Armageddon Averted – The Soviet Collapse 1970 – 2000 by Stephen Kotkin. Oxford University Press, 2008. pp 220. ISBN 978-0-19-536863-5. Reviewed by Sandra King-Savic.

Stephen Kotkin shines a light on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s (USSR) slow implosion and explains how the Soviet Union (SU) remained at peace notwithstanding its changing status on the international stage, during its societal, political and economic transformation. Mikhail Gorbachev stands at the center of this account as the man who managed the SU’s dissolution and the end of the Cold War. While one may argue that Gorbachev knew, or in fact planned the SU’s dissolution, Kotkin portrays Gorbachev from another side. He explains that the last General Secretary of the Communist Party (1985 - 1991) was usurped by his own policy – glasnost and perestroika – when in fact, Gorbachev sought to return to the socialist values upon which the USSR was built in 1917. Kotkin chronicles the USSR’s beginning of the end in seven chapters starting with History’s Cruel Tricks, followed by Reviving the Dream; The Drama of Reform; Waiting for the End of the World; Survival and Cannibalism in the Rust Belt; Democracy without Liberalism?; and ending with Idealism and Treason. Armageddon truly was averted considering the tectonic shifts through which the SU’s population as well as its politicians lived during the 1990’s. This is especially true when considering that the USSR could have gone the way of the former Yugoslavia should the August 1991 coup have been successful. In this instance, the new Kremlin leadership could have used force to hold the Union together. Yet it is important to keep in mind that Russia has not yet reached the endpoint of switching from a command-to-market-economy, expertly clarified by Kotkin’s work as he takes his readers all the way from 1970 to 2000.

1973 was not only a watershed year for the Middle East, the U.S., and Western Europe as the former fought over borders while the latter stood in line for gasoline. It was also a defining moment for the USSR as gas prices increased by 400% at a time when the SU’s energy exports accounted for 80% of its economy. Kotkin calls these the “windfall years” as energy exports increased the SU’s hard currency earnings while Arab states went on a spending spree of military equipment that further increased the SU’s revenues. Yet, explains Kotkin, revenues often ended up in the pockets of party leadership while the USSR’s aging industry gulped up oil reserves without concern for cost. The SU was therefore already bursting at its seams while the 1970’s oil crisis merely stalled the USSR’s complete demise. Into this picture came Gorbachev who sought to turn around the Union’s slow implosion by returning the SU to its original, pre-Stalinist values with glasnost and perestroika. Gorbachev’s policies – often hailed as the key policies for East-West reconciliation – however, dealt the death knell to the USSR instead of returning the Union to its socialist path. Here, Kotkin’s thesis becomes crystallized as Gorbachev’s policies unintended consequences rendered a pacific transformation on an international scale while, internally, bringing about Russia’s democratizing process. Nothing makes this transition as palpable as the peaceful unification of West and East Berlin, which Kotkin calls the SU’s returning of its crown jewel.

Armageddon Averted, though published in 2008, is well worth reading, not only because the author’s writing style is witty, sharp and at times quite entertaining, but because Kotkin illustrates through a historical monologue Russia’s current political and economic situation. Kotkin drives home the point that Russia’s relatively calm transition was vulnerable, yet managed by the “virtuoso tactician”, as he calls Gorbachev, without whom the transition period may have taken on different dimensions. Kotkin’s work illustrates a unique behind the scenes account of the USSR’s demise and for anybody interested in the region because he avoids unnecessary jargon, which makes his work accessible and enjoyable from the first to the very last page.