Armageddon averted
"In the Cold War era that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, nobody envisaged that the collapse of the Soviet Union would come from within, still less that it would happen meekly, without global conflagration. In this compact book Stephen Kotkin shows that the Soviet collapse resulted not from military competition but, ironically, from the dynamism of Communist ideology, the long-held dream for 'socialism with a human face'. The neo-liberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia never took place, nor could they have, given the Soviet-era inheritance in the social, political, and economic landscape." "Kotkin takes us deep into post-Stalin Soviet society and institutions, into the everyday hopes and secret political intrigues that affected 285 million people. He conveys the multiple ironies and unintended consequences of perestroika, and the high drama of a superpower falling apart while still armed to the teeth with millions of loyal troops and tens of thousands of weapons of mass destruction."--Jacket.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
2people
2017–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A short and fun to read corrective is Kotkin's Armageddon Averted. The competition, inefficiency and the demands of its own power projections were a costly strain but nowhere close to leading to ruin or an irrecoverable state.
- Kotkin (of the New Yorker interview recently making the rounds, the Stalin bio, etc) wrote Armageddon Averted - one interesting and fairly brief summary.
- I'm happy to talk about the ways in which NATO expansion was a questionable choice, as I am inclined to agree, but that's not what you originally contended.
Russia had a Rust Belt orders of magnitude larger than the United States. It had a factory system optimized on quotas decades out of date. It had no real infrastructure for resolving economic disputes in legal terms. It had a factory manager class with little accountability.
You say these Americans worked for the Russian government. What departments? Do you think those departments had adequate control of their own police forces to enforce such policies? How do you suppose these forces would have been funded?
My point is that you are mistaken about the extent to which a Russian state was a viable entity during this period. Without an effective state, there is no real way for the west to exert the kind of influence you describe. The Washington Consensus was real, and its importance exaggerated by its exponents in the US.
To say Americans had substantial influence on Russian economic policy is indeed plain wrong. I would be honored to send you a copy of some books that explain this, and include abundant primary source documentation of my claims.
Please feel free to email me at my address as listed in my profile. I think you might really enjoy a copy of Armageddon Averted by Kotkin. It is a very enjoyable account of this era, and it quite deftly addresses your contention.
