The power of ideas: notes on Zubok (2021)
Recently I read “Collapse: the fall of the Soviet Union” by Vladislav Zubok. It is an impressive work — career defining — and packed full of historical context. He challenges the common view that the Soviet economy was riddled with structural problems and that its failure was inevitable. Rather, his central premise is that Gorbachev made specific policy errors that contributed to the economic and financial turmoil of the late 1980s.
What I found most interesting (and pleasantly surprising) about the book is the emphasis placed in individual choices that were influenced by ideological reasoning. In my book on The Neoliberal Revolution in Eastern Europe (co-authored with Paul Dragos Aligica) I spent a lot of time considering the motivations and intellectual frameworks used by key decision makers. Without denying the importance of structural factors and wider historic forces, the scope for ideas to have impact on events can be extremely important.
Zubok argues that the context of glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) was that “the party’s ideological legitimacy had long been eroded” (p.4) and his narrative comprises of one person (“Gorbachev lies at the centre of this puzzle” p.5) with one conviction (“he was the last true Leninist believer” p.21). If this were a movie (and it should become one) I can imagine the contrasts between bread lines and public protests while Gorbachev dons a favourite sweater and interrogates his collected works of Lenin to find a way forward.
Consider Alexander Yakovlev, who, while Soviet Ambassador to Canada met with Gorbachev and discussed how Marxism-Leninism needed to be reinterpreted in order to deal with the problems occuring with the state management of the agricultural industry. Gorbachev arranged a job for Yakovlev at a leading think tank and they met regularly to discuss ideas (this was back when senior politicians meeting with think tank directors was deemed normal and part of policy formulation, rather than a deep and dark conspiracy).
Rather than present Western intellectuals as experimenters, parachuted in by international organisations to rule over a compliant and provincial population, Zubok gives scope for the agency and importance of local policy makers. Indeed I was surprised at how scant the evidence was for the links between radical free market economists and Russian policy leaders. Some specific meetings include:
- In July 1990 Gaidar attended a conference in Hungary and met Rudiger Dornbusch (MIT) and William Nordhaus (Yale)
- Yeltsin met with a group of Stanford economists (including Michael Bernstam) who were visiting Moscow in March 1991.
- In December 1990 Gaidar met with Dornbusch, Jeff Sachs (Harvard), Anders Aslund (Uppsala) and others.
But this is a far cry from US sponsored training programmes or Russian hired personnel. And indeed what is the key policy advice? Fiscal discipline to avoid excessive inflation. And yet:
Indeed, where I think Zubok perhaps overstate the ideological importance, is where he argues: “The Russian leaders wanted to be recognised, legitimated, adopted, and incorporated by the West. Without such expectations, amounting to an ideological revolution, one simply cannot understand the story of the Soviet implosion from within” (p.431). But how much of this was instrumental? Gorbachev wanted and needed loans, and the intricate hesitancy with which he raises this with George Bush Snr, like a shy school boy picking up the courage to ask out a girl, are some of the most potent moments in the book.
Lots gets made about the scale of Western policy influence, but Zubok presents it as merely being a consolation gesture in lieu of actual financial assistance.
That said, Zubok recognises that Westerners were both “chroniclers” and “participants”, and played a role in “radicalising” local politics. He confirms that it was not just anti-communism or American-style liberalism that spread so swiftly, but specifically economics as a social science. (Indeed never before had economists played such a central role in policy transformation).
Zubok is surely right to warn against “provisional insights” becoming an “established view” and wrestles against “the dominant narrative that the Soviet collapse was inevitable” (p. 7). But what are the examples of sustainable socialist economies? Cuba? North Korea? I think it is fair to say that the economic contradictions meant that the Soviet economy was impossible to maintain a reasonable standard of living for its citizens. But that does not mean it had to all come to a head when it did. Here we have a seminal account of how Gorbachev’s reforms constituted a causal factor in the turmoil he was seeking to address. But that is not so much a cause of the collapse, but a trigger. Many a time have hapless public servants taken the hit for constituting the focal point of a much deeper crisis.
Zubok dedicated the book “to all reformers”. The implicit claim is that Gorbachev failed due to implementation. That a better reformer might have found a different outcome. I find this naive. Gorbachev’s task — to conceptualise a humane, democratic form of socialism — was an impossible one. It was an effort in science fiction and was destined to fail. Had he spent as much time studying Mises as he studied Lenin he might have realised this.
The book ends with the end of the Soviet Union, on December 26th 1991. So although Zubok refers to “the neoliberal revolution” of Thatcher and Reagan, and gives plenty of attention to those ideological underpinnings of of Western policy advice, we do not see what happened next. We do not see how the deployment of shock therapy affected transition countries, and how Yeltsin’s attempts to chart a path between chaos and order utilised aspects of the Washington Consensus playbook. For that, see my current project.
