Why Did the USSR Collapse?

5.1 Is the collapse of the USSR more attributable to personality, institutional or structural features?

I think the collapse of the USSR was attributable to all three of the features: personality, institutional, and structural. Presuming that Mikhail Gorbachev is the person referred to in the first regard, I think it's fair to say that his personality played an essential role in the country's collapse, although obviously it's more difficult to say whether the dismantling of the Soviet state was by design or an unintended consequence of reform. Here, the readings for the week offer a range of viewpoints. David Marples's analysis is particularly useful in pointing out how, on the one hand, Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the party into the elite with the paradoxical effect that "Neither workers, nor peasants, nor the intellectual elite accepted him as one of their own."[1] While such a characterization might initially seem to constitute a handicap, I rather think the lack of personal connections allowed Gorbachev to have a sort of maneuverability that a leader more attached to the party (e.g., Brezhnev) or to the workers and peasants (e.g., Khrushchev) might not have had. At those times where the wisdom of Gorbachev's decisions faltered (such as in the Lithuanian crisis early in 1991), he was probably saved more by luck than ability, but outside of the last year of his tenure, I don't think was the overarching style of Gorbachev's leadership.

Regarding institutional features, the diminishing role of the party probably plays the most important role. Here, in ultimately excluding the party from an exclusive role as the single guiding party of the system, Gorbachev delivered a coup de grace to a system that had been deteriorating over at least two decades. As Alexander Dallin points out, although the party grew to a heavily bureaucratized state with deeply entrenched control by the dawn of the Brezhnev era, the stagnation of that era resulted in a fundamental disconnect between the people and the party, made worse by rampant corruption. When the glasnost policy brought all of these problems out into the open, Dallin writes, "all this brought about a remarkable sense of having been lied to, of having been deprived of what the rest of the world had had access to […] a transformation of the Communist Party from the unchallenged clan of privilege to a hollow institution without a rational task other than self-preservations."[2] With glasnost in place, there could not help but be a vicious cycle of openness evoking party delegitimization evoking more openness, etc. Without the guiding hand of the party over the party state, the state could not but help but dissolve.

Finally, the structural features are most complex of all, involving both the rise of nationalism and the dissolution of totalitarianism. On the former point, a two-faced minorities policy that for decades had preached local self-determination but practiced aggressive Russification could not have helped but fuel nationalism, everything we know about nationalism considered. Regarding the latter point, I found Rasma Karklins's essay most helpful. As she notes, "If one links the totalitarian model's assumptions about the significance of the party's ideological and media monopolies to a dynamic concept of political culture, the erosion of these monopolies reveals itself as even more of a systemic change."[3] Karklins is clear that the roles of personality, ideology, and institutions are interrelated in her essay, so she bears in mind Gorbachev's role of instituting democratization "from above" and his dilution of the party's key role. Overall, I found her analysis to be the most incisive.

=====

[1] David R. Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union 1985-1991 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 103.
[2] Alexander Dallin, "Causes of the Collapse of the Soviet Union," Post-Soviet Affairs, 8, no. 4 (1992): 298.
[3] Rasma Karklins, "Explaining Regime Change in the Soviet Union," Europe-Asia Studies, 46, no. 1 (1994): 34.

Assessing Gorbachev

In my opinion, Mikhail Gorbachev deserves enormous credit for both the peaceful ending of the dictatorship and cold war and the decline and collapse of the Soviet state because I cannot imagine one happening without the other. Moreover, the see the decline and collapse of the USSR as having been an overwhelmingly positive thing, even if events since then for Russia and the other constituent republics have often been difficult. Gorbachev sought to dismantle the system more cautiously and slowly, so the chaos and anarchy that erupted in some places cannot, in my opinion, be blamed on him.

Regarding Gorbachev's most positive accomplishment, I believe that it was ending the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. With literally no end in sight for the Soviet troops fighting there, growing discontent over the war among the Soviet public – particularly among the USSR's Muslim ethnicities – and the monumental cost of the intervention with little or no gain, it is frankly amazing to me that Brezhnev persisted in the war for as long as he did, although the U.S. record in its own intervention in Vietnam left at least as much to be desired.

Regarding Gorbachev's worst miscalculation, I think his failure to assess his opponents within the Soviet government was the chief issue. While it certainly could not have been easy to manage criticism from his left from the entrenched interests of the military and security apparatuses and, at the same time, more right-wing pressure from the likes of Boris Yeltsin, a more savvy politician might have been able to insulate himself sufficiently from the sorts of threats that these groups posed and prevented the August 1991 coup and the rapid deterioration of his power that followed. More importantly, better management of the political terrain might have allowed Gorbachev to control the final collapse of the USSR more competently, thus perhaps averting some of the tragedy that has since ensued.

Finally, on a personal note, I lived through the collapse of the final year of the Soviet Union and remember the events very well. I recall Gorbachev returning to power when the August coup was crushed and the disappearance of the Soviet Union four months. I remember thinking then that Mikhail Gorbachev might have been the greatest leader of the 20th century for what he accomplished. Certainly he was the most significant, in the same way that Hitler was (in my opinion) for the first half. If everything about Europe mid-century was more or less a direct result of the catastrophic policies that Hitler pursued, then Gorbachev was ultimately the person who was responsible for that landscape having changed so enormously by the century's end.