but rather a cover for one of the most comprehensive mass robberies in history.

For 70 years, the entire country had grown accustomed to cheating the state. Now the process merely deepened. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, understanding their own system, the communist ?lites began in the late 1980s to convert their remaining political influence into financial power. They paid domestic prices for heavily subsidised oil and gas, and sold them at world prices abroad, used tax loopholes, manipulated the distribution of export and import licences. Fortunes were stashed away, writes Kotkin, ?using mechanisms that the KGB had developed to pay for industrial espionage: channelling funds through shell companies as well as banks in offshore locations?.

Well before the Soviet Union had actually collapsed, ?a pattern was set?. As privatisation progressed, the process merely grew more rapid: the state ?sold? its most valuable assets for pennies to insiders who knew which ones to buy, and was left without the funds to shore up its rotting infrastructure, or even to pay state sector wages.

Throughout all of this, the West saw what it wanted to see, first taking credit for the collapse, then imagining itself, during the Clinton presidency, to be directing both the reform process and the ?transition to democracy?. When it turned out that there was no reform process and a very shaky version of democracy, Western leaders and Western economists fell out, blaming one another for ?losing Russia?.

In truth, Western involvement was minimal all along. Although it is wrong to say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable ? had it not been for Gorbachev, we might still be fighting the Cold War today ? the explanation both for the rapidity of the decay, and for the confusion of the aftermath, lay within the old communist system itself.