Collapse from Inside-Out or Outside-In?

IF 0.3 3区 历史学 Q2 HISTORY KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY Pub Date : 2023-09-01 DOI:10.1353/kri.2023.a910982
Mark R. Beissinger
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Let me start by noting that there is a fundamental difference between writing a political history, as Zubok has done, and writing a historically sensitive social scientific inquiry, as I aspired to do in my own study two decades ago.1 My purpose was not to provide a full-fledged historical interpretation of the politics of the time. Rather, I sought to shed light on previously unaccentuated aspects of the collapse: to explicate the enormous transformations in identities that occurred, how those transformations related to one another, the ways that they affected Russians, the relationship between what happened on the street and what took place in government offices, and how the seemingly impossible in 1987 (the breakup of the USSR) could become the seemingly inevitable by 1991. I did this with purposes of theory building in mind, not as an encompassing historical explanation. In the social sciences, we do not have the luxury of talking about \"perfect storms,\" as Zubok does in this book; we are tasked instead with analyzing the dynamics of storms in general—how they function and how they behave. Since the publication of my study, a trove of new information has become available. Zubok has been indefatigable in tracking these down and [End Page 847] deserves much credit for doing so. He has scoured the archives, delved into diaries and memoirs, and interviewed many of the key decision makers and their aides (including their US counterparts). I am in awe of the sheer volume of material he has digested, and indeed Zubok treats us to a cornucopia of new details on what occurred behind the scenes. We learn, for instance, of the opulence of Mikhail Gorbachev's villa, how much George Bush's judgments flowed from his personal attachment to Gorbachev, how Dmitrii Iazov thought he could fix the \"Lithuanian problem\" in less than a week, the details of the back-and-forth over economic reform in 1990, the intense bickering and relentless tug-of-war for control between Boris Yeltsin and Gorbachev, Yeltsin's ubiquitous drinking (hardly a surprise), the frustrations of Gorbachev's aides and ministers over his constant prevarication, and many other insights. We even discover that Yeltsin learned of the August 1991 coup while watching television in his underwear—though what the relevance of that detail is (and who else learned about the coup in their underwear), I cannot say. The book aims to rethink the inevitability of Soviet collapse. I could not agree more with that aim. It was the central theme of my own work.2 The language of the \"perfect storm\" aside, Zubok does put forward an argument about the collapse: it was not nationalism that broke the Soviet Union into national pieces but personalities, the dismantlement of the party apparatus, and ill-advised economic reforms. The collapse occurred from the inside-out. My differences with Zubok are differences of interpretation, emphasis, and perspective: his ascription of the collapse primarily to personalities; his predominant focus on change from the inside-out rather than appreciating the key role also played by change from the outside-in; his excessive attention to 1991 rather than to what preceded it; and his overemphasis, in my opinion, on the economic determinants of collapse. These are issues about which reasonable scholars can disagree. What Zubok substitutes for structural determination is near-complete indeterminacy. 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Abstract

Collapse from Inside-Out or Outside-In? Mark R. Beissinger (bio) Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. xv + 576 pp., illus., maps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0300268171, $25 (paper). You know you are old when the events that you lived through and wrote about in your youth become the domain of historians. The collapse of the Soviet Union has now entered that realm, and Vladislav Zubok's monumental tome is the most detailed study yet of elite politics during the Soviet collapse. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the subject. Let me start by noting that there is a fundamental difference between writing a political history, as Zubok has done, and writing a historically sensitive social scientific inquiry, as I aspired to do in my own study two decades ago.1 My purpose was not to provide a full-fledged historical interpretation of the politics of the time. Rather, I sought to shed light on previously unaccentuated aspects of the collapse: to explicate the enormous transformations in identities that occurred, how those transformations related to one another, the ways that they affected Russians, the relationship between what happened on the street and what took place in government offices, and how the seemingly impossible in 1987 (the breakup of the USSR) could become the seemingly inevitable by 1991. I did this with purposes of theory building in mind, not as an encompassing historical explanation. In the social sciences, we do not have the luxury of talking about "perfect storms," as Zubok does in this book; we are tasked instead with analyzing the dynamics of storms in general—how they function and how they behave. Since the publication of my study, a trove of new information has become available. Zubok has been indefatigable in tracking these down and [End Page 847] deserves much credit for doing so. He has scoured the archives, delved into diaries and memoirs, and interviewed many of the key decision makers and their aides (including their US counterparts). I am in awe of the sheer volume of material he has digested, and indeed Zubok treats us to a cornucopia of new details on what occurred behind the scenes. We learn, for instance, of the opulence of Mikhail Gorbachev's villa, how much George Bush's judgments flowed from his personal attachment to Gorbachev, how Dmitrii Iazov thought he could fix the "Lithuanian problem" in less than a week, the details of the back-and-forth over economic reform in 1990, the intense bickering and relentless tug-of-war for control between Boris Yeltsin and Gorbachev, Yeltsin's ubiquitous drinking (hardly a surprise), the frustrations of Gorbachev's aides and ministers over his constant prevarication, and many other insights. We even discover that Yeltsin learned of the August 1991 coup while watching television in his underwear—though what the relevance of that detail is (and who else learned about the coup in their underwear), I cannot say. The book aims to rethink the inevitability of Soviet collapse. I could not agree more with that aim. It was the central theme of my own work.2 The language of the "perfect storm" aside, Zubok does put forward an argument about the collapse: it was not nationalism that broke the Soviet Union into national pieces but personalities, the dismantlement of the party apparatus, and ill-advised economic reforms. The collapse occurred from the inside-out. My differences with Zubok are differences of interpretation, emphasis, and perspective: his ascription of the collapse primarily to personalities; his predominant focus on change from the inside-out rather than appreciating the key role also played by change from the outside-in; his excessive attention to 1991 rather than to what preceded it; and his overemphasis, in my opinion, on the economic determinants of collapse. These are issues about which reasonable scholars can disagree. What Zubok substitutes for structural determination is near-complete indeterminacy. The collapse, as he describes it, was largely dependent on the whims and follies of two personalities: Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The structure-agency problem that animates so much social scientific thinking [End Page...
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由内而外还是由外而内坍塌?
由内而外还是由外而内坍塌?马克·r·贝辛格(传记)弗拉季斯拉夫·m·祖博克,《崩溃:苏联的解体》。Xv + 576页,插图。、地图。纽黑文:耶鲁大学出版社,2021。ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00(布)。ISBN-13 978-0300268171,纸质版25美元。当你年轻时经历和写过的事件成为历史学家的领域时,你就知道自己老了。苏联的解体现在已经进入了这个领域,弗拉季斯拉夫·祖博克(Vladislav Zubok)的巨著是迄今为止对苏联解体期间精英政治最详细的研究。这是对我们理解这一主题的重大贡献。首先,我要指出,写政治史(就像祖博克所做的那样)和写历史敏感的社会科学探究(就像我20年前在自己的研究中所渴望做的那样)之间存在着根本的区别我的目的不是要对当时的政治提供一个完整的历史解释。相反,我试图揭示之前未被强调的崩溃方面:解释身份发生的巨大转变,这些转变如何相互关联,它们如何影响俄罗斯人,街头发生的事情与政府办公室发生的事情之间的关系,以及1987年看似不可能的事情(苏联解体)如何在1991年成为看似不可避免的事情。我这样做的目的是建立理论,而不是作为一个包罗万象的历史解释。在社会科学领域,我们没有像祖博克在这本书中那样谈论“完美风暴”的奢侈;相反,我们的任务是分析风暴的总体动力学——它们是如何运作和行为的。自从我的研究发表以来,有了大量的新信息。Zubok一直孜孜不倦地追踪这些信息,在这方面他值得称赞。他翻遍了档案,钻研日记和回忆录,采访了许多关键决策者及其助手(包括他们的美国同行)。我对他所消化的大量材料感到敬畏,事实上,祖布克为我们提供了丰富的新细节,讲述了幕后发生的事情。例如,我们了解到米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫别墅的奢华,乔治·布什对戈尔巴乔夫的个人依恋在多大程度上影响了他的判断,德米特里·亚佐夫如何认为他可以在不到一周的时间内解决“立陶宛问题”,1990年经济改革的反复细节,鲍里斯·叶利钦和戈尔巴乔夫之间激烈的争吵和无休止的争夺控制权的拉锯战,叶利钦无处不在的酗酒(不足为奇),戈尔巴乔夫的助手和部长们对他不断推诿的失望,以及其他许多见解。我们甚至发现叶利钦是在穿着内衣看电视时得知1991年8月政变的——尽管这个细节的相关性是什么(还有谁穿着内衣得知了政变),我不能说。这本书旨在重新思考苏联解体的必然性。我完全同意那个目标。这是我自己作品的中心主题撇开“完美风暴”的语言不谈,祖博克确实提出了一个关于苏联解体的论点:将苏联分裂成多个国家的不是民族主义,而是个性、党的机构的解体和不明智的经济改革。坍塌是由内向外发生的。我与祖博克的不同之处在于解释、重点和观点的不同:他将崩溃主要归因于人格;他主要关注由内而外的变化,而不是欣赏由外而内的变化所起的关键作用;他过分关注1991年,而不是1991年之前的事情;在我看来,他过分强调了导致崩溃的经济因素。这些都是理性的学者可能不同意的问题。Zubok用近乎完全的不确定性取代了结构确定性。正如他所描述的那样,苏联的崩溃在很大程度上取决于戈尔巴乔夫和叶利钦这两个人的奇思妙想和愚蠢。结构-代理问题激发了如此多的社会科学思考。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.60
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0.00%
发文量
51
期刊介绍: A leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history and culture, Kritika is dedicated to internationalizing the field and making it relevant to a broad interdisciplinary audience. The journal regularly publishes forums, discussions, and special issues; it regularly translates important works by Russian and European scholars into English; and it publishes in every issue in-depth, lengthy review articles, review essays, and reviews of Russian, Eurasian, and European works that are rarely, if ever, reviewed in North American Russian studies journals.
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