The Strange Death Of The Soviet Empire

by David Pryce-Jones

Regarding the fall of the Soviet empire as a challenging mystery, a historical study considers such questions as why Gorbachev did not resort to classic armed enforcement tactics and what role the West played in the events. Tour.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Russia

456 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

David Eugene Henry Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British conservative author, historian and political commentator.

Reviews

[Gramarye · Rating 1 out of 5]

The War That Never Was first came out in 1995, when a book of this nature was more in the line of 'current events' than 'history'. At that point in time, there were quite a lot of people around who were very willing to talk about the part they had played in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Editor and author David Pryce-Jones travelled around the former Soviet Union and its constituent republics, collecting interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, former dissidents, and political commentators who had been in at the end of things, as it were. Through these interviews, Pryce-Jones is attempting to piece together the greater puzzle of how one of the world's two superpowers simply fell apart in the space of less than a decade.

I wish I had more to say about the book, but to be perfectly truthful I found it incredibly difficult to get through. My difficulties started off with bits of Pryce-Jones' running commentary that made me raise an eyebrow. Take, for instance, this passage: 'President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were unusual among world leaders in their genuine detestation of communism. It was a question of right and wrong. Moral outlook of the sort troubled neither post-war French Presidents nor German Chancellors.' In my opinion, I would say that it's remarkably easy to make moral judgments when you're not facing either immediate internal (French) or external (German) pressure from native communist movements. I could keep quoting passages in a similarly conservative vein, ones where he damns the Helsinki Accords or snipes at President George H.W. Bush for not being more aggressive to act in support of the nationalist movements in the Baltic countries. In essence, he seems to think that if the Soviet Union was on its last legs by the late 1980s, the West would've been better off getting out the knives and finishing the job with more than a bit of relish. By the time I was halfway through the book, I was more than tempted to get out some knives of my own to hack and slash my way to the end.

I'm honestly not sure if I'd even keep this book on my shelf. I've no problem with debating the different choices that might have been made by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and others -- but Pryce-Jones seems to keep repeating a few pet ideas and picking only the interviews to support his views. It might be moderately useful to keep The War That Never Was as a representation of a particular kind of ideological mindset that shouldn't be ignored outright, but I can't imagine rereading except to pull quotations from it. And as far as that goes, I may simply end up copying out the quotes that I think I might find useful and consigning this polemic masquerading as history to a used book store.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

total fruitcakery


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Kirkus

Pryce-Jones is on shakier ground when he asserts that Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and rival party leaders Yakovlev, Ligachev, and Lukyanov were all cut from the same cloth, or when he implicates Khrushchev in the death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjîld. Most questionable is the assertion that intellectuals such as Brecht, Pablo Neruda, Sartre, and Graham Greene supported the Soviet Union as a matter of ``self- esteem'' and that Foucault, Lukacs, Marcuse, and others ``had a brutal manic streak in their characters which found its correspondence with similar sadists.'' A wealth of detail from the warp and woof of Soviet society, but flawed by a lack of critical insight.

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Pryce-Jones did end up being an big editor at National Review
only a small part of the story
of his endless writing of strange shit

[Dima · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring, boring book, but with relevant message to communicate.

David Pryce-Jones saw the ambiguity of the Soviet political system, where he finds an individual’s route to power lies in their ability to balance and juggle numerous contingent of ambitious segments within the Communist Party, the KGB and the Army.

His findings suggest that ethnicity were not the issue of these divides, but rather a gang-like rivalry between circles of influences within the ruling class, which may extend to involving Army and KGB commanders.

David likes to use the Nomenklatura phrase, which is to describe those people in government, public services, and top management levels in trade sectors and industries who are privileged to have a temporarily ownership of state property, such as nice houses, fancy apartments, and limited edition cars [sometimes imported] all the way to private jets.

In this book, David presents numerous interviews that covers different angles from people who were involved in the fall of the Soviet empire, which he thinks took place during the Gorbachev leadership. His interviews is sorted in a particular order to give an illustration of how the Nomenklatura, which is the very system that feeds on people’s ambitions, is actually the source of the problem, that leads to the fall of the USSR.

David is not so convincing, and sometimes tries to be objective that he makes his own voice sound vague. In the end, it can be enough to read the first and last five chapters of this book to understand his personal views of the matter.

I certainly see David blaming people’s greed and personal ambition as the main reason for Soviet destruction. I also find him rather romantically confirming that there is no place in politics for such humanist as Gorbachev. The interviews given about the popular democratic movement that took place not only in Russia but also in other Republic states as well as Eastern European countries clearly described the danger of conservative communists’ willingness to use power and face bloodshed. Mysteriously, it never took place. Other mysteries didn’t get solved either.

That’s OK. The book was published in 1996, so David hadn’t enough time to dig deeper into things.

But what startles me is the course communism took: all out poverty, industrialisation, corruption, capital flight, reconstruction for a democratic platform, new ambition, power struggle, disintegration, demise.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of interviews taken in the years shortly following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some revealing, some self-serving rationalisation, and occasionally some with insightful points that now look prescient.

[Cws]

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