Getting Russia Wrong: The End of Kremlinology

by Patrick Cockburn

Looks at the forces shaping modern Soviet society, explains why Western expectations were so far off, and describes how past events have led to these changes

Genres: Politics

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Patrick Oliver Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent.

He has written four books on Iraq's recent history. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006 and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009.

Reviews

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this amongst a pile of mouldering books in my garage. Obviously bought it around 1989 or 90 but very read it. Very damp but decided to dry if our and read it.

Glad I did. It was an opportunity to revisit the major event in world history of my lifetime - the winding up of the Soviet Union - to see what was really going on and it people observing that process closely saw tings that have been lost from sight for the rest of us.

Cockburn's main thesis was that the SU was under pressure to change, not because of external pressure as the neo-cons still proclaim - but because it was a very different society from the one which existed in the period 1928-35, when Stalin established its basic state structure. It has developed into a large urban culture, with 60% living in the cities, populated by a well-educated citizenry - at leaast at the technical level.

The Russian 'empire' was one in which most invest went to the developing the peripheral regions, opening virgin lands for agricultural and establish industry in the steppes, but with the majority Russian/Slavic people, who made up 70% of the population, falling behind in their share of the benefits.
Cockburn saw Gorbachev as pursuing reforms which at least had a chance of success and which might have produced a modernised, decentralised, version of socialism. It would have produced a more open political culture, allowing criticism of party apparatniks, a flexible economy which increased the vairety and quality of goods available to the mass of the people, and a military sector strong enough to defend the motherland, but not embark on adventures abroad or threaten nuclear holocaust.

So why didn’t Gorbachev succeed? Cockburn doesn’t say – his book finishes in August 1989 when perestroika and glasnost were still on the agenda. It is possible at this point that the ‘external pressure’ thesis does kick in. If this is not sufficient as a explanation as to why reform was being attempted (most of the neo-cons believe it was all smoke and mirrors anyway), it surely does play some role in telling us why, once under way, the reform of the state created by Stalin ended in its collapse. For Gorbachev to have brought about the laudable changes he aspired to there would have had to be a renewal of the world’s revolutionary movements, with capitalism across the globe being assaulted by renewed efforts to transcend its own internal contradictions in ways which would benefit the majority of the people.

That was not the climate of the world the Russian leader found himself operating in. Reagan-Thatcherite triumphalism and the defection of China to the capitalist camp meant that options on the left were rapidly being closed down and the initiative going to the new wave of globalisation.
Ironically, some of the conditions which might have permitted Gorbachev to succeed back in 1989 are now beginning to emerge as capital enters into a new period of turbulence and political crisis. Twenty years to late to save the remnants of the Bolshevik revolution from its final dissolution, but hopefully still in time for a radical transformation of global politics in favour of the great majority of people.