Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire (New York: Random House, 1994; and David Satter, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

Two very surprising things happened to the Soviet Union under Gorbachev's stewardship. First, the regime crumbled at quite remarkable speed. In the second place, and even more surprisingly, it did so with relatively little bloodshed. In 1985 it would have been very difficult to predict either eventuality. Jack Matlock makes no attempt to pretend that he did so. Instead, he comments that at the time of Gorbachev's ascent to power he expected the eventual triumph of democracy in the USSR and hoped that his grandchildren would live to see it.

To be sure, already in the early 1980s there was compelling evidence of the long-term decline of the USSR. Though the precise extent of Soviet economic difficulties was debated hotly by Western experts, no one could reasonably doubt that economic growth was (at best) extremely slow and that the gap between the USSR and the capitalist world was widening rapidly. Linked to this and equally apparent was the sharp decline in ideological conviction, especially in the capital cities and among the younger generation. This in turn was connected to the rise of anti-Soviet nationalism, which Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone and HŽlne Carrre d'Encausse among others had analyzed very persuasively already in the 1970s. By the end of the Brezhnev era it was sensible to argue that the Soviet regime would have great difficulty in reversing these trends and that a resolute attempt to do so might well endanger political stability. In 1985, however, it could not reasonably be predicted that the Soviet political elite would both promote a radical reformer to the general-secretaryship and (more astonishingly) sustain him in power while he dismantled the pillars on which not merely the communist regime but also the multi-ethnic empire itself were based. Precedent, Russian and Soviet political culture, and indeed common sense suggested otherwise, for the Soviet regime in 1985 was by no means yet faced with the sort of crisis of existence which makes such dangerous policies readily comprehensible.

Nor indeed could even longer-term predictions about secular decline and final disintegration be made with great confidence. Apart from the obvious fallibility of all such long-term predictions, the failure of the Soviet regime was relative rather than absolute. The collapse of Soviet communism's legitimacy by 1985 owed much to the fact that, under American hegemony, peace between the major capitalist powers had been preserved for four decades since 1945 and their wealth had increased greatly. By contrast, in the previous thirty years, both communism's capture of Russia and its subsequent expansion to China and Eastern Europe was owed above all else to the wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 between the capitalist great powers and the depression of the 1930s. In 1985 there was no immediate reason to expect a reversion to war and depression, but American hegemony was clearly less complete than had been the case two decades previously, and the rise first of Japanese and then of Southeast Asian economic power was certain to cause problems for both domestic political stability in the West and for the management of the global political economy.

The most implausible scenario of all, however, was that the Soviet political elite would surrender power and tamely allow their state to disintegrate with barely a shot fired in its defense. Whatever their other failings, the communist elites were supposed to be supreme tacticians of power. Lenin and Stalin had sacrificed millions of their compatriots to establish and strengthen this regime. No doubt their heirs were a softer breed, but they were scarcely the parliamentary foxes whom Pareto so despised, and whose weak-kneed aversion to the use of force he saw as fatal to any regime's survival.

The history of empires certainly gave no cause for optimism about the peaceful demise of the USSR. Sensing the relative decline in their international power and prestige and a corresponding strengthening in anti-imperial Serb and Romanian nationalism, the rulers of the Habsburg Empire sought in 1914 to arrest both tendencies by a dramatic display of military force. The First World War resulted. The decline of the Ottoman Empire was longer drawn out and entailed many wars and some appalling examples of large-scale "ethnic cleansing." Between 1912 and 1923, as collapse reached its final stages, 62 percent of the Muslim population fled from areas conquered by the Christian Balkan states and 27 percent of them perished. Parts of Anatolia were depopulated and the Armenians became victims of full-scale genocide. The collapse of the British Empire was better managed and did not occur in the midst of war between great powers. It nevertheless entailed a number of vicious conflicts, of which those in the Indian subcontinent, Palestine, and Ireland stand out not merely for the loss of life involved but also because of the resulting instability in these regions even many decades after the empire's demise. With these precedents in mind one can only marvel at the relative bloodlessness of the Soviet collapse thus far.

Among possible lines of explanation for the USSR's collapse, two in my opinion are particularly useful. They are, on the one hand, the impact in 1985-91 of contingency, personality, and chronology; on the other hand, the long-term importance of ideology and of its decay. Matlock is especially strong on one, David Satter on the other.

Among the many strengths of former Ambassador Matlock's book, the greatest are the insights he provides on personalities, perceptions, and conflicts within the top Soviet ruling elite. It was in these circles that the reforms were launched that resulted in the regime's collapse. Not until the spring of 1988 did a broader public begin to play a major role in Soviet politics and only in 1990 did political movements truly get beyond the communist elite's control. Even then the regime's disintegration owed much to the personalities of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Kryuchkov (to name but a few), as well as to their misperceptions, ambitions, and conflicts. Among Western experts Matlock was unique in enjoying ready access to these people and possessing the confidence of many of them. His reporting of the conversations he had with them are fascinating, his judgment of their strengths and weaknesses usually sharp. This is never truer than when he blends his basic admiration for Gorbachev with recognition of failings that played their part in the USSR's collapse. These include illiteracy about economics, naivete about the severity of the nationalities problem, intellectual arrogance, a craving for popularity, and (most contentiously) a dislike for fellow politicians (of whom Yeltsin was the prime example) who were major independent and popular figures. I share Matlock's admiration for Gorbachev and his recognition that the latter's moral decency and clear-sightedness played a vital role in the relatively peaceful demise of an exceptionally unpleasant regime, never more dangerous potentially than when staring disintegration in the face.

Contingency, personality, chronology, and accident are important in general in politics, and vital in times of war, revolution, and rapid change. They are almost by definition underrated by political scientists, for whom the analysis of structures comes more naturally. In this respect Matlock's history of the USSR's collapse is of particular value. In addition, however, Matlock does not shy away from moral issues and David Satter places them at the center of his account, something that an academic political scientist (let alone a Sovietologist) would be extremely loath to do. Of all the wise statements made about Soviet communism, none in retrospect seems truer than Solzhenitsyn's comment that if the regime's subjects stopped telling each other lies, the system would collapse. A moral prophet who combines European "Old Right" religiously-based conservatism with a strong dose of "Green" ideas is a difficult figure for Anglo-Saxon social science positivism to comprehend, let alone take seriously. But Satter's book is really a narrative of how a society lives by the lie, of how (pace Alexander Zinoviev) its political rulers use police terror and hideously misuse psychiatry to enforce the community's complicity in the lie, and what happens when the bosses cease to enforce coercion and even indeed encourage a considerable dose of truthfulness.

Satter's book is in a sense a tribute to Gorbachev, whose dismantling of this system did owe something to moral qualms about its foundations. It is even more a tribute not just to Satter himself but also to many other Western journalists in the USSR who worked under immense pressure to expose vile sides of Soviet politics while trying at the same time both to preserve some sense of balance about Soviet society and to portray the warmth and basic decency of most Soviet citizens. But above all the book bears witness to a number of people of quite astonishing courage and obstinacy, who stood out against the lie and suffered the often appalling consequences. Of course very many of these people would be most uncomfortable fellow citizens not merely in Soviet circumstances but also for cozy bourgeois pragmatists like myself, which makes Satter's tale all the more impressive and moving.

His book is in a sense an anti-Soviet tract. It is "unbalanced." The ordinary citizen of the USSR did not experience psychiatric abuse, labor camps, or even overt political coercion. But all of these were essential for sustaining this particular polity and society. In a sense, Western journalists were a final court of appeal for the "cheated and insulted" of Soviet life, and had no option but to fulfill this role if they were to do their job. But Satter's book is not propaganda. It does also seek to portray a Soviet life beyond that of the dissident and of the Muscovite intelligent. It has the journalistic strengths of authenticity and evocative description of people and events, and it is powered by a commitment to human dignity. When Satter describes the death of a child in post-Soviet Tver for lack of basic drugs and despite the devoted attention of doctors and nurses, this commitment and outrage finds targets other than the Soviet regime, and provides some down-to-earth explanations for why ex-Communists are at present favorites to defeat Yeltsin in the June 1996 elections. In recent years, many former correspondents have published their reminiscences of life in the Soviet Union. Satter's book is one of the best in this genre, coherent in theme and powerful in its commitment.

Unlike a journalist, the American ambassador lived in salubrious circumstances and escaped the harassment of the Soviet police and most of the day-to-day travails of Soviet life. Even in comparison to his ambassadorial predecessors, Matlock had a privileged existence. Not merely did he have a bird's eye view of an immensely important and exciting period, but he also represented his country in Moscow at a time when the United States was uniquely popular in Russia and its long-held policy objectives were being achieved at dizzying speed. On the other hand, though he is too loyal to say so, Matlock was harassed by a stream of distinguished American visitors anxious to see perestroika for themselves and convinced that the ambassador's most pressing duty was to assist them in this endeavor. He had to analyze the enormously confused and quickly moving currents of Soviet politics, and then fight to ensure that other less informed perceptions did not prevail in Washington. It was not easy to manage his relationships with Gorbachev, Yeltsin, the Baltic leaders, and other antagonistic groups in the USSR so as to preserve the confidence of all of them, and the influence on their behavior that this confidence could entail. According to Matlock, managing George Bush could at times present equally daunting problems.

Matlock himself was deeply involved in Soviet high politics: though of course he notes the collapse of the Soviet economy that occurred during his time in Moscow, his analysis of the causes of the USSR's disintegration does not really integrate the economic and political. At this point the two aspects of his book--part autobiography and part history--do not quite gel. It was after all of vital significance that in the first four years of his rule Gorbachev promoted two quite contradictory economic policies, neither of which squared very easily with the strategy of political democratization that he began to pursue at the same time. High inflation, the goods famine, soaring budgetary deficits, and the creeping breakdown of exchange mechanisms played a big role in the Soviet regime's collapse. If glasnost did the most to wreck the regime's legitimacy in 1988-91 by exposing the horrors of its past, the population's faith in its rulers was also devastated by economic disaster. Equally, though nationalism became a crucial factor in Soviet politics at this time and most republican leaders felt they had to wrap themselves in a national flag to legitimize their power, it is also true that economic collapse was a vital factor in republican separatism. Moscow no longer had the economic resources with which to control or woo local leaders. On the contrary, in order to provide their local populations with basic services and thereby preserve their own power in an era of increasing democracy, the republican leaders had to seize control of local enterprises, deny taxes to the center, and distance themselves as far as possible from the economic chaos that Moscow's policies had created.

In Matlock's view, Gorbachev's two biggest mistakes were his mishandling of Boris Yeltsin and his failure in 1987-90 to make it clear that the Balts were a special case, uniquely deserving of independence, and to offer far-reaching autonomy to the other republics when most of them would still have been willing to remain within a reconstituted and truly federalized union. Both arguments are powerful but so is part of Gorbachev's defense against them. He himself told Matlock subsequently that it would have been politically impossible for him to compromise over Baltic independence in 1989-91. Any attempt to do so would have resulted in his removal from power by hardliners, already infuriated by the loss of Eastern Europe and wholly unwilling to contemplate the dismemberment of the USSR. Though it would not be possible to advance an equally plausible defense of Gorbachev's handling of Yeltsin in 1987-9, it is true that once his rival became Russia's leader the Soviet president faced major problems. Precisely because Russia constituted so huge a part of the USSR's population and resources, the Soviet regime had always been careful not to allow the emergence of a separate Russian Communist Party leadership, which would inevitably challenge the central authorities. In just the same way, no chancellor of Imperial Germany could exercise effective power unless simultaneously he was minister president of Prussia, and all schemes to federalize the United Kingdom and accommodate its Gaelic fringe have broken down over the fact that the kingdom of England is too large a unit not to dominate the rest, but the United Kingdom too historic to be comfortably dismembered.

Perhaps a historian based in London might be permitted two final comments on empire and on Russian history. Ignorance about Russian history was universal in Soviet ruling circles and rather typical also of Western Sovietologists. The history of the last sixty years of Imperial Russia revolved around the czarist regime's attempt to modernize Russia's economy and society, not by use of the Petrine or Stalinist fist but rather through liberating individual energy and creativity. The government's key dilemma was to combine this strategy of modernization with the regime's own survival, the preservation of political stability in Russia, and the maintenance of the multi-ethnic empire. Knowledge of this era would have forewarned Gorbachev, together with many Western Sovietologists, about many of the pitfalls, contradictions, and possibilities of the reform program that he was launching.

Matlock's book is called Autopsy of an Empire, and indeed use of the word empire has now become rather fashionable in describing the former Soviet Union. In most cases this does not add up to much more than the assertion that empires are wicked and now defunct. The Soviet Union was wicked and is now defunct, therefore history (and by implication progress and even God) has rendered judgment on the USSR, which is best kicked into history's dustbin with the curse of empire attached to its name.
In fact it is worth being a little more precise when talking about the Soviet Union as an empire. Empire means great power. It means to rule directly and without consent over far-flung territories and many peoples. It has implications as regards resources, ideologies, expansionist tendencies, and even cultural styles. To be worthy of the name, an empire should also play a major role in shaping not just the international relations but also the values and culture of an historical epoch. By almost all these definitions the Soviet Union was an empire. But it was the empire of an ideology more than of a nation, closer to the Ottomans and to the Habsburgs of the Counter-Reformation era than to the European maritime empire of the late nineteenth century.

For many reasons empires appear redundant in the second half of the twentieth century, their only hope of survival being to consolidate their peoples as a single national community. This is not entirely impossible. China is the most impressive example of a great historical empire that is nowadays seven-eighths of the way toward becoming a nation, its mandarin language and high culture seeping down into the tribal roots over the millennia, rather as Rome's civilization might have created a European nation by now had the empire survived. Inheriting the Russian empire, Soviet rulers did not have to build a nation from scratch, but they did not have two millennia behind them and anyway, as regards consolidating a single community in Soviet Northern Eurasia, the czarist past was of equivocal use.

The Soviet regime placed its main hope on ideology and progress. Pride in being equal members of the world's most progressive, fair, and prosperous community would overwhelm the consciousness of ethnic difference. For a time between 1945 and the early 1960s it seemed that, for many Russians and non-Russians alike, the dream might actually come true. By the 1970s, however, the familiar dilemmas of Russian history were reasserting themselves: backwardness; the need for modernization from above; the necessity to square individual initiative with political order and the regime's survival; the problem of retaining the loyalty of non-Russians to an empire that they had never consented to join and that offered them less freedom and less prosperity than existed in the West. The whole point of Soviet communism was that it was supposed to release Russia from this historical conundrum. In a sense faith was supposed to move mountains. More than anything else the history of the Soviet Union is the story of this faith, of its impact on the land and peoples, and of the results of its failure. The basic point is that faith does not usually move mountains and the attempt to use it for this purpose generally causes great suffering and disenchantment.