Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000.

• Author: Lipford, Jody
• Position: Book Review

By Stephen Kotkin

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 224. $25.00 cloth.

I begin with a personal anecdote. In the fall of 1982, I was attending college in my hometown and living with my parents. On the morning of November 11, my mother met me in the hall, and I'll never forget her first words to me. They were not "Good morning" or "How did you sleep last night?" or "What are your plans for today?" She simply said, "Brezhnev died." That the death of a foreign head of state so concerned my mother, who had never traveled outside the United States and who relied on nightly network news and my dad's subscription to U.S. News & World Report for information about national security, illustrates just how important the Cold War was to everyone who lived through it. We all were concerned. Who would the next leader be? Would that person inflame tensions between "us" and "them?" Or would he calm those tensions and ease our fears?

What no one, from national-security experts to ordinary citizens such as my mother, dared to dream was that within ten years of Brezhnev's death, the Soviet Union would collapse and simply cease to exist. How and why did this momentous event occur? Princeton University historian Stephen Kotkin takes up these salient questions in his concise, readable, and informative book Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000.

Kotkin dismisses the oft-cited explanations that emphasize increased U.S. military spending and the failure of central planning, arguing that as late as 1985 the Soviet Union was "lethargically stable" (p. 2). Instead, he blames attempts--first initiated by Khrushchev's de-Stalinization effort and culminating in Gorbachev's policies of perestroika, glasnost, and democratization--to reform a system that was inherently incapable of reform. To offer only an explanation of the Soviet Union's collapse, no matter how compellingly argued, however, is unsatisfactory because that explanation leaves too many questions unanswered. Why were the reforms undertaken? Why did the Soviet elites not resist them? What effect did the Soviet legacy have on the reforms? By considering these questions, Kotkin provides a deeper understanding of the Soviet Union's astonishing collapse.

Kotkin's first and second chapters pertain to why reform was undertaken. To say that competition between the superpowers was keen in the post-World War II era would be superfluous. The arms race, the space race, and the Olympic games are...