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Reviews
| A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, by Vladislav M. Zubok. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 467 pages. $39.95, cloth.
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| Vladislav Zubok ends his fine volume with this thought: "the Soviet socialist empire, perhaps the strangest empire in modern history, committed suicide." This "suicide" of a strange empire came at the end of a strange journey through post-World War II history that saw the Soviet Union pursue what Zubok, in this and previous work, has identified as the "revolutionary-imperial paradigm," which was most vigorously practiced by Josef Stalin and focused foreign policy on combating and reacting to U.S. and U.S. allies' efforts at containment while promoting Communist ideology among Soviet client and satellite states. During most of the Cold War era, though, the Kremlin leadership in the Soviet Union moved away from the hard-line of Josef Stalin and—ultimately—toward the détente of Brezhnev and perestroika and glasnost' of Gorbachev. With Gorbachev behaving more like a western-style social democrat than a Marxist-Leninist, Zubok argues, the Soviet leadership was not willing to contest vigorously the demise of the power of the Soviet state either abroad in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, or at home as dissent grew louder in the early 1990s. |
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What Zubok characterizes as "suicide," with its implication of suddenness, another might characterize as a decades-long decline into dotage and, eventually, death on the part of the Communist movement in the Soviet Union. Regardless of whether one agrees with the characterization, Zubok's contention that the individual historical actor, especially Mikhail Gorbachev, rather than broad-based structural weaknesses in the Soviet system, was instrumental in dealing the death blow to the system is well documented in this work. Zubok has used secondary and primary sources to good advantage, especially sources not available until recently, e.g., so-called "back-channel" documents demonstrating the interaction between high-level U.S. and Soviet officials such as Henry Kissinger and Anatoly Dubrynin. Zubok's discussion of high-level interaction between the U.S. and the Soviet leadership is a welcome addition to the literature on the Cold War. |
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While he argues effectively for the role of the individual, whether Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or Gorbachev, Zubok does not deny the effect of other factors, particularly economic factors and social factors, that played a role in the demise of the Soviet state. Just as early nineteenth-century Russia was affected by the influence of the West, which culminated politically with the Decembrist revolt, the Soviet Union of the mid-to-late twentieth century was affected by the influence of Western culture and economics. Zubok looks to the actions of the Soviet leadership and finds it unable and—in the case of Gorbachev—unwilling to counter Western influence with a viable economic, political, and social alternative. |
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Zubok's Failed Empire will be useful at both the undergraduate and graduate level; teachers of A.P. history will also appreciate this book. Undergraduate courses focusing on international relations, on Soviet and Western Cold War policy and practice, and on post-World War II Soviet history will welcome this addition to reading lists. Graduate students should find Zubok's work of particular value as they survey literature from and on the Cold War era. Above, I have made reference to earlier work from Zubok that explores similar and—in the case of the "revolutionary-imperial paradigm—identical themes. Zubok's earlier volume, co-written with Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, is a worthy companion piece to A Failed Empire. Undergraduate courses treating the Cold War or surveying Soviet-era Russia will benefit from a combined reading of these two volumes. The same holds true for graduate students, who will especially find A Failed Empire valuable for Zubok's use of documentation held in Russia and in the United States that has only recently been made available. While I cannot recommend A Failed Empire for high school students, teachers of A.P. or accelerated high school history will find this work to be very effective as they present the Soviet Union's role in the Cold War to their students. |
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| University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point |
Charles E. Clark |
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