Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?
   Robert Strayer
  1998 M. E. Sharpe, Armonk NY/London UK
   ISBN: 0765600048


The demise of the USSR, an event of profound consequence in its own right, illustrates an even larger historical pattern - the process by which all human societies change, sometimes slow & unobtrusive, sometimes with the speed & impact of revolution.

About every five years I get this strange urge to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad as did one of my heroines 80 years ago. An impulse to see that vast land I've called Russia all my life, knowing full well that if a little bitty island like Britain can be home to so many pockets of Angles, Saxons, Norse, Gaels, Teuts, Danes, Scots, Welsh, Dorsets et al, then a country as huge as Russia must have zillions of ethnic peoples. How did the Communists keep everyone under their thumb for 70 years? Actually, the trick was to let a tier in society have more absolute power than all the tsars put together & let them get away with murder, repression & deportation by the political millions.

“A final legacy of revolution lay in the political system the victorious Bolsheviks erected. It was an unprecedented arrangement, particularly in the depth to which it penetrated society and the extent to which it sought to transform and control every area of life. It claimed to be democratic in that it acted in the interest of the vast majority, especially workers and peasants, but it created a centralized autocracy far surpassing that of the tsars. The dual instruments of that system -the state and the party- both derived from the revolution. It was their unique relationship that marked the Soviet regime as a new type of political system.”

Once I joined an international pen pal group & got a young woman in a town that was built out in the Siberian wilderness the year she was born. We exchanged postcards of local places, photos of each other & labels from canned goods. I sent her tapes of music she asked about. I always felt a great excitement when one of her envelopes, inspection stamp included, would make it out to me.

My friend yearned to travel, she expressed angst about the restrictions in her life - where & what she could study, where she could work, where she could travel. Sometime during the demolition of the Berlin Wall I moved & she quit writing. She had even sent me a Christmas Card - a Russian one on Russian paper, I was fascinated.

Taking the Soviet collapse - the most cataclysmic event in recent history - as a case study, Robert Strayer seeks to elucidate an understanding of historical change. His book engages you in the exercise of historical analysis, interpretation & explanation of why societies rise & fall. He traces the economic crises, re-emerging nationalists & external pressures that brought about that sudden 1991 implosion. He highlights questions & controversies, such as how Western pressures brought the Soviet Union down or how the awakenings of the regional ethnic peoples fragmented the concreted whole.

This was a labor for me, however, I persevered because I'd been asking that question while watching pundits expound & reporters utter sound bytes. When I came across this paperback & sampled a couple of sections I knew I could make sense of it.

Eminently readable though as dry as the Steppes in summer. Did I find out why the Soviet Union collapsed? Yes. I watch a little wiser now, at the news out of Russia & murmur Lest We Forget as I ponder our own society's 200 year history.
(06/12/99)

Rebecca