Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War

INTRODUCTION: ALTERNATIVES AND FATES

1. Shorter and somewhat different versions of chapters 1, 2, and 3 appeared, respectively, as an introduction to Nikolai Bukharin, How It All Began: The Prison Novel (Columbia University Press, 1998); a contribution to Political Violence, ed. Paul Hollander in honor of Robert Conquest (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and the introduction to Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev (Pantheon Books, 1993). Chapter 4 was published as an article in Slavic Review (Fall 2004). A preliminary, skeletal version of chapter 7 appeared in The Nation, July 10, 2006. In each of these instances, I retained the right to use all or parts of the text for this book, which I already had in mind; I thank the publishers for that agreement. Chapters 5 and 6 have not been previously published in any form.

2. See Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience (New York, 1985), chaps. 4–5; and several of the columns I wrote for a broader readership during those years, collected in Stephen F. Cohen, Sovieticus: American Perceptions and Soviet Realities, exp. ed. (New York, 1986). On the assumption that some of the same ideas circulated inside the Soviet political establishment, I also studied the uncensored writings of dissidents known as samizdat, including those in a volume I edited, An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union (New York, 1982).

4. See Cohen, Rethinking, chaps. 1–2.

5. See my “revisionist” book, Rethinking, esp. chap. 1; and for a different personal experience and kind of revisionism, Sheila Fitzpatrick in Slavic Review (Fall 2008): 682–704.

6. Interview with Viktor Danilov in Kritika (Spring 2008): 370. Gorbachev was, of course, also an alternativist, as he reiterated in the words quoted at the top of this introduction, from an interview in NG, Nov. 6, 1997.

7. An often quoted line from the famous perestroika-era film Pokaianie (Repentance).

8. Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 418. “School of inevitability” is a Russian term, but it applies as well to the American case. See, e.g., Dmitrii Oleinikov in Karl Aimermakher and Gennadii Bordiugov, eds., Istoriki chitaiut uchebniki istorii (Moscow, 2002), 148.

9. For “the edge,” see Aleksandr Tsipko in VA, no. 2 (2008): 14; and for the “knock,” see the emigre Russian journalist and scholar Alexander Yanov in International Journal of Sociology (Summer–Fall 1976): 85.

10. Mikhail Shatrov in Ogonek, no. 4 (1987): 5. Some said more categorically, “a final chance” (Aleksandr Tsipko in Megapolis-Express, Jan. 3, 1991). For the officers, see Iu. V. Rubtsov in OI, no. 4 (2005): 187.

11. See, e.g., Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices (New York, 2007); and Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York, 2007).

12. This is what Yegor Yakovlev, quoted at the top of the introduction, had in mind in speaking of “the lessons of missed opportunities” ( MN, Jan. 6, 1991). The tradition continues. A Russian prime minister of the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin, famously explained, “We wanted things to be better, but they turned out as they always do.”

13. Gorbachev told me about his favorable reaction to the book, which he read in a Russian translation published in the United States in 1980, and its influence on his ideological policy is recorded in the memoirs of his aide Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years With Gorbachev (University Park, Penn., 2000), 138–39; and, similarly, in the remarks of another aide, Ivan Frolov, reported in Angus Roxburgh, The Second Russian Revolution (London, 1991), 68. Extravagant conclusions have been drawn from that small fact. The scholar Anthony D’Agostino (www.h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu, July 17, 2004) wrote, for example, that by misleading Gorbachev into believing there was a Bukharinist alternative to Stalinism, “Stephen Cohen’s biography of Bukharin probably caused the fall of Soviet power in a more direct sense than any wire-pulling by Reagan or Bush” (www.h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu, July 17, 2004). Similarly, see the Russian historian Valerii Solovei in PK, no. 24 (Dec. 2006), Internet version, who remarks, “One can joke that Cohen bears a certain responsibility for perestroika.” For our actual, more mundane relationship, see Gorbachev’s foreword to a small book about me by Russian friends and colleagues, Stiven Koen i Sovetskii Soiuz/Rossiia (Moscow, 2008), 9–12.

1. BUKHARIN’S FATE

1. Some sections of this essay borrow from my previous writings on Bukharin and his times: Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York, 1973 and 1980); Rethinking the Soviet Experience (New York, 1985), chap. 3; and my introduction to Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow (New York, 1993), 11–33.

2. The letter to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, dated by archivists “not later than Dec. 24, 1924,” was first published in VI KPSS, no. 11 (1988): 42–43.

3. Anonymous reviewer of George Katkov, The Trial of Bukharin (New York, 1969), in TLS, January 29, 1970; and, similarly, Tucker’s introduction to Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York, 1965), ix–xlviii. For different, less admiring interpretations of Bukharin’s conduct during the trial, see Rodina, no. 8 (1995): 39–42; and Vesa Outtinen in SM, no. 8 (2007): 158–69.

4. See the surveys of Soviet public opinion on historical figures reported in NYT, May 27, 1988; Moscow News, no. 44 (1990); G. A. Bordiugov and V. A. Kozlov, Istoriia i koniunktura (Moscow, 1992), esp. chap. 2; and for Yeltsin, SM, no. 11 (1995): 62–63.

5. An important but relatively small part of the original transcript was published and analyzed by Yuri Murin, once a senior archivist at the Presidential Archive. See NNI, no. 1 (1995): 61–76; and Istochnik, no. 4 (1996): 78–92. As I write, however, the full transcript, some 1,500 typed pages, remains inaccessible.

6. Vitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices (New York, 1996), 285. The fate of Soviet writers and their manuscripts during the terror years, as revealed in archives, is the subject of this valuable book.

7. These instructions in Stalin’s handwriting appear on documents I have seen. For the leader’s voracious reading, see Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power (New York, 1990), 51–52. (With Tucker’s first volume, Stalin as Revolutionary, this is the best biography of Stalin, including his role as architect of the terror.) Also see many documents in Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Soviet Culture and Power (New Haven, Conn., 2007).

8. Larina, This I Cannot Forget, 336.

9. The only trace of the reels is a thirty-minute newsreel about the trial, Verdict of the Court—Verdict of the People! shown briefly in Moscow theaters in 1938 and preserved in an archive. It shows the defendants only fleetingly and only from behind. According to an unconfirmed report, the reels were destroyed on Stalin’s orders. Several photographs alleged to be of Bukharin and other defendants at the trial have been published, but none is convincing and some are clearly miscaptioned. Scores of paintings done by Bukharin since childhood are also indicative. Only ten were recovered, from relatives and friends, when his surviving family was freed in the 1950s. Two more were found in 1996—one folded in old newspapers in a Moscow apartment; the other, having been anonymously held and sold, in the American state of Oregon.

10. Unless otherwise indicated, direct quotations from Bukharin in Lubyanka and my account of his prison circumstances are from his letters to Stalin itemized in note 11; his letter to his wife, which appears in Larina, This I Cannot Forget, 11–33; or a few other written communications by Bukharin and his jailers preserved in the NKVD and Presidential archives.

11. All four—dated April 15, September 29, November 14, and December 10—were found in the Presidential Archive described earlier. Copies are now in the Bukharin collection (F. 558) of the archive known as RGASPI in Moscow. One is twenty-two pages long, another barely two. Even before his arrest, Bukharin wrote many letters to Stalin, or “Koba” as he usually called him, partly as a precaution. As he explained to a childhood friend in 1936, the novelist and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, “I have to write. Koba loves to receive letters” (quoted in Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg [New York, 1996], 153). It is almost certain that he wrote more than these four letters to Stalin from prison. In the early 1960s, a Party official investigating Stalin’s crimes found “about ten” such letters, several of which evidently have since disappeared. Olga Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem veke (La Jolla, Calif., 2001), 298.

12. There are several bibliographies of Bukharin’s writings. The most complete is Wladislaw Hedeler, N. I. Bucharin: Bibliographie seiner Schriften und Korrespondenzen, 1912–1938 (Berlin, 2005).

13. The traces include the protocols of Bukharin’s interrogations, a few Lubyanka internal documents written by Kogan, several notes and one letter to him from Bukharin, and the childhood memories and family possessions of Kogan’s daughter, whom I located not far from Moscow in the early 1990s. When I brought Bukharin’s widow and Kogan’s daughter together in 1993, Anna Larina said of her husband and his Lubyanka interrogator, “They both were victims.” On the other hand, Anna Larina, despite her years of suffering, was an exceedingly compassionate person. Nothing special can be read into Kogan’s own fate. Almost all his NKVD colleagues also were shot.

14. After serialization in the mass-circulation journal Znamia in 1988, Anna Larina’s memoirs were published in full as Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow, 1989). For the English-language edition, see this chapter, note 1. Only very recently have I felt free, with his permission, to name and publicly thank Gennady Burbulis.

15. See A. P. Ogurtsov’s foreword to Nikolai Bukharin, Tiuremnye rukopisi, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1996), 2:5–28.

16. Thus, in the prison letter dated April 15, Bukharin begged Stalin to return the antifascist manuscript to him so he could make revisions and corrections and eliminate the repetitions “inevitable in such a method of writing.” It was not returned to him.

17. For a sample of his political caricatures, see A. Iu. Vatlin and L. N. Malashenko, Istoriia VKP(b) v portretakh i karikaturakh ee vozhdei (Moscow, 2007); and a somewhat different version, Alexander Vatlin and Larisa Malashenko, eds. Piggy Fox and the Sword of Revolution: Bolshevik Self-Portraits (New Haven, Conn., 2006). For the doomed Mandelstam, see Bukharin’s 1934 letter to Stalin in Novaia, Dec. 25, 2008.

18. On the eve of his arrest, Bukharin had his wife memorize a kind of last testament. Full of despair about the present, it was optimistic about the cleansing “filter of history” and “a future generation of Party leaders.” See Larina, This I Cannot Forget, 343–44. Bukharin would have thought it fitting that it was finally published under Gorbachev.

19. Other telling polemics against Stalin included Bukharin’s attribution of a variant of the slogan Stalin had used against him in 1928 and 1929, “There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm,” to a tsarist military officer; and a refutation of the charges that he had conspired to assassinate Soviet leaders by having his Leninist cousin reject terrorism on Marxist principle.

20. See Frezinsky’s introduction in Nikolai Bukharin, Vremena (Moscow, 1994), 3–20.

21. As an example of why Bukharin’s prison appeals, letters, and manuscripts must be read together for their meaning, a Western scholar, presumably unfamiliar with the novel, mistakenly concluded that when the doomed prisoner asked to be freed and “be called ‘Petrov’, Bukharin gave up on his very self” (Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul [Cambridge, Mass., 2003], 281). Considering Bukharin’s autobiography of “Petrov,” the opposite was the case.

22. For that struggle from Stalin’s death to the eve of Gorbachev’s rise to power, see Cohen, Rethinking, chaps. 4–5.

23. See, respectively, A. B. Aristov’s 1957 remarks quoted in IA, no. 4 (1993): 62; the Shvernik Commission’s report in Reabilitatsiia, 3 vols. (Moscow, 2000–2004), 2:541–670; and Petr Pospelov in Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie o merakh uluchsheniia podgotovki nauchno-pedagogicheskikh kadrov po istoricheskim naukam (Moscow, 1964), 298. For the students, see Evgenii Taranov in SM, no. 10 (1993): 102; and for the letter, D. T. Shepilov and V. P. Naumov in VI KPSS, no. 2 (1989): 51–52.

24. As he told several people I later knew in Moscow.

25. See the recollections of Andrei Kolesnikov in Izvestiia, Nov. 11, 2003; and Aleksandr Tsipko in VA, no. 3 (2005), Internet edition.

26. A. Fedosev in Novyi zhurnal, no. 151 (1983): 239. For an argument that their attachment to the NEP/Bukharinist model was a grave historical and theoretical mistake on the part of Communist reformers, see Oscar J. Bandelin, Return to the NEP (Westpoint, Conn., 2002).

27. Khronika zashchity prav v SSSR (New York), no. 27 (July–Sept. 1977): 16–17.

28. F. Janacek and J. Sladek, eds., V revoluci a po revoluci (Prague, 1967), 9, 281. A typescript review of my Bukharin biography by the Czech historian Hana Mejdrová made the same point.

29. As they told me before publishing my biography of Bukharin. For their writings, see, e.g., Zheng Yifan, “Reestimating Bukharin’s Political Philosophy,” She Jie Li Shi (World History), Feb. 2, 1981, 1–14.

30. Anatolii Chubais in LG, Nov. 18, 1992; and Boris Vishnevskii in NG, Feb. 14, 1988. I found Baburin’s letter in the archive of the Communist Party Control Commission in an uncatalogued file related to Bukharin’s trial, execution, and rehabilitation. For the Western study, see Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (Princeton, 1974), xiii.

31. Dvadtsatyi vek (London, 1976): 1:18.

32. David Anin in Kontinent, no. 2 (1975): 312–14; and Boris Shragin, Radio Liberty Seminar Broadcast, no. 38 012-R (1978).

33. See Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn i reformy, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1995), 1:365–69; his remarks in V. T. Loginov, ed., A. I. Mikoian (Moscow, 1996), 80; and, similarly, Aleksandr Tsipko in Proryv k svobode (Moscow, 2005), 338.

34. Anatolii Cherniaev, Shest let s Gorbachevym (Moscow, 1993), 183. The significance of the step was noted even by Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, the conservative, anti-Soviet ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration, who remarked that only Bukharin’s rehabilitation finally convinced her “real changes were occurring” under Gorbachev. Interview in Demokratizatsiya (Summer 1994): 460.

35. Bordiugov and Kozlov, Istoriia, chap. 2; Nedelia, Feb. 5–11, 1990; and VI KPSS, no. 3 (1991): 151.

36. Anatolii Rybakov in MN, Nov. 27, 1988; L. Pavliuchik in Pravda, May 17, 1989.

37. G. Bordiugov and V. Kozlov in Pravda, Oct. 3, 1988.

38. See, respectively, Bukharin, Tiuremnye rukopisi ; Bukharin, Vremena ; VRAN 69, no. 7 (1999): 652–54; Vladimir Mamontov in LG, March 28–April 3, 2007; and KO, no. 27–28 (2008): 4. The prison manuscripts, except the full volume of poems, were reprinted as Uznik Lubianki: tiuremnye rukopisi Nikolaia Bukharina (Moscow, 2008). Commenting on the first edition, a veteran Soviet Marxist wrote: “Marxism in our country… was destroyed when Stalin shot Bukharin and his school”: Leon Onikov in NG, Dec. 2, 1997. All four manuscripts have been published in English translations: How It All Began (New York, 1998); Philosophical Arabesques (New York, 2005); Socialism and Its Culture (Calcutta, 2006); and The Prison Poems of Nikolai Bukharin (Calcutta, 2009).

39. A. V. Fadin in Kentavr (Jan.–Feb. 1993): 92–97. Similarly, see Vadim Medvedev, V komande Gorbacheva (Moscow, 1994), 234, who speaks of a “non-catastrophic transformation.”

40. V. Bushuev in SM, no. 12 (2005): 187; and V. Mau in VE, no. 11 (2000): 7, whose point about China is also made by Bushuev. Similarly, see E. G. Plimak, Politika perekhodnoi epokhi (Moscow, 2004).

41. Vadim Belotserkovskii in SM, no. 3 (2006): 170.

42. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the pro-Communist newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia regularly published historical articles glorifying Stalin and denigrating Bukharin. For an attempt to salvage “Lenin’s NEP” from Bukharin, see the Party’s chief historian-ideologist, Iurii Belov, in the issues of Feb. 26, 1998, and April 21, 2007; Viktor Budarin in Dialog, no. 4–5 (2004): 27–40; and for “Bukharinization,” Richard Kosolapov, Polet sovy (Moscow, 1994), 261. For examples of non-Communist opponents of the idea of a viable Bukharinist or NEP alternative, see E. G. Gimpelson and I. B. Orlov in G. N. Sevostianov, ed., Rossiia v XX veke, 2 vols. (Moscow 2002), 2:52–60 and 101–16; and Mikhail Antonov in LG, April 9–15, 2008.

43. See Andrei Piontkovskii in Novaia, Feb. 3–5, 2003 and in MT, Nov. 10, 2003; Gleb Pavlovskii in Izvestiia, Sept. 9, 2003; Andrei Illarionov in NG, Nov. 14, 2005; Egor Gaidar, Gibel imperii (Moscow, 2006), 163, 428 and his comments in JRL, Aug. 24, 2006; and for Khodorkovsky, Aleksandr Minkin in MK, June 3, 2005, Grigory Yavlinsky quoted by Jeremy Page in JRL, Nov. 9, 2003, and Gleb Pavlovskii, gazeta.ru, April 1, 2004. According to a 1990 survey, the introduction of NEP was the most approved change in Soviet history, Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia (New York, 1997), 63. For Clinton, see the report by David Maraniss in WP, Sept. 13, 1998.

44. Knowing my longstanding interest in NEP, two of them emphasized this in discussions with me in Moscow in 2007. Similarly, see Vladimir Mau in Kommersant, Feb. 9, 2006.

45. For the revival of Stalinist-like modernization “projects,” see the objections of Aleksandr Tsipko in LG, June 25–July 1, 2008. For examples of the pro-NEP response, see Aleksandr Iakovlev in OG, Feb. 3–9, 2000; Naum Korzhavin in Novaia, May 8–11, 2003; and I. V. Karatsuba, I. V. Kurukin, and N. P. Sokolov, Vybiraia svoiu istoriiu (Moscow, 2005), 554. In conversations with me and others in 2003, the self-described “alternativist” Viktor Danilov “urgently” called for a public forum on the “relevance of the Bukharinist alternative” because pro-Stalinist historians were again gaining the upper hand in Academy of Sciences institutes.

46. A. A. Igolkin in VI, no. 6 (2001): 151.

2. THE VICTIMS RETURN: GULAG SURVIVORS SINCE STALIN

1. For their story and my book, see chapter 1, n. 1.

2. In the fortieth anniversary edition of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (New York, 2007), he remarked (xiii) that new materials on the terror are still “enough for generations of archaeologists.” Having discussed this and other subjects with my friend Bob Conquest over the years, I owe him a significant debt of gratitude.

3. For a discussion, see Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience (New York, 1985), esp. chaps. 1, 3–5.

4. For my first attempt, “The Friends and Foes of Change,” see Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Robert Sharlet, ed., The Soviet Union Since Stalin (Bloomington, Ind., 1980); and for subsequent ones, Cohen, Rethinking.

5. The best book was, of course, Conquest’s The Great Terror. There was, however, a narrow but useful Ph.D. dissertation, Jane P. Shapiro, “Rehabilitation Policy and Political Conflict in the Soviet Union” (Columbia University, 1967); and, on a related subject, Mikhail Geller, Kontsentratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literatura (London, 1974).

6. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, (New York, 1976), 3:445–68.

7. See Libushe Zorin, Soviet Prisons and Concentration Camps: An Annotated Bibliography (Newtonville, Mass., 1980). There were two important exceptions: Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (New York, 1981); and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf (New York, 1980).

8. Dariusz Tolczyk, See No Evil (New Haven, Conn., 1999), makes the same point but in an ideological way (pp. xix–xx, chaps. 4–5) that dismisses survivor-authors other than Solzhenitsyn. Similarly, see Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), 49–52, 73. Varlam Shalamov, perhaps the greatest Gulag writer, refused to be so dismissive of those lesser authors. See his letter to Solzhenitsyn in NG, April 9, 1998. For a contemporary Russian specialist who takes a position similar to mine, see Aleksei Simonov in “Pravda GULAGa,” Novaia, Aug, 7–10, 2008.

9. They included Sibirskie ogni, Baikal, Prostor, Angara, Ural, Poliarnaia zvezda, Sever, Na rubezhe, and Dalnii vostok.

10. Radio Liberty in Munich maintained an ongoing catalogue, Arkhiv samizdata.

11. See Roy Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa, Time of Change (New York, 1989), 99–100; and A. Antonov-Ovseenko, Vragi naroda (Moscow, 1996), 367. For my relationship with Medvedev, see our dialogue in NNI, no. 2 (2006): 94–101.

12. Baev felt free to tell his story only many years later. See A. D. Mirzabekov, ed., Akademik Aleksandr Baev (Moscow, 1997), chap. 1. In August 1968, the twenty-one-year-old Tanya Baeva participated in the famous “Demonstration of Seven on Red Square,” protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. There were actually eight; the others were arrested and severely punished while Tanya avoided prosecution, though not subsequent persecution.

13. In addition to Bukharin’s extended family, Antonov-Ovseyenko, and Roy Medvedev, my informants included, to list those whose names may be familiar to non-Russian readers, Yuri Aikhenvald, Lev Razgon, Igor Pyatnitsky, Lev Kopelev, Mikhail Baitalsky, Yuri Gaistev, Pavel Aksyonov, Yevgeny Gnedin, Kamil Ikramov, Natalya Rykova, and Leonid Petrovsky.

14. See Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago; Medvedev, Let History Judge (New York, 1972); and Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin (New York, 1981), which appeared with my introduction.

15. Andrei Timofeev in LG, Aug. 23, 1995.

16. Several questionnaires were prepared after 1985. See Gorizont, no.7 (1989): 63–64; Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), 121; Moskvichi v GULAGe (Moscow, 1996), 51–52; and Orlando Figes, The Whisperers (New York, 2007), 662.

17. Figes, The Whisperers, is based on many more cases, and admirably so, but was researched when stealth was no longer necessary and with teams of assistants across Russia. See 657–65.

18. Stephen F. Cohen, ed., An End to Silence (New York, 1982); and Cohen, Rethinking.

19. Adler, Gulag Survivor.

20. As pointed out by Anne Applebaum in Gulag (New York, 2003), 515, their saga is “often ignored” even in histories of the Soviet Union.

21. For examples of memoirs, in addition to those cited in n. 7, see Anna Tumanova, Shag vpravo, shag vlevo… (Moscow, 1995); Aleksandr Milchakov, Molodost svetlaia i tragicheskaia (Moscow, 1988); Pavel Negretov, Vse dorogi vedut na Vorkutu (Benson, Vt., 1985); Anatolii Zhigulin, Chernye kamni (Moscow, 1989); Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve (Moscow, 1990); Mikhail Mindlin, Anfas i profil (Moscow, 1999); and Olga Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem veke (La Jolla, Calif., 2001). Most still focus, however, on life in the Gulag, as do, for example, those in Simeon Vilensky, ed., Till My Tale Is Told (Bloomington, Ind., 1999). For general Western studies, see n. 8; Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost (New York, 1994); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin (London, 2003); Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin ’ s Victims (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996); Catherine Merridale, Nights of Stone (New York, 2001); and Figes, Whisperers.

22. A point made when the Russian edition of Adler’s book appeared in 2005. There are still few pages on the subject in Russian literature, as in Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War (Armonk, N.Y., 1998), chap. 16; and Mir posle Gulaga (St. Petersburg, 2004). The two main repositories, in Moscow, are the Memorial Society and Vozvrashchenie (Return). For archive volumes, see Reabilitatsiia, 3 vols. (Moscow, 2000–2004), and Deti GULAGa (Moscow, 2002), under the general editorship of A. N. Iakovlev. Bukharin’s relatives are among the best documented returnee cases. See Anna Larin, This I Cannot Forget The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow (New York, 1993); Mark Iunge, Strakh pered proshlym (Moscow, 2003); V. I. Bukharin, Dni i gody (Moscow, 2003); A. S. Namazova, ed., Rossiia i Evropa, no.4 (2007): 190–296 (on Bukharin’s daughter Svetlana Gurvich); and my introduction to Nikolai Bukharin, How It All Began (New York, 1998).

23. Vladlen Loginov, intro. to A. Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret tirana (Moscow, 1995), 3.

24. Aleksandr Proshkin in SK, June 30, 1988.

25. There is no agreed-upon figure for the number of people in the Gulag during that period, only a very large (and contradictory) Russian and Western literature on the subject. (Among the several problems involved are the percentages of criminal and political prisoners and how many inmates were there more than once.) I have used the figure given tentatively by the Memorial Society in recent years, possibly a conservative one. Though their figures are somewhat different, I am grateful for the expert advice of Stephen Wheatcroft and Alexander Babyonyshev (Maksudov).

26. See, e.g., Varlam Shalamov, Kolymskie rasskazy (London, 1978); Ginzburg, Within; Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (New York, 1963); Boris Diakov, Povest o perezhitom (Moscow, 1966); and the exchange in LG, July 4–10, 2007.

27. On the eve of Stalin’s death, according to archive sources, there were 2.7 million people in Gulag camps and colonies and 2.8 million in the “special settlements.” A. B. Suslov in VI, no. 3 (2004): 125; Istoriia stalinskogo GULAGa, 7 vols. (Moscow, 2004–2005), 5:90. There are at least two uncertainties about this total figure of 5.5 million. The usual assumption that half of those in camps and colonies were criminals may be too high. And the number given for special settlements, which were mainly for specific deported groups and nationalities, may not include the many individuals released into exile after serving their camp sentences or those sentenced only to exile, some of whom I knew. See, e.g., the discussion in Istoriia stalinskogo GULAGa, 5:23–24, 90.

28. Emma Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs (New York, 2004), 456.

29. My files include dozens of such cases. In addition to those in Deti GULAGa, four must suffice here: Larina, This I Cannot Forget; Pyotr Yakir, A Childhood in Prison (New York, 1973); Kamil Ikramov, Delo moego ottsa (Moscow, 1991); and Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, Semeinaia khronika vremen kulta lichnosti (Moscow, 1998). For the record, Bukharin’s son and others report that their orphanages were not the cruel, uncaring institutions usually depicted, as, e.g., by Vladislav Serikov and Irina Ovchinnikova in Izvestiia, May 1, 1988, and June 22, 1992; and Mikhail Nikolaev, Detdom (New York, 1985). For a study of orphanages during those years, see Catriona Kelly, Children’s World (New Haven, Conn., 2007), 221–58.

30. “Spoilt biographies”—people “whose fates were ruined by political repression” (Aleksei Karpychev in Rossiiskie vesti, March 28, 1995)—run through Figes, Whisperers. Among the exceptions were the president of the Academy of Sciences Sergei Vavilov, the famous newspaper caricaturist Boris Yefimov, the actress Vera Maretskaya (all had brothers who were arrested and killed), the actress Olga Aroseva, whose father was shot, and the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, whose father was executed and mother sent to a camp. See, respectively, Iu. N. Vavilov, V dolgom poiske (Moscow, 2004); Boris Efimov, Desiat desiatiletii (Moscow, 2000); the obituaries of Maretskaya in Pravda, Aug. 19, 1978, and LG, Aug. 30, 1978, which do not mention her brothers, and T. Iakovleva in KP, July 12, 1989, who does; Olga Aroseva and Vera Maksimova, Bez grima (Moscow, 2003); and I, Maya Plisetskaya (New Haven, Conn., 2001). Regarding benefits, see, e.g., the plight of Pyotr Petrovsky’s widow, Golosa istorii, no. 22, book 1 (Moscow, 1990), p. 230.

31. Istoriia stalinskogo GULAGa, 3:38.

32. See, e.g., the correspondence between Gumilyov and Akhmatova in Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs, 448–70.

33. For Molotov’s wife, see Viacheslav Nikonov in K O, no. 27–28 (2005): 3, and William Taubman, Khrushchev (New York, 2003), 246. For other relatives of leaders, see Roy Medvedev and Zhores Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin (New York, 2004), 107–8; for Communists, see Milchakov, Molodost; Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem; and Ivan Gronskii, Iz proshlogo… (Moscow, 1991), 192–96. For the doctors, Iakov Etinger in NV, no. 3 (2003): 38. For Fyodorova, Victoria Fyodorova and Haskel Frankel, The Admiral’s Daughter (New York, 1979), 185. For the Starostins, Moscow News, Feb. 5–12, 1988. And for Rozner, Iurii Tseitlin in Krokodil, no. 7 (1989): 6.

34. Reabilitatsiia, 1:213. For the slow process, see the case of Vsevolod Meierkhold in B. Riazhskii, “Kak shla reabilitatsiia,” Teatralnaia zhizn, no. 5 (1989): 8–11. For the period, see Adler, Gulag Survivor, chap. 3.

35. Meierkhold in B. Riazhskii, “Kak shla reabilitatsiia,”, 89, 104. For the crowds, see Riazhskii, “Kak shla,” 10. For the appeals, see Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 431; and Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret, 452.

36. Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs, 464.

37. Reabilitatsiia, 2:6, 9, and the documents in part 1. For examples of appeals, see Mikhail Rosliakov, Ubiistvo Kirova (Leningrad, 1991), 15–17; and Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs, 467. For the decision to read the speech publicly and reactions, see Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 3 (1989): 166, n. 1; and Medvedev and Medvedev, Unknown Stalin, 103–5. For examples of people who read or heard the speech, see also Anatolii Rybakov, Roman-Vospominanie (Moscow, 1997), 195; and Orlova and Kopelev, My zhili, 25.

38. My account of the commissions is based on two varying but generally compatible sources: Reabilitatsiia, 2:193, 792–93; and Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 274–77, 286–89. See also Adler, Gulag Survivor, 169–71; and Anastas Mikoian, Tak bylo (Moscow, 1999), 595. For “unloading parties,” see Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, 3:489. Many of my returnees confirmed this account. Some estimates of people released by the commissions are considerably higher. See Medvedev and Medvedev, Unknown Stalin, 115.

39. V. N. Zemskov in SI, no. 7 (1991): 14.

40. Vladimir Lakshin in LG, Aug. 17, 1994; Vasilii Grossman, Forever Flowing (New York, 1972), chap. 1; Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, 3:506; E. Nosov in Iu. V. Aksiutin, ed., Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev (Moscow, 1989), 98.

41. Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret, 451; Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 282.

42. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, vol. 3:449.

43. For examples, see Negretov, Vse dorogi; Ginzburg, Within; Mikhail Vygon, Lichnoe delo (Moscow, 2005); Mir posle Gulaga, 36–40; and on Kazakhstan, Leonid Kapeliushnyi in Izvestiia, Dec. 17, 1992. Poetic expressions of such attachments appeared in the journals Baikal and Prostor. See also Adler, Gulag Survivor, 231–33.

44. Hochschild, Unquiet Ghost; Colin Thubron, In Siberia (New York, 1999), 38–48; and for skulls, Evgenii Evtushenko in LG, Nov. 2, 1988.

45. Cohen, ed., An End, 66–67.

46. Applebaum, Gulag, 512. For examples of freed prisoners too broken to go on, see the cases of Iulian Khrenov in LG, July 4–10, 2007; Boris Zbarskii in Pravda, April 5, 1989; and Daniil Andreev in Grazhdanin Rossii, no. 4 (1993). For those who survived, see the stories about Oleg Volkov in Sobesednik, no. 2 (1990); and Anna Nosova in Ogonek, no. 12 (1989): 5. A few—e.g., Olga Tarasova and Nikolai Glazov—lived to be one hundred or more. See Nedelia, no. 33 (1990); and Eko, no. 4 (1991): 197. All those I knew personally lived into their seventies or beyond. Bukharin’s brother Vladimir died at eighty-eight.

47. Oleg Khlebnikov on Shalamov in Novaia, June 18–20, 2007; Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs, 423 (and, similarly, Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren [Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1995], 420); and Lez Razgon, True Stories (Dana Point, Calif., 1997); Aleksei Snegov in Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie o merakh uluchshenii podgotovki nauchno-pedagogicheskikh kadrov po istoricheskim naukam, 18–21 dekabria 1962 g. (Moscow, 1964), 270; the obituary of Valentin Zeka (Sokolov) in Russkaia mysl, Dec. 20, 1984; and Liudmila Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Moscow, 2008), 456. Regarding friendships, my Moscow acquaintances were good examples. Similarly, see Zhigulin, Chernye kamni, 265–71. For those who lived fearfully, see Adler, Gulag Survivor; and Figes, Whisperers. And for “prisoner’s skin,” see Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson, Surviving Freedom (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), 26.

48. For disparate examples, see Mirzabekov, ed., Akademik Aleksandr Baev; and Tumanova, Shag, 213–26.

49. See, respectively, V. Kargamov, Rokossovskii (Moscow, 1972), 147–48; Vladimir Lakshin, “Otkrytaia dver,” Ogonek, no. 20 (1988): 22–24; N. Koroleva, Otets, vol. 2 (Moscow, 2002); editor’s note in LG, Aug. 1–7, 2007; Mirzabekov, ed., Akademik Aleksandr Baev; Moscow News, Feb. 5–12, 1988; Tseitlin in Krokodil, no. 7 (1989): 6. Georgii Zhzhenov, Prozhitoe (Moscow, 2005); and Petr Veliaminov in SR, June 4, 1989.

50. For happy ends, in addition to ones listed earlier, see Mikhail Zaraev in Ogonek, no. 15 (1991): 15, where the term appears; Milchakov, Molodost; Mindlin, Anfas and profil; Tumanova, Shag; and Efim Shifrin in AF, no. 1 (1991). For unhappy ends, see Cohen, ed., An End, 101–2; and more generally, Adler, Gulag Survivor; and Figes, Whisperers. For the example of the homeless Wilhelm Draugel, see in MN, Dec. 31, 1989. For Shalamov, see Elena Zakharova in Novaia, Nov. 8–11, 2007; and for Berggolts, see Gerbert Kemoklidze in LG, Nov. 12–18, 2008.

51. See, e.g., Aleksei Savelev in Molodoi kommunist, no. 3 (1988): 57; and Natalya Rykova, on behalf of her mother, in Reabilitatsiia, 2:351. For a discussion, see Adler, Gulag Survivor, 29, 205–23; and for Levitin-Krasnov, his Likhie gody (Paris, 1977) and V poiskakh novogo grada (Tel-Aviv, 1980).

52. See, e.g., Shalamov’s letters in NG, April 9, 1998, and in KO, no. 27–28 (1997); Mikhail Zolotonosov in MN, Sept. 10–17, 1995; similarly, Kim Parkhmenko in NG, Jan. 5, 1991; and on the dislike, Zinovy Zinik in TLS, Dec. 5, 2008, 6. For Kopelev and Ginzburg, see Iurii Kariakin, Peremena ubezhdenii (Moscow, 2007), 232; and Ginzburg, Within, 389–92.

53. The scientist and Svetlana Gurvich, a historian, were in politically sensitive professions.

54. See Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret, 469–77; and the pro-Memorial account in Smith, Remembering, 177–78.

55. See Karpov in SR, July 27, 2002, Pravda, April 26, 1995, and his Generalissimus, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2002); and Sviashchennik Dmitrii Dudko, Posmertnye vstrechi so Stalinym (Moscow, 1993).

56. See the 1962 document in Rodina, no. 5–6 (1993): 56–57.

57. See, e.g., Izvestiia, June 22, 1992; Ella Maksimova in Izvestiia, May 5, 1993; E. M. Maksimova, Po sledam zagublennykh sudeb (Moscow, 2007); and, similarly, Deti GULAGa, 12.

58. See, e.g., the accounts by Anthony Austin in NYT Magazine, Dec. 16, 1979, 26; by Adler, Gulag Survivor, 140–41; by Ginzburg in Within, 410–11; and for the brothers, see Vladimir Ryzhkov in Novaia, Feb. 21–27, 2008.

59. For the well-known example of Eugenia Ginzburg and Pavel Aksyonov, see Konstantin Smirnov, “Zhertva prinoshenie,” Ogonek, no. 2 (1991): 18–21.

60. The wife and daughter of my friend Yevgeny Gnedin, e.g., remained utterly devoted to him. Similarly, see Milchakov, Molodost, 91–92; and Baitalsky, Notebooks, 389–91. For a contrary example, see Lakshin in LG, Aug. 17, 1994. More generally, see Adler, Gulag Survivor, 139–45.

61. See, e.g., Oleg Volkov, Pogruzhenie vo tmu (Moscow, 1992), 428–29. Solzhenitsyn and Aleksei Snegov had much younger post-Gulag wives. Among survivors who married other victims were Lev Razgon, Yuri Aikhenvald, and Antonov-Ovseyenko. Children included Irina Yakira and Yuli Kim, who married, and the famous novelist Yulian Semyonov, whose father spent many years in the Gulag and who married a victim’s daughter. For freed men marrying younger women, see Olga Semenova, Iulian Semenov (Moscow, 2006). Similarly, see Figes, Whisperers, 566, 650.

62. For a discussion, see Adler, Gulag Survivor, 114–18; for a specific case, M. Korol on the discarded wife of Marshal Budyonny in AF, no. 23 (1993); and for a tragic (and heroic) one, Iulii Kim on Pyotr Yakir in OG, Feb. 8–14, 1996. According to N. A. Morozov and M. B Rogachev. ( OI, no. 2 [1995]: 187), effects of the “syndrome” lasted for decades. For survivor circles, see Ginzburg, Within, 157; and Adler, Gulag Survivor, 134. And for nostalgia, Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation (Boston, 1990), 88; Bulat Okudzhava in Novaia, May 5–11, 2005; and even Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, 3:462.

63. For statutes and property compensation, see Reabilitatsiia, 2:181–83, 194–97, 333–34; and Adler, Gulag Survivor, 186–90. I heard of very few instances of possessions being returned, not even photographs, except ones saved by relatives and friends, but I learned of numerous instances of such items being held or sold by descendants of secret policemen. Similarly, see Liudmila Saveleva in Izvestiia, May 5, 1992; and Aleksandr Kokurin and Iurii Morukov, “Gulag,” SM, no. 2 (2002): 109. For Vyshinsky, see Vera Chelishcheva in “Pravda GULAGa,” Novaia, July 7–9, 2008.

64. E. Efimov in Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost, no. 9 (1964): 42–45; and Lev Zaverin in Soiuz, no. 51 (1990): 9.

65. See Adler, Gulag Survivor, chap. 5 (for the quotes, 103, 161); similarly, Golosa istorii, 225; and various documents in Reabilitatsiia, vols. 1 and 2.

66. Golosa istorii, 185–86, 214–33; Reabilitatsiia, 2:370–71, 456–62, 474–75; Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties (New York, 1996), 287–91, 303; Orlova and Kopelev, My zhili, 25.

67. Adler, Gulag Survivor, 171, 177; Ivan Zemlianushin in Trud, Dec. 24, 1992. The figures are probably compatible because the first refers to 1954 through 1961 and the second apparently to 1954 through 1964.

68. Adler, Gulag Survivor, 179, and passim for official opposition, which included Molotov ( Golosa istorii, 214). For examples of the other obstructions, see Semen Vilenskii, ed., Dognes tiagoteet (Moscow, 1989), 1:5; G. Anokhin in Izvestiia, March 23, 1988; N. Zarubin in Izvestiia, March 31, 1995; and employers in Briansk described in Lesnaia promyshlennost, May 1, 1989. For the quotes about official attitudes, see Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 456.

69. See Zaraev in Ogonek, no. 15 (1991): 15; Adler, Gulag Survivor, 186; for the poem, Vladimir Kornilov in MK, July 13, 1966 (and, similarly, the tributes in Evgenii Gnedin, Vykhod iz labirinta [Moscow, 1994]); and for Gnedin’s life, Stephen F. Cohen, Sovieticus, exp. ed. (New York, 1986), 104–7.

70. On the amnesty, see Miriam Dobson in Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization (London, 2006), 21–40; and Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, 3:452. A well-known Soviet film about the amnesty, The Cold Summer of 1953, was released in 1988.

71. Snegov in Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie, 270; and, similarly, Vladimir Amlinskii in Iunost, no. 3 (1988): 53. The official newspaper Izvestiia later admitted that “false denunciation frequently became a ladder by which to climb to the top” ( CDSP, Aug. 5, 1964, 20). The moral corruption of the living was a theme of the novels of Yuri Trifonov, a victim’s son. See NYT, Dec. 16, 1979.

72. Relatives naturally appealed on behalf of their loved ones, and professionals sometimes on behalf of their colleagues. See, e.g., V. A. Goncharov, Prosim osvobodit iz tiuremnogo zakliucheniia (Moscow, 1998); N. S. Cherushev, ed. “Dorogoi nash tovarishch Stalin!” (Moscow, 2001); and “Akademiki v zashchitu repressirovannykh kolleg,” VRAN, no. 6 (2002): 530–36. Friends and unrelated individuals sometimes tried to help, as, e.g., related by Razgon, True Stories, 81–86; Evgeniia Taratuta in SK, June 4, 1988; and Marina Khodorkovskaia in Novaia, May 16–18, 2005. In Rasprava: prokurorskie sudby (Moscow, 1990), some prosecutors are reported to have resisted. For reports of NKVD officers resisting or helping people, see Zhigulin, Chernye kamni, 262–64; I. Kon in AF, no. 18 (1988); V. Chertkov in Pravda, May 1, 1989; and Galina Vinogradova in LG, Nov. 12, 1997. For a few “good bosses” in the camps, see E. Boldyreva in SK, Sept. 14, 1989.

73. Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi (Paris, 1980), 2:115, 137 (and, similarly, Lev Razgon in LG, Dec. 13, 1995); and Applebaum, Gulag, 516–17. For a different perspective, see Miriam Dobson, “Contesting the Paradigms of De-Stalinization,” Slavic Review (Fall 2005): 580–600.

74. See Cohen, ed., An End, chap. 2. For Monte Christo, Igor Zolotusskii and Kamil Ikramov in MN, June 18, 1989. And for revenge more generally, Lev Razgon in Ogonek, no. 51 (1995): 48; and Adler, Gulag Survivor, 123–24.

75. Antonov-Ovseenko, Vragi, 16. For the no-guilt view, see Aleksandr Shitov on Yuri Trifonov in Novaia, Aug. 29–31, 2005; for the opposing view, Vladimir Sapozhnikov in LG, Aug. 24, 1988; for Yuri Tomsky and Svetlana Stalin, Boris Rubin, Moe okruzhenie (Moscow, 1995), 187; for the guards, Figes, Whisperers, 631.

76. I was told the first episode. For the others, see, respectively, Zhigulin, Chernye kamni, 263; Valentin Kuznetsov in KO, no. 49 (1990): 3; Efim Etkind, Notes of A Non-Conspirator (New York, 1978), 113–14, 118, 204; and Aleksandr Borshchagovskii in LG, June 10, 1992. For similar episodes, see V. Volgin, “Dokumenty rasskazyvaiut,” Voprosy literatury, no. 1 (1992): 257–83; Cohen, ed., An End, chap. 2; and N.N., “Donoschiki i predateli sredi sovetskikh pisatelei i uchenykh,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (May–June 1963): 74–76.

77. See, e.g., Bronia Ben-Iakov, Slovar argo Gulaga (Frankfurt, 1982); Vladimir Kozlovskii, Sobranie russkikh vorovskikh slovarei, 4 vols. (New York, 1983); and, in the Soviet Union itself, K. Kostsinskii (Kirill Uspenskii), “Sushchestvuet li problema zhargona?” Voprosy literatury, no. 5 (1968): 181–91. For objections, see those cited by Elvira Goriukhina in the weekly supplement of Novaia, Sept. 14, 2007.

78. Quoted by Tseitlin in Krokodil, no.7 (1989): 6. Yevtushenko said at the time, “The intelligentsia is singing criminal songs.” Quoted by Mikhail Roshchin in Ogonek, no. 41 (1990): 9. For a study written as early as 1979, see Iurii Karabchievskii, “I vokhrovtsy i zeki,” Neva, no. 1 (1991): 170–76.

79. See the accounts of Iurii Panov in Izvestiia, Aug. 10, 1990; and Viktor Bokarev in LG, March 29, 1989.

80. See, e.g., SK, May 6, 1989; Gorizont, no. 6 (1989); Ogonek, no. 39 (1990): 8–11; Tvorchestvo v lagerakh i ssylkakh (Moscow, 1990); Tvorchestvo i byt GULAGa (Moscow, 1998); and Nikolai Getman, The Gulag Collection (Washington, D.C., 2001). For the sketches, see Literator, no. 35 (1989).

81. For “catacomb,” see Paola Volkova in NG, May 30, 2001.

82. Konstantin Simonov in Izvestiia, Nov. 18, 1962. For examples of earlier works, see K. Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye (Moscow, 1959); V. Kaverin, Otkrytaia kniga, part 3 (Moscow, 1956); V. Panova, Sentimentalnyi roman (Moscow, 1958); N. Ivanter, “Snova avgusta,” NM, nos. 8 and 9 (1959); and A. Valtseva, “Kvartira No. 13,” Moskva, no. 1 (1957). For a few example from the early 1960s, see V. Nekrasov, “Kira Georgievna,” NM, no. 6, 1961; Iu. Dombrovskii, “Khranitel drevnostei,” NM, nos. 6 and 7 (1964); A. Vasiliev, “Voprosov bolshe net,” Moskva, no. 6 (1964); A. Aldan-Semenov, “Barelef na skale,” NM, no. 7 (1964); V. Aksenov, “Dikoi,” Iunost, no. 12 (1964); Iu. Semenov, “Pri ispolnenii sluzhebnykh obiazannostei,” Iunost, nos. 1 and 2 (1962); K. Ikramov and V. Tendriakov, “Belyi flag,” MG, no. 12 (1962); B. Polevoi, “Vosvrashchenie,” Ogonek, no. 31 (1962); I. Stadniuk, “Liudi ne angely,” Neva, no. 12 (1962); and I. Lazutin, “Chernye lebedi,” Baikal, nos. 2–6 (1964) and no. 1 (1966).

83. For the imagery and quote, see Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right (Berkeley, 1978), 15; and Solzhenitsyn, Oak, 16.

84. See, e.g., the complaints by Ivan Isaev in IA, no. 2 (2001): 123–24; and V. Ivanov-Paimen in IA, no.4 (2003): 23–24. For returning to Party work, see, e.g., Milchakov, Molodost, pp. 92–99; Rosliakov, Ubiistvo, p. 16; and D. Poliakova and V. Khorunzhii on Valentina Pikina in KP, March 17, 1988.

85. For Burkovsky, see Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 523. For Suchkov and Kheiman, see Emily Tall in Slavic Review (Summer 1990): 184; and V. Loginov and N. Glovatskaia in VE, no. 1 (2007): 154–56.

86. I frequently heard this derision. In addition to ones mentioned in the text, zeks in positions of power included Pyotr Yakir, whose family was close to Larina and Baeva, and Aleksandr Milchakov, whose son I knew in the 1980s. For Pikina, see Poliakova and Khorunzhii in KP, March 17, 1988; Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 273, 296; Grigorii Pomerants, Sledstvie vedet katorzhanka (Moscow, 2004), 7, 28, 37; and Reabilitatsiia, 1:168, 447, and 2:267, 299, 378, 453, 456, 482, 493, 793, 877. For Shatunovskaia and Snegov, see this chapter, n. 87.

87. For Shirvindt, who died in 1958, see Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, “MVD,” SM, no. 4 (1998): 115–16. For Todorsky, see N. Cherushev, 1937 god (Moscow, 2003), 407–35; Reabilitatsiia, 1:214, 460, and 2:376, 693–95, 793, 896; A. I. Todorskii, Marshal Tukhachevskii (Moscow, 1963); and V. Sokolovskii, “Boets i voennyi pisatel,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 9 (1964): 53–60. I was told a great deal about Shatunovskaia and Snegov long before printed sources on their roles became available. For the former, see Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem; and Grigorii Pomerants, “Pamiati odinokoi teni,” Znamia, no. 7 (2006): 165–69 and his Sledstvie. For both, see Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev (Boston, 1990), chap. 1; S. A. Mikoian, “Aleksei Snegov v borbe za ‘destalinizatsiiu,’” VI, no. 4 (2006): 69–83; Mikoian, Tak bylo, chap. 48; and the name indexes in Reabilitatsiia, vols. 1–3, and in K. Aimermakher, ed., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva o kulte lichnosti Stalina na XX sezde KPSS (Moscow, 2002).

88. Pomerants, “Pamiati,” 165.

89. For the congress, exiles, and camps, see the sources on Shatunovskaya and Snegov in n. 87. For the quotes, see, respectively, Mikoian, Tak bylo, 589; Pomertants, “Pamiati,” 166; Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, 13; and, similarly, Mikoian, “Aleksei Snegov.” Pomerants calls Shatunovskaya Khrushchev’s “gray Bishop” ( serym preosviashchenstvom ).

90. Mikoyan, who headed the first commission on rehabilitations, personally received and helped a remarkable number of returnees, as I was told and as is now well documented. For his own account, see Mikoian, Tak bylo, 589–90; and, in addition, A. I. Mikoian (Moscow, 1996). For Bukharin, see Mikoian, 79; and Dmitrii Pushken in MN, May 28–June 3, 1995. A well-informed historian thinks Mikoyan was “the most distraught by his conscience” (Miklós Kun, Stalin [Budapest, 2003], 290). For disagreements about his role under and after Stalin, see Sergo A. Mikoyan and Michael Ellman in Slavic Review (Winter 2001): 917–21.

91. Quoted in Roy Medvedev, Khrushchev (Garden City, N.Y., 1983), 89–91; and, similarly, Fedor Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring (New York, 1988), 61–62. For the memorial, see XXII sezd kommununisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 17–31 oktiabria 1961 goda, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1962), 2:587; and for Ivan Denisovich, see Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, pp. 480–98. It should be added that “only” Khrushchev’s own daughter-in-law, as he put it, was in the Gulag, from 1943 to 1954. See Tatiana Rybakova, “Schastlivaia ty, Tania!” (Moscow, 2005), 261–63.

92. For the Beria trial, see Lavrentii Beria 1953 (Moscow, 1999). Among the witnesses were Pikina, Snegov, and Suren Gazarian, who wrote a memoir account. See SSSR: Vnutrennie protivorechiia (New York), no. 6 (1982): 109–46. For the congress, see S. I. Chuprinin, ed., Ottepel 1953–1956 (Moscow, 1989), 461; for the showdown, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich 1957 (Moscow, 1998); and for Lazurkina, XXII sezd, 3:121. Solzhenitsyn’s novella appeared in NM in November 1962.

93. Iurii Trifonov, Otblesk kostra (Moscow, 1966), 86; and, similarly, Cohen, ed., An End, 29–30.

94. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 3 vols. (University Park, Penn., 2004–2007), 2:209; Georgii Ostroumov in Proryv k svobode (Moscow, 2005), 288, and, similarly, Evgenii Evtushenko in Novaia, Jan. 26–28, 2004.

95. Suren Gazarian, “Eto ne dolzhno povtoritsa” (samizdat manuscript, 1966); Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind (New York, 1967), and Within; Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever (New York, 1977), The Education of a True Believer (New York, 1980), and Ease My Sorrows (New York, 1983); Razgon, True Stories; Gnedin, Katastrofa i vtoroe rozhdenie (Amsterdam, 1977); Baitalsky, Notebooks.

96. See Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, esp. 296–361, and the 1963 Shvernik Commission report, to which she was a major contributor, in Reabilitatsiia, 2:541–670. On Snegov, Khrushchev, Khrushchev, 9–10; and Mikoian, “Aleksei Snegov,” 81–82. On Todorsky, see this chapter, n. 87; and Milchakov, Molodost.

97. Oleg Litskevich in SM, no. 6 (2008): 135–44. For lower-ranking examples, see Anatolii Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie (Moscow, 1997), 84

98. Trifonov, Otblesk; L. P. Petrovskii, Petr Petrovskii (Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, 1974); Yakir, Childhood; and Ikramov, Delo. Under a pseudonym, Antonov-Ovseyenko published a censored biography of his father in 1975 and much later an uncensored edition: A. V. Rakitin, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko (Leningrad, 1989). Yuri Gastev, a returnee whom I knew well, prepared a documented biography of his father in order to facilitate the latter’s posthumous rehabilitation. He did so at the suggestion of the procurator’s office. (For an interesting personal account of Gastev at about that time, see Valerii Rodos, Ia—syn palacha [Moscow, 2008], 534–61.) A number of published books and articles began that way. Several children of prominent victims were given prized slots for graduate study at history institutes, including Yakir and Petrovsky. For the generals’ children, see Iurii Primakov in Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 5 (Moscow, 2007), 191–92.

99. A recurring charge at the 1957 Central Committee meeting. See Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich.

100. See, e.g., Efimov in Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost, no. 9 (1964): 42–45; and Lev Zaverin in Soiuz, no. 51 (1990): 9.

101. Quoted in Medvedev, Khrushchev, 84; for “fashion,” see Vladimir Lakshin in LG, Aug. 17, 1994. Shatunovskaya, in her capacity as an official Party investigator, had personally interrogated Kaganovich, Malenkov, and Molotov about past crimes. Pomerants, Sledstvie, 12.

102. See Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow, 2005); Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 285–91; also on Suslov, see Mikoian, “Aleksei Snegov”; and, similarly on Molotov, see Golosa istorii, 214. For the lists, see Reabilitatsiia, 3:144.

103. Among them, e.g., Konstantin Simonov, Tvardovsky, and Ehrenburg.

104. For those developments, see Efimov in Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost, no. 9 (1964): 42–45; and Lev Zaverin in Soiuz, no. 51 (1990): 9; Aimermakher, ed., Doklad; Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2, section 3; and Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich. Many documents existed—and still exist today—incriminating Khrushchev and Mikoyan. See Reabilitatsiia, 3:146–47; V. P. Naumov in VI, no. 4 (1997): 19–35; and Anatolii Ponomarov in Rodina, no. 10 (1994): 82–88. For Khrushchev’s enemies circulating them, see Neizvestnaia Rossiia (Moscow, 1992), 1:294–95. For the role of archive documents more generally at that time, see Medvedev and Medvedev, Unknown Stalin, chap. 3. For Khrushchev’s own role in the terror, see Taubman, Khrushchev, chaps. 5–6. And for a recent anti-Khrushchev account, E. Prudnikova, Khrushchev: Tvortsy terrora (Moscow, 2007).

105. N. Barsukov, “Proval ‘antipartiinoi gruppy,’” Kommunist, no. 8 (1990): 99.

106. See N. Barsukov, “Oborotnaia storona ‘ottepeli,’” Kentavr, no. 4 (1993): 129–43; Evgenii Taranov, “‘Raskachaem leninskie gory!’” SM, no. 10 (1993): 94–103; and Reabilitatsiia, 2:7. For the quotation, see Nikita Petrov in NV, no. 23 (2000): 33; and, similarly, Gazarian in SSSR.

107. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich.

108. Ibid., 137.

109. The latter number is from V. P. Pirozhkov in Nedelia, no. 26 (1989), who also reports that 1,342 were tried. Nikita Petrov, whom I follow in this regard, effectively debunks the number tried, in N. G. Okhotin and A. B. Roginskii, eds., Zvenia, (Moscow, 1991), 1:430–36. For the number executed, see Iu. S. Novopashin in VI, no. 5 (2007): 54–55; and for one executed hangman and the fate of his family, Rodos, Ia—syn palacha. For examples of the various punishments, see Kokurin and Petrov, “MVD,” 114–18; and Robert Conquest, Inside Stalin’s Secret Police (Stanford, Calif., 1985), 155–57.

110. Kokurin and Petrov, “MVD”; Aleksandr Kokurin, “GULAG,” SM, no. 2 (2002): 98; Aleksandr Fadeev (Moscow, 2001) (and, similarly, Burlatsky, Khrushchev, 18); and Medvedev and Medvedev, Unknown Stalin, 116–17.

111. Khrushchev, cited in Medvedev, Khrushchev, 99 (and, similarly in Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 286); Gorbachev in V politbiuro TsK KPSS: Po zapisiam Anatoliia Cherniaeva, Vadima Medvedeva, Georgiia Shakhnazarova (1985–1991) (Moscow, 2006), 323–24; and Khrushchev, quoted by Mikhail Shatrov in SM, no. 10 (1994)_: 22. For his vulnerable position, see Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, 14.

112. Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 478. All quotes are from the proceedings, XXII sezd, vol. 3.

113. Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 297–300. For the final report, see Reabilitatsiia, 2:541–670.

114. I borrow the phrase from Vladimir Lakshin, “Ivan Denisovich, ego druzia i nedrugi,” NM, no. 1 (1964).

115. Den poezii 1962 (Moscow, 1962), 45. I remain grateful to the late Professor Vera Dunham, who located and translated the poem. For a list of other examples, see Cohen, Rethinking, 199n. 65; and the sources in this chapter, n. 82.

116. Politicheskii dnevnik, (Amsterdam, 1975), 2:123; and, similarly, Medvedev and Medvedev, Unknown Stalin, 116–17. For the cases, see N.N., “Donoschiki”; Cohen, ed., An End, 124–32, and generally, chap. 2. When Yudin died in 1968, official obituaries noted only his “long and glorious career” ( CDSP, May 1, 1968, 39).

117. Read comparatively, e.g., the reviews of Ivan Denisovich, Iurii Bondarev; “Tishina,” NM, nos. 3–5 (1962); and Diakov’s memoirs, Povest, which began appearing in 1963. See also Lakshin, “Ivan Denisovich.”

118. See the exchange between Ehrenburg and Viktor Ermilov in Izvestiia, Jan. 30 and Feb. 6, 1963; for Khrushchev, Taubman, Khrushchev, 596; and the anonymous letter from a Russian writer in Encounter (June 1964): 88–98.

119. See, e.g., E. Genri, “Chuma na ekrane,” Iunost, no. 6 (1966), and his comments on a related Soviet film, Ordinary Fascism, in NM, no. 12 (1965); Fedor Burlatskii in Pravda, Feb. 14, 1966; Evgenii Gnedin, “Biurokratiia dvadtsatogo veka,” NM, no. 3 (1966), and his “Mekhanizm fashistskoi diktatury,” NM, no. 8 (1968); Politicheskii dnevnik, 2:109–22; and, similarly, Adler, Gulag Survivor, 194.

120. Politicheskii dnevnik, 2:123.

121. As I frequently heard from Russians who knew or studied them.

122. Translated by George Reavey, The Poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1953 to 1965 (London, 1966), 161–65. The poem appeared in Pravda, Oct. 21, 1962. On the same point, see Z. L. Serebriakova in Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 4 (Moscow, 2006), 96.

123. For Snegov, Shatunovskaya, and the report, see Reabilitatsiia, 2:524; and Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 291. For the editorial and constitution, see Burlatsky, Khrushchev, 200–201, 215; and G. L. Smirnov’s memoir in Neizvestnaia Rossiia, (Moscow, 1993), 3:377–81.

124. For the overthrow, and a somewhat different interpretation, see Taubman, Khrushchev, chap. 1; for the shift, Cohen, Rethinking, chap. 5; and for Solzhenitsyn, Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 525. A Russian scholar thinks the people behind Khrushchev’s ouster “didn’t mention the real reason.” See Serebriakova, cited this chapter, n. 122.

125. Quoted in Taubman, Khrushchev, 14. For Suslov, see Istochnik, no. 2 (1996): 115; and for the proceedings, Nikita Khrushchev 1964: stenogrammy plenuma TSK KPSS i drugie dokumenty (Moscow, 2007).

126. Medvedev, Khrushchev, 98, gives a somewhat different version and dates it later than did my informants. Similarly, Party bosses were now heard to say: “Far too many were rehabilitated” (Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, 3:451). For neo-Stalinism after 1964, see Cohen, Rethinking, chap. 4; for Beria’s men, O. Volin in Sovershenno sekretno, no. 6 (1989): 18; and for Solzhenitsyn, Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 535.

127. Reabilitatsiia, 2:5; Applebaum, Gulag, 557.

128. For the two episodes, see Kremlevskii samosud (Moscow, 1994), 209, 361; and Reabilitatsiia, 2:538–40. In 1966, Suslov labeled Snegov a “blackmailer” ( shantazhist ), which suggests Snegov may have had documents incriminating Suslov. See Reabilitatsiia, 2:510, and for the subsequent persecution of Snegov, 2:521–25.

129. Adler, Gulag Survivor, 196–97. For several “hangmen,” see Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret; N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD (Moscow, 1999); and Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich. 137. For Sheinin, whose role in the terror is clear from documents I read in the Lubyanka archive and is recounted in Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky (New York, 1991), see his Zapisky sledovatelia (Moscow, 1980) and his obituary in Izvestiia, May 31, 1967, both of which omit his Stalinist past. For one such former Gulag region, see Pechorskii ugolnyi bassein (Syktyvkar, 1957). According to Antonov-Ovseyenko, who was a zek in the region’s Kolyma camp, most of the volume’s editors and contributors had been camp bosses.

130. Antonov-Ovseyenko, Time of Stalin, xviii; Rodos, Ia—syn palacha, 344.

131. For Trifonov, whose House on the Embankment (1976) and The Old Man (1978) were especially important, see NYT, Dec. 16, 1979; and for Shatrov, the interview in Figury i litsa, no. 7, supplement in NG, April 13, 2000, and Shatrov: tvorchestvo, zhizn, dokumenty, 5 vols. (Moscow, 2006–2007).

132. Elena Bonner’s father was executed and her mother, Ruth Bonner, freed under Khrushchev.

133. For Nuremberg, see, e.g., Vitalii Shentalinskii in KP, Oct. 17, 1990; and G. Z. Ioffe, looking back, in OI, no. 4 (2002): 164. For the “trial of Stalin,” A. Samsonov in Nedelia, no. 52 (1988); the special issue of MN, Nov. 27, 1988; and Iurii Solomonov in SK, Sept. 9, 1989. And for the Memorial Society, Nanci Adler, Victims of Stalin’s Terror (Westport, Conn., 1993).

134. For Aleksandr Milchakov’s investigative articles, which appeared regularly in the press, see the interviews in Izvestiia, Nov. 11, 1988, and in Vecherniaia Moskva, April 14, 1990. For “hangmen on pension,” see the stories in Moscow News, nos. 19, 28, 42 (1988), and nos. 10, 37 (1990); and KP, Dec. 8, 1989. For “martyrology,” Istoriia SSSR, no. 3 (1988): 52.

135. As I heard repeatedly. Similarly, see, e.g., Iurii Orlik in Izvestiia, March 3, 1989; Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem, 430; and even Akhmatova, quoted by N. B. Ivanova in Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 4, 81.

136. Reabilitatsiia, 3:507, 521–22. For the quote, see Orlik in Izvestiia, March 3, 1989.

137. Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn i reformy (Moscow, 1995), 1:38–42. Others in the leadership included Yegor Ligachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, whose wives’ fathers had perished. For the charge, see the letter in Izvestiia, May 7, 1992; and, similarly, Vladimir Karpov’s complaint about “rehabilitation euphoria,” quoted by Zhanna Kasianenko in SR, July 27, 2002.

138. Reabilitatsiia, 3:7–8. For the SOS, see KP, Sept. 26, 1990; and for the dacha, Chelishcheva in “Pravda GULAGa.”

139. Reabilitatsiia, 3:600–606; Adler, Gulag Survivor, 33. For the post-Soviet period generally, see Adler, Gulag Survivor, chap. 7; and Nanci Adler, “The Future of the Soviet Past Remains Unpredictable,” EAS (Dec. 2005): 1093–119.

140. B.S. in NG, Sept. 21, 1993. More generally, see Mir posle Gulaga. A returnee who headed a Moscow city commission on rehabilitations in the early 1990s recalled that benefits were a “huge problem.” A. Feldman, Riadovoe delo (Moscow, 1993), 58–60.

141. See, respectively, Reabilitatsiia, 3:507, 521–22; Leonid Goldenmauer in KO, no. 40 (2003): 7; A. T. Rybin, Stalin v oktiabre 1941 g. (Moscow, 1995), 5. And, similarly, see Evgenii Strigin, Predavshie SSSR (Moscow, 2005), 181–85; and Sigizmund Mironin, Stalinskii poriadok (Moscow, 2007).

142. Three examples of such volumes: Reabilitatsiia, vols. 1–3; Deti GULAGa; 1937–1938 gg. : Operatsii NKVD (Tomsk-Moscow, 2006). For an overview of Gulag-related monuments, museums, and other remembrances, see Arsenii Roginskii in Novaia, Dec. 11, 2008. In 2006, a former head of the KGB/ FSB presented a literary award to a former zek, the poet Naum Korzhavin, and invited him to speak at its headquarters ( KO, no. 48 [2006]: 4).

143. See, respectively, kremlin.ru, June 21, 2007, and Peter Finn in WP, July 20, 2007; Reuters dispatch, Nov. 2, 2000; Der Spiegel interview with Solzhenitsyn in JRL, July 24, 2007, which includes his favorable opinion of Putin; and kremlin.ru, Oct. 20, 2007, along with Itar-Tass dispatch the same day. The textbook was A. V. Filippov, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 1945–2006 gg. (Moscow, 2007), 81–94.

144. See, e.g., the special supplement in Novaia, Feb. 21–27, 2008; 55-i godovshchine so dnia smerti I. V. Stalina posviashchaetsia (Moscow, 2008), 136; and Fillipov, Noveishaia istoriia, 93.

145. In 2006, an editor emphasized that the conflict between “two Russias,” described by Akhmatova in 1956 and quoted earlier in this chapter, “has not been settled to this day” ( Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 4, 81). And in 1993, Memorial Society editors wrote: “The past, which left its traces on the lives of a majority of us… has not ended” ( Memorial-Aspekt [June 1993]). For the open letter, see “Pravda GULAGa,” Novaia, Dec. 4–7, 2008.

146. As a credential for this prediction, I take the immodest liberty of pointing out that I reached the same analytical conclusion before Gorbachev came to power. See Cohen, ed., An End, 22–50; and Cohen, Rethinking, chaps. 4–5.

147. Cited by Paul Goble in JRL, Feb. 24, 2006. For examples of grandchildren, in addition to Gorbachev, see V. V. Obolenskii’s letter in Ogonek, no. 24 (1987): 6; Efim Fattakhov in Sobesednik, no. 21 (1989); and I. Shcherbakova, ed., Kak nashikh dedov zabirali (Moscow, 2007).

3. THE TRAGEDY OF SOVIET CONSERVATISM

1. After Gorbachev, Ligachev probably was the most written about political figure of the perestroika years, at least until the rise of Yeltsin. The standard version of his role appeared in most of the journalistic accounts. For scholarly studies, see Jonathan Harris, Ligachev on Glasnost and Perestroika, University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, No. 706 (Pittsburgh, 1989); Baruch A. Hazan, Gorbachev and His Enemies (Boulder, Colo., 1990); and Jeffrey Surovell, “Ligachev and Soviet Politics,” SS, no. 2 (1991): 335–74. The last goes to the other extreme, presenting a Ligachev without any real political or ideological differences with Gorbachev.

2. E. K. Ligachev, Zagadka Gorbacheva (Novosibirsk, 1992); Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (New York, 1993).

3. On Repentance and Afghanistan, see Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom (New York, 1991), 173; and the interview with Shevardnadze in NG, Nov. 21, 1991. For Eastern Europe, see the account of Ligachev’s trip to Hungary in WP, April 26, 1987.

4. See, e.g., Nursultan Nazarbaev, Bez pravykh i levykh (Moscow, 1991), 165–66; Vadim Bakatin in Sovershenno sekretno, no. 10 (1991); Shevardnadze in NG, Nov. 21, 1991; and the interview with Abel Aganbegyan in New Perspectives Quarterly (Winter 1988–89): 28. On the other hand, for two leaders with nothing good to say about Ligachev, see Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain (New York, 1990); and Anatoly Sobchak, For a New Russia (New York, 1992), though Sobchak says Ligachev “was sincerely convinced that he was in the right” (47). For a highly critical but in some ways empathetic portrait by a Soviet liberal journalist, see Vitalii Tretiakov, Gorbachev, Ligachev, Yeltsin (Moscow, 1990), 31–41.

5. See the accounts cited in the preceding note.

6. David Remnick in WP, October 15, 1990. For a different, negative impression, see Svetlana Allilueva in Dialog, no. 8 (1991): 109–10.

7. Before Ligachev, only two former Soviet leaders had published memoirs, but both did so abroad. Leon Trotsky’s My Life, which he published in exile in 1930, said very little about actual leadership politics. And Khrushchev’s memoirs, dictated in retirement to family members, first appeared in the United States in 1970 and in full in Russia only in 1999. For the full English-language edition, see Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 3 vols. (University Park, Penn., 2004–2007). Ligachev completed his book before the Soviet Union ended in December 1991, and sections began to appear in the Soviet press in 1990. Nikolai Ryzhkov, also a member of the Gorbachev’s top leadership, published his memoirs ( Perestroika: istoriia predatelstva ) in Moscow later in 1992; and Gorbachev’s appeared in Moscow in 1995, in two volumes, as Zhizn i reformy.

8. Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs (New York, 1990); Shevardnadze, The Future; and Yeltsin, Against the Grain. The Russian-language title of Yeltsin’s book was Confessions on an Assigned Subject.

9. Aleksandr Bovin, who commented similarly in Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev ’ s Reformers (New York, 1989), 225.

10. See interview with Abel Aganbegyan in New Perspectives Quarterly (Winter 1988–89): 28.

11. The pioneering study in this regard was Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).

12. XIX vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1988), 2:84–85.

13. In Iurii Afanasev, ed., Inogo ne dano (Moscow, 1988), 125.

14. I heard such murmurings in Moscow in 1988. They were in print regularly by 1990. A former Ligachev aide later extended the argument back to 1985, though Ligachev never publicly embraced it. See the series of articles by Valerii Legostaev in Den, nos. 13–16 (1991).

15. For a fuller analysis, see Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York, 1985), chap. 5.

16. Pravda, Feb. 14, 1988, and May 8 and Dec. 31, 1989. For “multiparty-ness,” see, e.g., Kirill Gusev in Nedelia, no. 15 (1988); and L. Shevtsova in Izvestiia, Feb. 27, 1990. These and many other subsequent Soviet statements confirmed an analysis I first presented in 1978, which was frequently dismissed by other Western Sovietologists. See Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Robert Sharlet, eds., The Soviet Union Since Stalin (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), 16.

17. Aleksandr Galkin, “Blizok li kriticheskii chas?” Poisk, Dec. 28, 1989.

18. For English translations of Gorbachev’s increasingly explicit “humane democratic socialism,” see Mikhail Gorbachev, The Socialist Idea and Revolutionary Perestroika (Moscow, 1990), which first appeared in 1989; Towards a Humane and Democratic Socialist Society: Report by Mikhail Gorbachev (Moscow, 1990); and the materials published in CDSP, nos. 30–31 (1991). The best scholarly works on this subject are Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York, 1996) and his Seven Years That Changed the World (New York, 2007).

19. Materialy plenuma tsentralnogo komiteta KPSS: 25 aprelia 1989 goda (Moscow, 1989), 71.

20. Quoted in Angus Roxburgh, The Second Russian Revolution (London, 1991), 80.

21. Ivan Polozkov in SR, March 7, 1991; and, similarly, in LR, June 29 1990, where he remarks that “no civilized country can manage without conservatives.”

22. For the congress, see XXVIII sezd kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: stenograficheskii otchet, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1991). Only 776 of the 4,035 delegates voted for him. Talking with delegates during the congress, and later reading their speeches, I had a strong sense that the majority preferred Ligachev’s views to Gorbachev’s. Why they nonetheless supported Gorbachev’s candidate is a separate and complicated story, part of it being that they still feared political life without him.

23. I persuaded him to change the title for the English-language edition to Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin. See this chapter, n. 2; and for the second Russian edition, E. K. Ligachev, Predosterezhenie (Moscow, 1998).

24. A popular documentary film about the conference, titled Pluralism, clearly conveyed the point. Soon after the conference, Moscow’s flea markets began featuring political buttons that proclaimed, “Tell Them—Boris!” and “Yegor—You’re Wrong!”

25. See, for example, John Gooding, “Gorbachev and Democracy,” SS, no. 2 (1990): 195–231; and Brown, The Gorbachev Factor.

26. Valerii Legostaev in Zavtra, no. 52 (Dec. 2000).

27. Based on a memoir account published in 1991 and private remarks by Aleksandr Yakovlev, David Remnick later concluded that Ligachev had in fact been behind the publication of Andreyeva’s article and had “lied like a thief” about it ( NYRB, March 25, 1993, 34–38). Possibly, but such accounts in 1991 usually had the purpose of discrediting Communist Party officials like Ligachev, and the charge did not appear in a posthumous volume of Yakovlev’s unpublished remarks, letters, and memorandums. See Aleksandr Iakovlev, Perestroika: 1985–1991 (Moscow, 2008). Nor is there conclusive evidence in the private notes made by Gorbachev’s aides on Politburo disputes, though Ligachev is recorded as having said he liked the article and saw it before it was published. See V Politburo TsK KPSS… (Moscow, 2006), and for Ligachev, 307–8.

28. Izvestiia, Oct. 23, 1991.

29. For his report on his work in the Duma, see Egor Ligachev, Otchet deputata (Tomsk, 2003).

30. See e.g., his articles in SR, Dec. 18, 1997; Dec 27, 2003; Nov. 26, 2005; April 30, 2008; and his Nasha tsel—sozidanie (Tomsk, 2002).

31. Legostaev in Zavtra, no. 52.

32. Ibid.

33. Quoted by Remnick in WP, Oct. 15, 1990.

4. WAS THE SOVIET SYSTEM REFORMABLE?

1. Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms, 1985–1990 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1991), 357; and Ed A. Hewett in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus eds., The Soviet System, rev. ed. (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 320. For examples of other works that assumed the system’s reformability at the time, see R. V. Daniels, Is Russia Reformable? (Boulder, Colo., 1988); Barrington Moore Jr., Liberal Prospects Under Soviet Socialism (New York, 1989); George W. Breslauer, ed., Can Gorbachev’s Reforms Succeed? (Berkeley, 1990); Stephen White, Gorbachev in Power (New York, 1990); Robert T. Huber and Donald R. Kelley, eds., Perestroika-Era Politics (Armonk, N.Y., 1991); Eugene Huskey, ed., Executive Power and Soviet Politics (Armonk, N.Y., 1992); Michael E. Urban, More Power to the Soviets (Brookfield, Vt., 1990); Jerry F. Hough, Russia and the West, 2nd ed. (New York, 1990); Graham Allison and Gregory Yavlinsky, Window of Opportunity (New York, 1991), esp. chaps. 1–2; and the authors cited in Jan Hallenberg, The Demise of the Soviet Union (Burlington, Vt., 2002), 177–86, 195, and by David Rowley in Kritika (Spring 2001): 414n. 9. For the U.S. government, see Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels (Boston, 1993), chaps. 16 –21; and Jack F. Matlock Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev (New York, 2004).

2. See, respectively, Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C., 1995), 31 and chap. 2; M. Steven Fish, Democracy from Scratch (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 3; Michael Dobbs in WP, Dec. 15 1991; Beryl Williams in RR (Jan. 1997): 143; and David Saunders in EAS (July 1996): 868. Similarly, see Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York, 1994); Fred Coleman, The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York, 1996), xii, xv, xvi; Alec Nove, The Soviet System in Retrospect (New York, 1993), 7; Richard Pipes, Communism (London, 1994), 39; Wisła Suraska, How the Soviet Union Disappeared (Durham, N.C., 1998); Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions (New York, 1999), 37; Fritz W. Ermarth in National Interest (Spring 1999): 5; Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted (New York, 2001), 181; Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (New York, 2002), 390; Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Power (New Haven, Conn., 2007), x; and Adam Ulam in TLS, Nov. 6, 1992. For notable exceptions, see Dallin in Dallin and Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System, chap. 58; David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above (New York, 1997); Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past (Stanford, Calif., 1993); Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York, 1997); Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR (Washington, D.C., 1997); and Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms (Washington, D.C., 2001). For an early but different approach to this issue, see Alexander Dallin in Robert O. Crummey, ed., Reform in Russia and the USSR (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 243–56. And for an interesting treatment of the question from inside the political culture of Communist systems, see Zdenĕk Mlynář, Can Gorbachev Change the Soviet Union? (Boulder, Colo., 1990).

3. Martin Malia in Daedalus (Spring 1992): 60; Alain Besançon in G. R. Urban, ed., Can the Soviet System Survive Reform? (London, 1989), 202; and A. M. Rosenthal in NYT, May 21, 1991.

4. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 3, 5; Malia in Stéphane Courtoise et. al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), xx; Malia in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (November 1990): 8; Malia in Dallin and Lapidus, eds., Soviet System, 667; and Tony Barber in FT, Jan. 27, 2007, citing Malia. Similarly, see David Satter, The Age of Delirium (New York, 1996); Terry McNeill in Michael Cox, ed., Rethinking the Soviet Collapse (New York, 1998), 68; Daniel Chirot on “utter moral rot,” as quoted in Philip G. Roeder, Red Sunset (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 15; the related examples cited by Rowley in Kritika (Spring 2001): 400n. 11; and Vladimir Brovkin’s rendering of the views of Richard Pipes in JCWS (Winter 2006): 127–32. Even an admirer of Malia is troubled by his reliance on “an original sin of biblical proportions.” Yanni Kotsonis in RR (Jan. 1999): 126. For a systematic critique of Malia’s “essentialist” explanation, see Dallin in Dallin and Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System, chap. 58.

5. For these facts, see David Brion Davis in NYT, August 26, 2001; and Brent Staples in NYT, January 9, 2000. For these opinions, see, respectively, George W. Bush, who cites Adams, quoted by Richard W. Stevenson in NYT July 9, 2003; and the historian Steven Mintz, “A Slave-Narrative Documentary Is Limited, but Compelling,” Chronicle, Feb. 7, 2003, B16. For “accursed thing,” see the discussion by Stephen Hahn in NR, April 23, 2008, 51. For Reagan, see Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition (Washington, D.C., 1994), 352.

6. The quotes are from Michael Dobbs in WP Magazine, June 9, 1996, 29; and Dusko Doder in WP Book World, March 22, 1998. Similarly, see Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 492; Michael McFaul in Andrew C. Kuchins, ed., Russia After the Fall (Washington, D.C., 2002), 27; Stephen White in Slavic Review (Summer 2002): 421; Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 4, 341; Jack F. Matlock Jr., Autopsy on an Empire (New York, 1995), 293; Peter Kenez in Kritika (Spring 2003): 369. A critic of this kind of history writing, Reinhard Bendix, cited in the next note, calls it “hindsight bias.” Historical opinion about the tsarist reforms of the nineteenth century and the fate of that system is an instructive analogy: “The collapse of the Tsarist autocracy in 1917 is no longer seen as proof incontestable of the ultimate or inevitable failure of these reforms” (Ben Ekloff in Ekloff et al., eds., Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 [Bloomington, Ind., 1994], x).

7. For the fallacy and bias, see Reinhard Bendix quoted by Dallin in Dallin and Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System, 688. Mark Almond makes the first point in Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History (London, 1997), 392. There is also the truly silly triumphalism inspiring a well-known writer to tell us in 2008 that while he was there in 1982, as an “ignorant, neophyte” correspondent, he “did notice that the Soviet Union was on the verge of economic and social collapse” (P. J. O’Rourke in WS, Dec. 31, 2007/Jan. 7, 2008, 34).

8. For some exceptions, see George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (New York, 2002), 266 –70; Henry E. Hale, “Ethnofederalism and Theories of Secession” (unpublished manuscript, June 2001); Mark. R. Beissinger in Slavic Review (Summer 2006): 301; and especially, Hough, Democratization, which examines a number of the questions raised here. For other fields, see, e.g., Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1996); Ferguson, ed., Virtual History ; Robert Crowley, ed., What If? (New York, 1999); and Andrew Roberts, ed., What Might Have Been (London, 2004). And for a vigorous defense of counterfactual reasoning in general, see Martin Bunzl in AHR (June 2004): 845–58.

9. For the quotes, see, respectively, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedakl and Melvin A. Goodman, The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze (University Park, Penn., 1997), 50; Giulietto Chiesa, Transition to Democracy (Hanover, N.H., 1993), 203; and Peter Rutland in Cox, ed., Rethinking the Soviet Collapse, 43. For different versions of the institutional thesis, see Roeder, Red Sunset ; Bunce, Subversive Institutions ; and Richard Sakwa in Stephen White et al., eds., Developments in Russian Politics 4 (Durham, N.C., 1997), 16, who writes: “The polity itself was incapable of reform.” On the other hand, one scholar of the Soviet breakup concludes that it happened not because of the “rigidity” of the institutions but because they were “too flexible” (Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the Soviet State [Cambridge, Mass., 1998], 223).

10. R. Karklin quoted approvingly in John Keep, Last of the Empires (New York, 1995), 416. Similarly, see Robert Conquest quoted in Brown, Gorbachev, 252; Kotkin, Armageddon, 71–73; and Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York, 1998), 172. The argument is explicit or implicit in many books. See, e.g., Fish, Democracy ; Nicolai N. Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Cambridge, 1995); Michael Urban, The Rebirth of Politics in Russia (New York, 1997); Malia, Soviet Tragedy ; Coleman, The Decline and Fall ; John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton, N.J., 1993); and Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001). There is also the different but related view that democratization was incompatible not only with the Soviet system but Russia’s general traditions of governance. See, e.g., Theodore H. von Laue in Joseph L. Wieczynski, ed., The Gorbachev Reader (Salt Lake City, 1993), 149–51; and Walter M. Pinter in Crummey, ed., Reform, 243–56.

11. See, respectively, R. Karklins quoted in Kotz and Weir, Revolution from Above, 239n. 9; Michael Wines in NYT, Jan. 9, 2000; Fish, Democracy, 3, 51; Stephen Kotkin in RR (Jan. 2002): 50; and George Kennan quoted by Thomas L. Friedman in NYT, May 2, 1998. Similarly, see Joel C. Moses in SS, no. 3 (1992): 479; Malia in Daedalus (Spring 1992): 57–75; Thomas F. Remington in Robert V. Daniels, ed., Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse (Lexington, Mass., 1995), 330 –39; Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism (Durham, N.C., 1997), 57, 130 –31; D’ Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution, 5; Michael McFaul in San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 2004; Graham Allison in BG, Dec. 26, 2005; Leon Aron in Demokratizatsiya (Summer 2005): 435–59; the authors discussed by Rowley in Kritika (Spring 2001): 403–6; and the single-authored books cited in the preceding note. Looking back at that period, President Vladimir Putin of Russia gave a different interpretation of events: “Let’s proceed from reality. Democracy in Russia was in fact issued from above” ( Izvestiia, July 14, 2000). For an alleged defection from Soviet socialism, see also Åslund, How Russia, 51–52; and Michael McFaul in WP, Sept. 22, 2001. Few Russian historians think that democratization killed the system. See, e.g., T. E. Vorozheikina in ONS, no. 5 (2005): 21–22. For several who do, see V. Sogrin, Politicheskaia istoriia sovremennoi Rossii, 1985–1994 (Moscow, 1994), 107, and in OI, no. 3 (2005): 8 –9; R. G. Pikhoia in G. N. Sevostianov, ed., Rossiia v XX veke, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2002), 1:130, 143; and Aleksandr Tsipko in VA, no. 3 (2006): 209. For Western scholars who dissent from the notion of a revolution from below, see Kotz and Weir, Revolution ; Hough, Democratization ; Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, chaps. 3– 4; Judith Devlin, The Rise of the Russian Democrats (Brookfield, Vt., 1995); Peter Rutland in Transitions (Feb. 1998): 16 –17; Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002); and Walter D. Connor in JCWS (Fall 2003): 75.

12. A. S. Barsenkov, Vvedenie v sovremennuiu rossiiskuiu istoriiu (Moscow, 2002), 326; and Interfax report in JRL, April 20, 2007. A British specialist reached the same conclusion: “Russians, it seemed, wanted a ‘socialism that worked’” (Stephen White, Communism and Its Collapse [New York, 2001], 75). In an opinion poll taken in late 1990, two-thirds of those surveyed still favored socialism ( Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 2 [1991]: 51). Similarly, see M. K. Gorshkov in Sociological Research (Nov.–Dec. 2005): 72. For opinion on economic-social features of the system, see Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia (New York, 1997), chap. 7; the survey data collected in Iu. A. Levada, ed., Est mnenie! (Moscow, 1990), and his Sovetskii prostoi chelovek (Moscow, 1993); and even the data presented by a colleague of the anti-Soviet “shock-therapy” team that subsequently came to power, Tatiana Koval, in Yegor Gaidar, ed., The Economics of Transition (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), chap. 25. A number of Western scholars have also used detailed polling data to make similar and related points. See, e.g., Kotz and Weir, Revolution, 137–39; Hough, Democratization, 471; James R. Millar in Millar and Sharon L. Wolchik, eds., The Social Legacy of Communism (Washington, D.C., 1994), 5–7; Vladimir Shlapentokh, A Normal Totalitarian Society (Armonk, N.Y., 2001), 125, 208, 281n. 1; and Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 92–94, 154. For an opposing view that only 10 to 20 percent of Soviet citizens “still supported the ‘socialist choice,’” but without any evidence, see Leon Aron in WP, Dec. 24, 2006.

13. Wyman, Public Opinion, chap. 6; RFE /RL, March 16, 2001; I. V. Zadorin in Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 3 (Moscow, 2005), 39. Less than a year after the breakup, two-thirds of those surveyed regretted it even in pro-Yeltsin Moscow ( Izvestiia, Oct. 6, 1992). Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton, N.J., 2006) argues otherwise, but based on little empirical evidence, only personal experience and a few theoretical and literary models. For Yeltsin, see the pro-Soviet first edition of his autobiographical book, Ispoved na zadannuiu temu (Sverdlovsk, 1990); his presidential campaign speech in FBIS, June 3, 1991, 71–79; Mikhail Chelnokov, Rossiia bez soiuza, Rossiia bez Rossii (Moscow, 1994), 30 –32; and Hough, Democratization, 279, 308, 333–34. Similarly, a member of the most radical prodemocracy group at the 1989 Congress, which included Yeltsin, later recalled that its struggle was “not against the USSR” (Iurii Boldyrev in LG, Jan 17–25, 2007).

14. Alexander Lebed, My Life and My Country (Washington, D.C., 1997), 321; Rodric Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 242; Elem Klimov in OG, Aug. 23–29, 2001. Similarly, see Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremen “Tsaria Borisa” (Moscow, 1995), 261; G. E. Burbulis in Izvestiia, Oct. 26, 1991; Aleksandr Tsipko in LG Dec. 20, 2006; Jonathan Steele, Eternal Russia (Cambridge, 1994), chap. 4; and Mark Kramer in JCWS (Fall 2003): 9. For a few of the many claims of an “August Revolution,” see Peter Kenez in The New Leader, Sept. 9–23, 1991, 15–18; Martin Malia in NYRB, Sept. 26, 1991, 22–28, and in PC (Jan.–April 1992): 93; Anatole Shub in PC (Nov.–Dec. 1991): 20; John Gooding, Rulers and Subjects (London, 1996), 337–39; Leon Aron, Yeltsin (New York, 2000), chap. 10; Michael McFaul in Kuchins, ed., Russia, 27; and Urban, Rebirth, 252, who sees a “national resistance.” For an exhaustive but unconvincing argument on behalf of such a revolution, see Harley Balzer in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 193–218. Proponents of the “August Revolution” interpretation see Yeltsin as its leader or personification, but he himself later took pride in having been “able to save Russia from revolution” (quoted in Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 226).

15. For the American revolution, see Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth (New York, 1978); for presidents and slave labor, Davis in NYT, Aug. 26, 2001, and Mintz in Chronicle, Feb. 7, 2003, B16; and for textbooks, James T. Campbell in WP Book World, Dec. 12, 2004, 3, and Robert William Fogel, The Slavery Debates, 1952–1990 (Baton Rouge, La., 2006). Indeed, a historian of my own Southern state was still “comfortable” in 2005 with the role of the Confederacy’s president and the “South’s past” generally when viewed “in the context of their times” (Bill Ellis in Kentucky Monthly [June 2005]: 54). A leading American historian says of the founding fathers, “At least they provided some ideas that… could inspire later opponents of slavery” (George M. Fredrickson in NYRB, July 14, 2005, 42.) The same could be said of Lenin and Bukharin, e.g., in connection with post-Stalin reformers.

16. For a similar point, see John Miller, Mikhail Gorbachev and the End of Soviet Power (New York, 1993), 201. The equation is so widespread that it is used by scholars on opposite sides of the political spectrum. See Malia, Soviet Tragedy ; Chiesa, Transition to Democracy, 202; and, similarly, Jeremy Smith, The Fall of Soviet Communism (New York, 2005). For the case, such as it is, for retaining “Communist” and “Communism” as analytical labels, see Andrew Roberts in Slavic Review (Summer 2004): 349–66; and for a thoughtful Russian study of the problem of conceptualizing and labeling the Soviet system, see D. V. Maslov, Istoriograficheskie i metodologicheskie osnovy issledovaniia sostoianiia sovetskoi sistemy (Sergiev Posad, 2004).

17. BBC interview with Gorbachev, March 8, 2002, in JRL, March 20, 2002. A Gorbachev aide later said their goal had been “a USSR that had broken with Communism” (Aleksandr Tsipko in LG, May 23, 2001). The former aide later argued that the Soviet Union’s “Communist legitimacy” could have been replaced by the concept of “a special Eurasian civilization” (Tsipko in LG, Dec. 20, 2006). Even a pro-Yeltsin history concedes that “the majority of critics of the regime came out not against the soviets but the domination of the Communist Party” (Iu. M. Baturin et. al., eds., Epokha Eltsina [Moscow, 2001], 170). Russians expressed their agreement in two ways. First, by protesting against Communist Party rule while supporting the Soviet system in the late 1980s and early 1990s and later by regretting the end of the Soviet Union and expressing nostalgia for the Soviet era but without voting the Communist Party back into power. Similarly, see the survey results reported by Paul Goble in JRL, Jan. 2, 2006. For a similar point about Gorbachev’s 1990 meaning of “Communism,” see Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (Stanford, Calif., 1995), 554 –55, 617n. 177.

18. See, e.g., Urban, ed., Can the Soviet System, xiii; Remington in Daniels, ed., Soviet Communism, 331; and, similarly, Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 401. As for the Party, one scholar writes: “the CPSU leadership (i.e., the Soviet system)” (Troy McGrath in The Harriman Review [Dec. 2002]: 15). More generally, as a Russian politician remarked in a related discussion, the question “depends on what we mean by the Soviet Union” (Aleksei Arbatov in NG, Jan. 16, 1997).

19. The new conception of the Soviet system was expressed in many perestroika-era publications, but for a striking example see Elena Bonner—Andrei Sakharov’s widow and hardly a Soviet devotee—on power and property in MN, July 15, 1990.

20. For the “evolution,” see this chapter, n. 63. Just how heretical the new tenets were may be judged by the growing opposition of Gorbachev’s own former aide for ideology, himself a reformer. See G. L. Smirnov, Uroki minuvshego (Moscow, 1997). The new ideology was elaborated by Gorbachev in late 1989, reframed as the draft of a new Party program in early 1990, and debated and in effect adopted at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in July. See, respectively, Pravda, Nov. 26, 1989; Materialy plenuma tsentalnogo komiteta KPSS: 5–7 fevralia 1990 goda (Moscow, 1990), 511– 40; and XXVIII sezd kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: stenograficheskii otchet, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1991), 1:55–101, and 2:255–68, 276 –94. Gorbachev’s aides continued to make the draft program increasingly liberal-democratic. See the draft and debates in Pravda, Aug. 8, 1991; and SR, July 27–30, 1991. For anti-Communist views inside the Party apparatus itself, see Aleksandr Tsipko in VA, no. 3 (2005): 213–37; and for the larger process, Archie Brown, ed. The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (New York, 2004), esp. 9–11, chaps. 2– 4.

21. Thus a Gorbachev aide responsible for spelling out the new ideology argued at the same time that its role in Soviet life should be greatly diminished. See Georgii Shakhnazarov in Kommunist, no. 4 (1990): 46 –59, and in LG, April 18, 1990.

22. As Gorbachev and his supporters fully understood. See V. A. Medvedev, Prozrenie, mif ili predatelstvo? (Moscow, 1997), 4 –5, and earlier in Pravda, June 29, 1990.

23. See, e.g., Sakwa, Gorbachev, 192; John Gooding in RR (Jan. 1992): 36 –57; and Chiesa, Transition, 3. There is also the opposite view, reflexive rather than considered, that the “CPSU remained the ruling Party” until August 1991 (Mark R. Beissinger in James Millar, ed., Cracks in the Monolith [Armonk, N.Y., 1992], 213). In fact, as we are told by a member of the Central Committee at that time, “The Party had ceased to be a ruling political organization, and officials of the Central Committee apparat understood this better than anyone else” (Roy Medvedev, Sovetskii Soiuz: poslednii god zhizni [Moscow, 2003], 76). Similarly, see Vera Tolz, The USSR’s Emerging Multiparty System (Washington, D.C., 1990).

24. Brown, Gorbachev, 310.

25. Gorbachev in XXVIII sezd, 2:201–2; and Pravda, April 13, 1990. On the latter claim, see also L. Shevtsova in Izvestiia, Feb. 27, 1990, who wrote: “We have much more political diversity than any other country in the world.”

26. V. N. Kudriatsev in Trud, Nov. 11, 1988. For the constitutional aspects of Gorbachev’s reforms, see Robert B. Ahdieh, Russia’s Constitutional Revolution (University Park, Penn., 1997).

27. Elizabeth Teague in Report, Oct. 19, 1990, 9–10. For “checks and balances,” see M. S. Gorbachev, Izbrannye rechi i stati, 7 vols. (Moscow, 1987–90), 7:161.

28. For the growing power of state ministries vis-à-vis the Party apparatus, see Stephen Whitefield, Industrial Power and the Soviet State (New York, 1993); David Lane and Cameron Ross in Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27, no. 1 (1994): 18 –38; and Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 109–11. One Western historian even argues that by the 1980s the Party had lost its power to the state bureaucracies. Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (London, 2005), 348 –51. On scholarly neglect of the Soviet state and its government, see Huskey, ed., Executive Power, pp. xii–xiii.

29. The figures are from Leon Onikov, KPSS (Moscow, 1996), 75, whose insistence that the apparat’s control over the party remained intact does not square with actual developments or other accounts. See, e.g., Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (New York, 1993), 109–11 and passim; and this chapter, note 30.

30. “Kadrovoe popolnenie perestroiki,” Pravda, June 25, 1989; and the editorial, Pravda, June 14, 1989. For Gorbachev’s remark, see A. S. Cherniaev, Shest let s Gorbachevym (Moscow, 1993), 356.

31. Graeme Gill, The Collapse of a Single-Party System (New York, 1995), 174 – 75; Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn i reformy, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1995), 2:575; and Boris Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels (New York, 1994), 142; and for an insider’s testimony, Andrei Chuzhakin in PZH, no. 29 (2004): 76 –77. Indeed, the coup leader told party officials to stand aside: “This is a purely state affair” (Iurii Prokofev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS [Moscow, 2005], 243). For examples of such Western accounts, see Beissinger in Millar, ed., Cracks, 213; and Michael Dobbs, Down with Big Brother (New York, 1997), whose treatment of August 1991 is entitled “The Revolt of the Party.” For attempts to substantiate that view, see G. A. Belousova and V. A. Lebedev, Partokratiia i putch (Moscow, 1992); and Hahn, Russia’s Revolution, pp. 420 –27.

32. Interpretation aside, the best summary discussion of the bureaucratic or nomenklatura class is Hough, Democratization, 51–57.

33. It was true even of Party apparatus bureaucrats. See Onikov, KPSS, 56; B. Iu. Berzin and L. N. Kogan in SI, no. 3 (1989): 21–22; and “Apparat protiv apparata?” SK, March 31, 1990. For a sample of nomenklatura political and economic views by mid-1990, see the survey of delegates to the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in SI, no. 11 (1990): 99–104.

34. I will return to this subject in the next chapter, but for two studies of the phenomenon, see Olga Kryshtanovskaia in ONS, no. 1 (1995): 51–65; and Viola Egikova in MP, May 26, 1994.

35. M. S. Gorbachev, Razmyshleniia ob oktiabrskoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1997), 35; Dawn Mann in Report, Feb. 23, 1990, 1–6; and, for rank-and-file support from the beginning, Viktor Gushchin in NG, Sept. 9, 2000. For the “silent majority,” see Liudmila Saveleva in Izvestiia, Sept. 3, 1988.

36. For the Party as “part of the state machine,” see Lev Burtsev, Izvestiia, July 15, 1990; and, similarly, A. Zevelev in Izvestiia, Nov. 3, 1988.

37. Gorbachev, Razmyshleniia ob oktiabrskoi revoliutsii, 35; in Materialy plenuma, Feb. 5–7, 1990, 11–12; and, similarly, in XXVIII sezd, 2:201–2.

38. Tatiana Samolis in Pravda, July 1, 1991.

39. The episode was known as the Nina Andreyeva affair. See SR, March 3, 1988; and Pravda, April 5, 1988.

40. Brown, Gorbachev, 191. For the Central Committee, see Onikov, KPSS, 90 –91. At the conference, Ligachev denied the obvious—“There are no factions, no reformers and conservatives, among us”—while Gorbachev emphasized the point about the factional 1920s ( XIX vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: stenograficheskii otchet, 2 vols. [Moscow, 1988], 2:88, 175).

41. Uchreditelnyi sezd kommunisticheskoi partii RSFSR: stenograficheskii otchet, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1991); Gorbachev, Zhizn, 1:530 –39; and the report by Elizabeth Tucker in WSJ, July 11, 1991.

42. Aleksandr Iakovlev in Izvestiia, July 2, 1991; and I. Maliarov in Pravda, Sept. 26, 1990. Or as a Soviet political scientist put it, “The CPSU is itself already a multiparty system in miniature” (L. Shevtsova in Izvestiia, Feb. 27, 1990).

43. See chap. 3, note 16. Years later, Gorbachev thought there would have been “at least three political parties”—social-democratic, Communist, and liberal. Mikhail Gorbachev, Poniat perestroiku… (Moscow, 2006), 369–70.

44. The words regularly used included “razmezhevanie” (dividing up), “rasstavanie” (parting of the ways), and even “razvod” (divorce).

45. For the conservatives, see the report by E. Savishev in KP, June 15, 1991; Oleg Shenin, Rodinu ne prodaval i menia obvinili v izmene (Moscow, 1994), 44; and Prokofev, Do i posle, 232–36, who mentions the presidency. For Gorbachev, see Pravda, July 3 and 26, 1991; his Zhizn, 2:547, 548; his interview in NG, Nov. 11, 1992; quoted in Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev (Moscow, 2001), 228; and Vasilii Lipitskii in NG, Aug. 3, 1991. For his aides and supporters, see Georgii Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobody (Moscow, 1993), 151; Vadim Medvedev, V komande Gorbacheva (Moscow, 1994), 130 –31, 185– 86, 207; and Sergei Alekseev, Fedor Burlatskii, and Stanislav Shatalin in LG, Jan. 30, 1991. For an insider’s view of these developments, see Otto Latsis, Tshchatelno splanirovannoe samoubiistvo (Moscow, 2001), 349–70.

46. Aleksandr Iakovlev, Omyt pamiati, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2001), 1:505. For a similar argument from a different political perspective, see Liudmila Vartazarova in Zavtra, no. 31 (Aug. 1995).

47. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution, p. 375; Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenĕk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev (New York, 2002), 121; Gorbachev, Poniat, 373–74, where he adds that “a majority of the members” would have followed him because of Party discipline; and, similarly, Gorbachev, Zhizn, 2:578. One top aide thought that a formal split would not favor Gorbachev (Medvedev, V komande, 131), but several supporters and well-informed observers believed that a majority of Party members, at least 9 million, would follow him. See, e.g., Fedor Burlatskii, Glotok svobody, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1997), 2:189–90; Latsis, Tshchatelno, 345; German Diligenskii in SK, July 7, 1990; and Boris Pugaev in Rossiia, Aug. 3–9, 1991. It seems unlikely, however, that either wing of the CPSU would have had that many supporters in the event of a formal split; many Communists probably would have joined other breakaway parties or quit altogether. But even a million or so registered members would have been ample.

48. S. Sheboldaev in Pravda, Sept. 26, 1990; and White, Gorbachev and After, 256.

49. In early 1990, it was estimated that in a free election the Communist Party would have gotten 20 percent of the vote, nationalist and patriotic parties about 30 percent, and a social democratic one 50 percent (Sakwa, Gorbachev, 189). Had the CPSU split into two parties, it is reasonable to assume that the conservative wing would have gained much of the nationalist vote and the Gorbachev wing most of the social democratic vote. On the latter, see also White in SEER (Oct. 1994): 663. For an argument against the possibility of such a social-democratic party, see Vladlen Sorotkin in Nedelia, no. 9 (1991). Significantly, Aleksandr Yakovlev also did not believe in the “social-democratization” project. See Aleksandr Tsipko in VA, no. 2, 2006, Web site version (isoa.ru).

51. See, e.g., the interview with Yeltsin in MN, Jan. 14, 1990. For a somewhat different but not conflicting argument, see Atsushi Ogushi in EAS (July 2007): 731–32.

52. For similar arguments, see Miller, Mikhail Gorbachev, 146; and Kelley in Huber and Kelley, eds., Perestroika-Era Politics, 93.

53. As the leader of the post-Soviet Communist Party later said, it has become a “party of patriots” (Gennadii Ziuganov in SR, Oct. 24, 1995). Similarly, see Ivan Polozkov in SR, Feb. 28, 1991; E. Volodin in SR, Sept. 28, 1991; and Aleksandr Prokhanov in KP, Sept. 3, 1991.

54. Their first reaction was to declare that “in such circumstances they will not run in these elections because there is a hundred percent certainty they will not be elected.” To which Gorbachev replied: “Really?! It turns out that the party should refuse to participate in leadership and in elections?” ( Materialy plenuma tsentralnogo komiteta KPSS: 25 aprelia 1989 goda [Moscow, 1989], 91). Evidently, they soon figured out that if one in five first secretaries had lost, four others had won, one way or another. See V. Boikov and Zh. Toshchenko in Pravda, Oct. 16, 1989.

55. For the post-1991 party, see Joan Barth Urban and Valerii D. Solovei, Russia’s Communists at the Crossroads (Boulder, Colo., 1997); and Luke March, The Communist Party in Post-Soviet Russia (New York, 2002). For the observer, see Vitalii Tretiakov in RG, April 24, 2003.

56. Joseph R. Blasi et. al., Kremlin Capitalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 21. Similarly, see William Moskoff, Hard Times (Armonk, N.Y., 1993), 6; Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 488; Miller, Mikhail Gorbachev, 205; Robert Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse? (Armonk, N.Y., 1998), 115, 133; and Tony Barber in FT, Jan. 27, 2007, who summarized the prevailing opinion: “Gorbachev was… a flop as an economic reformer.”

57. And they continued to do so to the end. See, e.g., Marshall I. Goldman, What Went Wrong With Perestroika (New York, 1992), esp. 210 –11; and Jeffrey Sachs quoted in Lynn D. Nelson and Irina Y. Kuzes, Radical Reform in Yeltsin’s Russia (Armonk, N.Y., 1995), 22–23. The same was true of many Soviet economists who later became “radical reformers.” See, e.g., V. A. Naishul in F. M. Borodkin et. al., eds, Postizhenie (Moscow, 1989), 441– 48. For explicit statements of the economy’s reformability, see, e.g., Kotz and Weir, Revolution, esp. chap. 5; and Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, eds., The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System (Armonk, N.Y., 1998), esp. chap. 2.

58. See, e.g., Aslund, How Russia, 28; and Gorbachev’s critical remarks about foreign advisers in FBIS, Feb. 27, 1991, 81.

59. See, e.g., Gorbachev in Pravda, Sept. 18, 1990; and for radical reformers, S. S. Shatalin and N. Ia. Petrakov in Pravda, April 26, 1990. Put another way, “For many Soviet economists, the ideal still remained the policies of NEP” or “socialism with a human face” (Baturin et. al., eds., Epokha Eltsina, 170).

60. Aslund, How Russia, 28; Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Cambridge, 1997), 492. For Gorbachev’s comment on Yeltsin’s remark, see Zhizn, 1:576; and for a sympathetic treatment of Gorbachev’s proposal, Brown, Gorbachev, 137– 40.

61. Padmai Desai, Perestroika in Perspective (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 106. Similarly, see Vasilii Leontev’s letter in MN, Jan. 14, 1990; Ed A. Hewett’s oped in NYT, March 25, 1990; and Richard Parker in Atlantic Monthly (June 1990): 68 –80.

62. See, e.g., the laws on land, ownership, and enterprises in Izvestiia, March 7, 1990; Pravda, March 10, 1990; and SR, June 12, 1990. Until 1991, the laws were still somewhat euphemistic about private property and related matters, but even one of Gorbachev’s harshest economic critics acknowledges their importance (Aslund, How Russia, 30).

63. Gorbachev, Izbrannye, 7:573. For the candidate, see Albert Makashov in SR, June 8, 1991. Similarly, see Iurii Prokofev in Kommunist, no. 13 (1990): 7; the now liberal Vadim Bakatin’s account of his “metamorphosis” in KP, May 31, 1991; A. D. Nekipelov on his “rethinking theoretical views” and his “ideological evolution” in ONS, no. 4 (2005): 10 –11, and Proryv k svobode: o perestroike dvadtsat let spustia (Moscow, 2005), 183–85; and the survey of delegates to the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in SI, no. 11 (1990): 99–100. This was the “evolution of views” later recalled by Ryzhkov in Pravda, Oct. 3, 1992.

64. David Remnick in WP, July 7, 8, 9, 1991; for a personal example and account, see Artem Tarasov, Millioner (Moscow, 2004), esp. chaps. 3–6. For the cooperatives, see Vladimir Tikhonov in AF, March 31–April 6, 1990, and in LG, Aug. 8, 1990; and Andrei Borodenkov in MN, July 1, 1990.

65. Mikhail Berger in MT (magazine ed.), March 12, 1995, 35. A post-Soviet finance minister and investment banker remarked, “It all began with Gorbachev” (Voice of America interview with Boris Fedorov, JRL, April 6, 2004). Similarly, see Iurii Burtin in NV, no. 20 (1994): 19; Egor Gaidar, Gosudarstvo i evoliutsiia (Moscow, 1995), 150; Roi Medvedev, Zdorove i vlast v Rossii (Moscow, 1997), 14 –18; Aleksandr Golovkov in NG, Sept. 26, 1998; and R. Nureev and A. Runov in VE, no. 6 (2002): 21. For the view that Gorbachev “lost his chance to introduce meaningful economic reforms,” see Michael Dobbs in WP, Dec. 15, 1991.

66. See his public remarks in Lithuania, in January 1990, in Nashi obshchie problemy vmeste i reshat (Moscow, 1990).

67. For Gorbachev’s struggle, see Soiuz mozhno bylo sokhranit (Moscow, 1995); and A. P. Nenarokov, ed., Nesostoiavshiisia iubilei (Moscow, 1992), 331–508. For his characterization of the old state, see Gorbachev, Zhizn, 1:495–96, and, similarly, 2:530. For Lincoln, see Gorbachev and Mlynář, Conversations, 129; and for the end of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dekiabr—91 (Moscow, 1992), and V. T. Loginov, ed., Piat let posle Belovezhia (Moscow, 1997).

68. Leon Onikov quoted in Smirnov, Uroki, 288.

69. For similar points about language, see Nelson and Kuzes, Radical Reform, 8; and Robert V. Daniels, Russia’s Transformation (Lanham, Md., 1998), 212–13. Not surprisingly, a senior Sovietologist, having misformulated the issue, found “the sudden collapse difficult to explain even in retrospect. Why did the huge edifice collapse?” (Walter Laqueur, The Dream That Failed [New York, 1994], 71). To illustrate the crucial difference in formulation, compare Richard Lourie in NYT Book Review, April 5, 1998, 26 (“Soviet Russia… collapsed of its own weight”) with the topic of a Russian roundtable discussion in NG—Stsenarii, Jan. 1, 1997: “Who Broke Up the Soviet Union: History, the West, Yeltsin, Gorbachev?”

70. See, respectively, Stephen Kotkin in NR, April 15, 2002, 27; Pipes, Communism, 41; and Alec Nove in Geir Lundestad, ed., The Fall of Great Powers (Oslo, 1994), 144. Similarly, see Hosking, First, 500; Vera Tolz and Iain Elliot, eds., The Demise of the Soviet Union (London, 1995), 21; Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 488; and Bunce, Subversive Institutions, 19, 36 –37, and passim. To be fair, this is also the view of several serious Russian analysts. See, e.g., Vladimir Sogrin in ONS, no. 1 (1992): 147; Burlatskii, Glotok, 2:155–56; and Andranik Migranian in NG, June 14, 2000. But according to another Russian political scientist, “The defeat of the Communist system did not have to entail the breakup of the state” (Lilia Shevtsova in Anne de Tinguy, ed., The Fall of the Soviet Empire [Boulder, Colo., 1997], 76). For a similar Western dissenting opinion, see Richard Sakwa in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 266 –67, who argues that apart from the party, the “broader political order… largely represented the aspirations of a majority of society” and had the “potential for significant evolution.”

71. See this chapter, n. 28.

72. Shlapentokh, Normal, 164 –66. Similarly, see S. V. Cheshko, Raspad Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1996), 140 – 41; V. D. Solovei, Russkaia istoriia (Moscow, 2005), 154; and Brown, Gorbachev, 258 –59.

73. Mark Kramer in JCWS (Fall 2003): 21. For the statistics, see Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 132; and Solovei, Russkaia isoriia, 159. More than a decade after the breakup, Russian language and Soviet education were still powerful forces in Central Asia. See the report by Zamira Eshanova in RFE /RL, Nov. 13, 2002. More generally, it was later reported that of the 142 million former Soviet citizens living outside Russia, at least 100 million knew the Russian language (Sergei Blagov in Asia Times, July 23, 2003).

74. Stephen Kotkin in NR, April 15, 2002, 27. In 1996, Gorbachev made a similar point about the former Soviet Union: “De facto the county still lives even though de jure it no longer exists” ( NG, Dec. 25, 1996).

75. Suny, Revenge, 150. Even Russian anti-Communist critics of Gorbachev agree. See, e.g., Sergei Roy in Moscow News, Nov. 26 –Dec. 2, 1998; and the group statement in NG-Stsenarii, May 23, 1996.

76. For the law, see Pravda, April 7, 1990; and for Gorbachev on the “process of ‘divorce,’” Zhizn, 1:520 –21. Some historians think that if an acceptable union treaty had been offered in early 1989, even the Baltic republics would have remained. See R. Kh. Simonian in VI, no. 12 (2002): 34 –37; and, similarly, Feodor Burlatsky in Metta Spencer, ed., Separatism (Lanham, Md., 1998), 141.

77. Stanislav Shushkevich in FBIS, Sept. 30, 1991, 70; and Solzhenitsyn in LG, Sept. 18, 1990. Similarly, in November 1991, Yeltsin assured listeners: “It is hard to say how many states will enter the Union, but I have a firm conviction that there will be a Union” (quoted in Medvedev, Sovetskii Soiuz, 203). One Russian specialist believes it did not matter how many republics initially signed the treaty because others would have joined later (S. V. Cheshko in G. N. Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia velikoi derzhavy [Moscow, 2005], 465). That is, there is no reason to think, as one American specialist does, that a new Union would have had to include “all fifteen union republics” (Edward W. Walker, Dissolution [Lanham, Md., 2003], 186).

78. For the treaty, see Izvestiia, Aug. 15, 1991; and for strong pro-Union statements by Yeltsin and Kravchuk at the negotiations, Natsionalnye interesy, no. 2–3 (2001): 80, 88. It is often argued that Ukraine would not have actually signed the treaty—see this chapter, n. 80—but Gorbachev thought otherwise, as do several Russian specialists and at least one American. See Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 198; Iakov Pliais in NG, March 3, 1994. And, similarly, Cheshko in Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia ; and Hale, “Ethnofederalism.”

79. Mikhail Gorbachev, On My County and the World (New York, 2000), 132; Gorbachev in Novaia, Aug. 14 –16, 2006; and Gorbachev in Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 3, 69. For the seating, see also Gorbachev’s press conference of Aug. 16, 2001 in JRL, Aug. 20, 2001.

80. For this interpretation, see Hahn, Russia’s Revolution, chap. 8. And, similarly, Henry E. Hale, “The Strange Death of the Soviet Union,” Harvard University Davis Center, Ponars Series No. 12, March 1999; and Burlatsky in Spencer, ed., Separatism, 146. Several Western scholars argue, on the other hand, that the treaty would have not worked. See, e.g., Miller, Mikhail Gorbachev, 198; Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 390, 422–25; and, less emphatically, Hough, Democratization, 424 –28. And some Russians agree, including Dmitrii Furman in Proryv, 329–30; and Viktor Sheinis in SM, no. 10 (2005): 105.

81. Anatoly Sobchak quoted in Brown, Gorbachev, 293. Similarly, see Sobchak in MN, Aug. 18 –25, 1996; and Vladimir Lukin quoted in Hough, Democratization, 393.

82. To take a contingency considered earlier, according to a widely respected Russian economist, if the G7 had not sent Gorbachev home from London in July 1991 “with empty hands,” without the financial assistance he desperately needed, the plotters would not have moved against him; the refusal even “urged” them on (Nikolai Shmelev in SM, no. 7 [1996]: 62, and no. 2 [1999]: 77, and in Proryv, 207). Similarly, see Viktor Sheinis in SM, no. 11–12 (2006): 178. Indeed, the plotters took steps in June and July to undermine his requests for Western aid. See Hahn, Russia’s Revolution, 406; and Mark Kramer in JCWS (Winter 2005): 62. For the G7’s rejection and the “big humiliation” it inflicted on Gorbachev, see Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 178 –82; and for the contrary view that Western aid would not have prevented the Soviet breakup, see Celeste Wallander in JCWS (Fall 2003): 164.

83. See, e.g., the post-August statements by Sobchak, Shushkevich, and Aleksandr Yakovlev in FBIS, Sept. 13, 33, Sept. 30, 70, and Oct. 2, 33; Roy Medvedev’s account of the Congress in NNI, no. 2 (2003): 167, and of his own expectations in LR, April 4, 2003; for the economic union, Walker, Dissolution, 144; and for Yeltsin, Dzhuletto Keza, Proshai, Rossiia! (Moscow, 1997), 110. Another soon-to-be coconspirator, Shushkevich, made a similar statement ( FBIS, Nov. 15, 1991, 26). Indeed, after August, Yeltsin was still considering having himself made president of the Soviet Union. See Boris Yeltsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Moscow, 1994), 154 –55. Gorbachev, of course, continued to insist that the Union could be saved. See his Zhizn, vol. 2, chap. 44. For a different but related conception of the Union alternative that still existed after August, see Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 245– 46.

84. For the text, see Pravda, Nov. 27, 1991.

85. Martin Malia in NYT, Sept. 3, 1998; and Stephen Kotkin in NR, March 31, 2003, 34. Elsewhere, Kotkin dismisses “Gorbachev’s quest for a non-existent reformed socialism” ( East European Constitutional Review [Fall 1997]: 118). Similarly, see Jeffrey W. Hahn in Slavic Review (Winter 1993): 851. Some Western scholars have treated the Gorbachev years as a “transition.” See, e.g., Huber and Kelley, eds., Perestroika-Era Politics, 3; Archie Brown in JOD (Oct. 2001): 35; and Hahn, Russia’s Revolution, chap. 8. The word “transition” ( perekhod ) and concept were regularly applied to Gorbachev’s reforms by Soviet writers at the time.

86. Strayery, Why, 113.

87. I borrow the term “counterweights” from John N. Hazard, The Soviet System of Government, 5th ed. (Chicago, 1980), chap. 13. Originally published in 1957, it was the first to develop this important insight. For a similar and earlier approach, but focusing on the official ideology, see Barrington Moore Jr., Soviet Politics—the Dilemmas of Power (New York, 1965), 28, 339, first published in 1950; and for yet another perception of the system’s “dual structure,” Mlynár, Can Gorbachev, 84 –85.

88. See, respectively, Gorbachev, Izbrannye, 6:352; Gorbachev, Zhizn, 1:390; A. S. Cherniaev in 10 let bez SSSR (Moscow 2002), 8; and Gorbachev, Zhizn, 1:423. Thus, one American Sovietologist commented at this time, with considerable surprise, on “the coming to life of institutions that most people regarded as dead, sham, a grotesque caricature of what they ought to be” (Donald W. Treadgold in Wieczynski, ed. Gorbachev, 43).

5. THE FATE OF THE SOVIET UNION: WHY DID IT END?

1. Leontii Byzoev in Pravda, Feb. 16, 1991.

2. For a demonstration of an estimated 250,000 pro-Communists, see Commersant, Feb. 25, 1991; and for the “rally mania,” Pravda, March 26, 1990.

3. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York, 1997), 270 –71; and Roi Medvedev in OI, no. 5 (2003): 122.

4. Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, Gorbachev’s top military adviser, quoted in Roi Medvedev, Sovetskii Soiuz: poslednii god zhizni (Moscow, 2003), 152. Similarly, see S. F. Akhromeev and G. M. Kornienko, Glazami marshala i diplomata (Moscow, 1992); Vladimir Kriuchkov, Lichnoe delo, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1996); and Valentin Falin, Bez skidok na obstoiatelstva (Moscow, 1999), 380 – 461, and his Konflikty v kremle (Moscow, 2000).

5. See, e.g., Vladimir Sokolov in LG, Sept. 12, 1990; Ivan Sidelnikov in KZ, Oct. 4, 1990; and L. Shvetsova and Pavel Gutioniov in Izvestiia, Oct. 8 and Nov. 27, 1990. For 1941, see Ivan Polozkov quoted in Otto Latsis, Tshchatelno splanirovannoe samoubiistvo (Moscow, 2001), 336; and Valentin Rasputin in SR, Dec. 14, 1990. The preceding quote summarized the charges as conveyed to Gorbachev’s chief aide (Anatolii Cherniaev, 1991 god [Moscow, 1997], 47).

6. Nikolai Petrakov in FT, Jan 26, 1991. See, e.g., the openly mutinous “Address to the People,” whose signers included two active-duty generals, in SR, July 23, 1991. Its insubordinate intent was later acknowledged by one of its organizers, Gennadii Ziuganov in SR, July 26, 2001; and by its author, Aleksandr Prokhanov, in NG Ex Libris, March 2, 2006.

7. Anatolii Gromyko, Andrei Gromyko (Moscow, 1997), 201; A. Krasnov and Iu. Nikolaev in SR, June 15, 1991; Marshal Viktor Kulikov in Moscow News, Sept. 15–21, 1999. Similarly, see the account of Gorbachev’s meeting with a large group of hostile officers, in KZ, Nov. 15, 1990; and for a close study of those reactions, Mark Kramer in JCWS (Winter 2005): 3–66, which included charges of “betrayal” (8, 25).

8. For public opinion, see S. Shpilko and Tatiana Zaslavskaia in Izvestiia, Jan. 17 and 18, 1991, the latter quoted here.

9. Joseph Nogee and R. Judson Mitchell, Russian Politics (Boston, 1997), 86; David Remnick in WP, Nov. 19, 1990; Richard Sakwa in Russia and the World, no. 19 (1991): 12.

10. See his important speeches on the subject in Pravda, March 1 and 2, 1991; his memoir explanation in Zhizn i reformy, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1995), 2:520 –25; and the comments of his close adviser Georgii Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobody (Moscow, 1993), 147, 184. For Gorbachev’s promise, see Pravda, March 16, 1990, and XXVIII sezd kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: stenograficheskii otchet, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1991), 2:203; and for being a democrat, David Remnick in WP, Sept. 26, 1990. Such “moderate conservatives” were still on the Central Committee, according to Medvedev, Sovetskii Soiuz, 78. Because of their subsequent roles in the August 1991 coup, the leading members of Gorbachev’s new government became known as hard-line reactionaries, but that was not their reputation when he embraced them in 1990. Indeed, pro-Gorbachev figures spoke favorably of them, as professionals and men, before and even after the coup attempt. On Valentin Pavlov, the new prime minister, whose moderate reformist views on the economy were set out in Pravda, Feb. 21, 1991, see, e.g., Cherniaev, 1991, 100, 156; Otto Latsis in LG, Jan. 23, 1991; Aleksandr Golovkov in NG, Sept. 26, 1998; G. Popov in VE, no. 8 (2005): 139– 44; and in his own words, Valentin Pavlov, Upushchen li shans? (Moscow, 1995). On the KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, Aleksandr Iakovlev in Trud, Feb. 23, 1993. And for Boris Pugo, minister of internal affairs, see Chernyaev cited in Rodric Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River (New Haven, Conn., 2003), 240; and Gorbachev himself, in Zhizn, 1:408, who calls Pugo “a decent man.” Typically, Gorbachev’s new vice president, Gennady Yanaev, characterized himself as an economic reformer against “shock” policies ( Glasnost, Jan. 3, 1991). For a similar analysis, see Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, (Washington, D.C., 1997), 400, 442.

11. Stanislav Shatalin quoted by Abraham Brumberg in NYRB, June 27, 1991, 55; Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich in EAS, no. 2 (1997): 275. For “tactical,” see Georgi Arbatov, The System (New York, 1992), 339; and Dimitri Simes, After the Collapse (New York, 1999), 82. And for “eternal values,” Gorbachev quoted by Serge Schmemann in NYT, Jan. 23, 1991. During this period, Gorbachev repeatedly declared that he would never “turn back.” See, e.g., FBIS, Feb. 15, 1991, 27, and Feb. 27, 1991, 78 –79; and Pravda, March 2, 1991.

12. This latter point was occasionally made at the time. See, e.g., Peter Rutland in Arguments and Facts International 1, no. 4 (1990): 1, and Sergei Iastrezhemskii in MN, Nov. 5, 1989. And, similarly, Rair Simonyan cited by Bill Keller in NYT, May 14, 1990; and Mary Buckley, Redefining Russian Society and Polity (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 250 –53. For the political fashion, see Fedor Burlatskii in LG, May 2, 1990; and, similarly, Edvard Shevardnadze in LG, April 18, 1990, who remarked: “Today, optimism is not in fashion. On the contrary, many compete in their pessimism, advancing the most terrible prognoses.” To give a contemporary and retrospective example, see Oleg Gusarevich in Pravda, Jan. 8, 1990, who thought that glasnost and democratization had led to a “civil war” in public discourse; and Mark R. Beissinger, National Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (New York, 2002), 88, 124, who thinks that the first mostly free parliamentary election, in 1989, “rocked the country” and left the “Soviet regime… tottering on the edge.” But why should the normal unruly aspects of democratic political life be interpreted in such an exceptional way? Indeed, as late as June 1991, Gorbachev’s most critical adviser reported that the “situation is relatively stable now” (Aleksandr Yakovlev in FBIS, June 7, 1991, 27). For similar critiques of Moscow intellectual and Western press “hysteria” at the time, see Hough, Democratization, 262–65; Moshe Lewin, Russia/ USSR /Russia (New York, 1995), 301; and Alexander Dallin’s related point that the system had survived worse crises, in Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System, rev. ed. (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 674.

13. Alexei Izyumov in Moscow Magazine (April 1991): 28 –31. Similarly, see V. N. Kudriavtsev in Izvestiia, Feb. 5, 1990; E. Batalov in Izvestiia, Nov. 26, 1990; Burlatskii in LG, May 2, 1990; and, Shevardnadze in LG, April 18, 1990. For a different view, based on personal observation and memory, see Valerii Solovei’s review of an earlier version of this chapter in PK, no. 24 (Dec. 2006), politklass.ru.

14. NG-Stsenarii, Jan. 16, 1997; Cherniaev, 1991, 20; Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev (Moscow, 2001), 119. Similarly, see Gorbachev’s remarks in Pravda, March 2, 1991; and FBIS, March 31, 1991, 63, May 18, 1991, 23, and July 22, 1991, 18. An American economist, Ed Hewett, made an analogous point about the economy (quoted in Ben Eklof, Soviet Briefing [Boulder, Colo., 1989], 99).

15. David Arbel and Ran Edelist, Western Intelligence and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (London, 2003). Even Western scholars who saw “an irreversible process of breakdown” did not foresee the end of the Soviet Union. See, e.g., Peter Reddaway in Report, Aug. 25, 1989, 1. Nor did those who later insisted that the end had been inevitable, see, e.g., Martin Malia in NYRB, March 29, 1990, 26 –27. For an exception, see Vladimir Kvint, a Russian scholar living in the United States, in Moscow Magazine (April 1991): 45; and for a partial exception, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure (New York, 1989), 245, who, writing in August 1988, thought that of the five “alternative outcomes,” the end of the Soviet Union was the “much more remote possibility.”

16. Gromyko, Anatolii Gromyko, 103; Nikolai Popov in NV, no. 11 (2005): 21; D. Zykin, “Model krakha SSSR,” Internet protiv teleekrana, Oct. 21, 2005; and Sergei Baburin in Natsionalnye interesy, no. 5–6 (2001): 3. Similarly, see Anatolii Utkin in NG, Dec. 31, 1997; Sergei Kara-Murza in SR, Oct. 8, 2002; and V. V. Alekseev and S. A. Nefedov in ONS, no. 6 (2002)_: 66.

17. Stefan Hedlund in RR (Jan. 2007): 163.

18. Peter Kenez in Kritika (Spring 2003): 369. The explanation given by another veteran specialist, also “in retrospect,” is equally unhelpful: “it appears that the U.S.S.R. was never really a viable country” (Strobe Talbott, introduction to Arbatov, The System, ix).

19. For overviews of several but not all of the explanations, see S. V. Cheshko, Raspad Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1996), 8 –19; V. V. Alekseev and E. V. Alekseeva in OI, no. 5 (2003): 4 –6; Anatolii Utkin in V. I. Tolstykh, ed., Perestroika (Moscow, 2005), 126 –38; F. N. Klotsvog in OI, no. 3 (2005): 176 –81; Medvedev, Sovetskii Soiuz, chap. 5; A. V. Buzgalin and A. I. Kolganov, Stalin i raspad SSSR (Moscow, 2003), chaps. 2–3; D. V. Maslov, Istoriograficheskie i metodologicheskie osnovy issledovaniia sostoianiia sovetskoi sistemy (Sergiev Posad, 2004), 183–90; Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism (Durham, N.C., 1997), chap. 2; Rutland in Transitions (Feb. 1998): 14 –21; Rowley in Kritika (Spring 2001): 395– 426; Jeremy Smith, The Fall of Soviet Communism (New York, 2005); and Kramer in JCWS (Winter 2003): 3–16.

20. Consider, e.g., the relevant sections of Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted (New York, 2001); Hough, Democratization ; Carol Barner-Barry and Cynthia A. Hody, The Politics of Change (New York, 1995), esp. 3, 5, 131–32; Nick Bisley, The End of the Cold War and the Causes of Soviet Collapse (New York, 2004); V. V. Isakov, Raschlenenka (Moscow, 1998), esp. 170; R. G. Pikhoia in G. N. Sevostianov, ed., Rossiia v XX veke, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2002), 1:121– 45; V. V. Alekseev and E. V. Alekseeva in OI, no. 5 (2003): 3–20; Dmitri Trenin, The End of Eurasia (Washington, D.C., 2002), esp. chap. 2; Vitalii Tretiakov in PK, no. 24 (Dec. 2006), politklass.ru; and Tsipko in LG, Dec. 20, 2006. For “its own weight,” see Stephen R. Sestanovich in JRL, Oct. 25, 2007; and Donald W. Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia, 8th edition (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 430. Similarly, see Steven Lee Myers in NYT, Oct. 9, 2005; and Margaret Paxon in JRL, Aug. 3, 2004. For the Russian scholar, see Anatolii Utkin in NG, Dec. 31, 1997. There are also utterly trivial explanations such as the suggestion that President Reagan’s wife Nancy “precipitated the end of the Soviet Union” (Diana McLellan in WP Book World, June 15, 2003, 5).

21. See, e.g., Sergei Cheshko in NG, Jan. 16, 1997; and N. Bikkenin in SM, no. 10 (2000): 98. For a few of the many examples in the Western literature, see Richard Lourie, Sakharov (New York, 2002), 404; and this volume, chap. 4, nn. 4, 6.

22. Martha Brill Olcott in Slavic Review (Spring 1995): 207; Rutland in Transitions (Feb. 1998): 16; and Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 3. For “post-facto,” see R. Kh. Simonian in NNI, no. 2 (2003): 57. For a similar critique of “retrospective determinism,” see Stathis N. Kalyvas in Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 323– 43.

23. John P. Maynard in William Barbour and Carol Wekesser, eds., The Breakup of the Soviet Union (San Diego, 1994), 27. Similarly, see Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York, 1994); the treatment of “civilization” in Kotkin, Armageddon ; de Tinguy in Anne de Tinguy, ed., The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 55; and Richard Pipes, Communism (London, 1994), 147– 48.

24. Felipe Fernández-Armesto in TLS, Oct. 12, 2007, 5. For the preceding quote, see Wisła Suraska, How the Soviet Union Disappeared (Durham, N.C., 1998), 1; and for other examples, Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda, Soviet Disunion (New York, 1990); Ann Sheehy in Vera Toltz and Iain Elliot, eds., The Demise of the USSR (London, 1995), 3; Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends (New York, 2001), 10; Leon Aron, Yeltsin (New York, 2000), 478 –79; Ariel Cohen, Russian Imperialism (Westport, Conn., 1996); Susanne Michele Birgerson, After the Breakup of a Multi-Ethnic Empire (Westport, Conn., 2002); Raymond Pearson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York, 1998); John L. H. Keep, Last of the Empires (New York, 1995); and this chapter, n. 34. For obvious reasons, the “doomed-empire” explanation was also popular among Yeltsin’s men who had helped abolish the Union. See, e.g., Gennady Burbulis and Sergei Vasilev cited in Lynn D. Nelson and Irina Y. Kuzes, Radical Reform in Yeltsin’s Russia (Armonk, N.Y., 1995), 10; and later Yeltsin himself, quoted in RIA Novosti dispatch, Dec. 7, 2006, in JRL, Dec. 7, 2006.

25. For an extended argument that the end of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was a major factor in ending the Soviet Union, see Kramer in JCWS (Fall 2003): 178 –256; (Fall 2004): 3–64; and (Winter 2005): 3–96. A Soviet insider at the time reports, however, that “no one at the Central Committee or in the country’s leadership noticed the departure of East Europe in 1989” because they were focused on dramatic events inside the country (Aleksandr Tsipko in VA, no. 2 [2005]: 225). For a scholarly attempt to relate the two, but which conflates and thus confuses them, see Beissinger in Slavic Review (Summer 2006): 294 –303; and in AAASS NewsNet, Jan. 2008, 5.

26. As pointed out by Rowley in Kritika (Spring 2001): 418 –19; and Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 5–6, though he suggests otherwise in AAASS NewsNet, Jan. 2008, 1. For varying and shifting scholarly positions on this issue since 1991, see Beissinger in Slavic Review (Summer 2006): 294 –303; and for the “imperial turn” in Western Russian studies more generally since 1991, the editors’ comment in Kritika (Fall 2006): 705–12. The quote is from Anne Applebaum in NYRB, Feb. 12, 2004, 11. To take a telling example, few, if any, Western scholars despised the Soviet Union more than did Martin Malia, but even he denied it was an empire, “at least not in any usual sense of the word” ( Daedalus [Spring 1992]: 66). One Western scholar who used the empire model presented a scenario of its doom, a clash with the Muslim world, that turned out to be fundamentally wrong (Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Decline of an Empire [New York, 1981], esp. 277–84). For sharp criticism of her work by Russian scholars, see S. M. Iskhakov and V. A. Tishkov in G. N. Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia velikoi derzhavy (Moscow, 2005), 486, 502–3, 594.

27. Robert Kagan in Foreign Policy (Summer 1998), foreignpolicy.com . For opinions on this, see, e.g., Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); James B. Rule in Dissent (Fall 2002): 46; Max Boot in WS, Nov. 4, 2002, 26 –29; Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay in NYT, May 10, 2003; the articles in National Interest (Spring 2003); Rich Lowry in New York Post, July 19, 2003; Niall Ferguson in WSJ, June 6, 2003; Kal Raustiala in IHT, July 2, 2003; G. John Ikenberry in FA (March/April 2004): 144 –54; Corey Robin in WP, May 2, 2004; John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy in NYT Book Review, July 25, 2004, 23; Ronald Steel in The Nation, Sept. 20, 2004, 29–35; and David C. Henrickson in WPJ (Summer 2005): 1–22. For Russian commentaries on America’s “road to Empire,” see V. O. Pechatnov in NNI, no. 2 (2006): 85–88; and Sergei Samuilov in SM, no. 3 (2006): 34 – 44.

28. See, respectively, Ronald Grigor Suny, Revenge of the Past (Stanford, Calif., 1993), 157–60; Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union (London, 1997), vii; Dominic Lieven, Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2001), xii; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), 19; and Hough, Democratization, 216. For Russians, in addition, of course, to Gorbachev, see, e.g., R. Kh. Simonian in VI, no. 12 (2002): 27–39; Cheshko, Raspad ; Boris Kagarlitskii in NG, Jan. 16, 1997; Sergei Roy in Moscow News, Sept. 8 –14, 1999; and V. D. Solovei, Russkaia istoriia (Moscow, 2005), 138 – 39, 155–56, 158. Some Russians do argue that it was an empire. See, e.g., V. V. Sogrin in ONS, no. 4 (2002): 98; Egor Gaidar, Gibel imperii (Moscow, 2006); Alexei Arbatov in Russia in Global Affairs (Jan.–March 2006): 23–34; and the discussion in OI, no. 2 (2005): 211–16, and in Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia, esp. section 3. For the quote, see Motyl, Imperial Ends, 10; and, similarly, Suraska, How the Soviet Union, 1.

29. Holmes, Post-Communism, 34; and Trenin, End, 80. Similarly, see Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion, xii; Robert Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse? (Armonk, N.Y.. 1998), 78; Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms (Englewood Cliff, N.J., 1991), 259; Martin, Affirmative, 18 –19; and Maslov, Istoriograficheskie, 185, where the same point is made about Russian scholars. One American scholar tries to reconcile the anomalies by positing the Soviet Union’s “resemblance” to an empire, but this could be true of many multiethnic states (Beissinger in Slavic Review [Summer 2006]: 294 –303).

30. See Vladimir Shlapentokh, A Normal Totalitarian Society (Armonk, N.Y., 2001), 163–66; Solovei, Russkaia istoriia, 138 –39, 158; and the remarks of the president of Kirgiziia, who was “grateful to the Soviet period” for his former republic’s industrial and technological advances, in SM, no. 4 (2002): 52. Similarly, see Valerii Sidorov on Soviet Lithuania, in VA, no. 3 (2007): 52–55. Indeed, some Russian intellectuals and politicians insisted that their resource-rich republic was the real economic victim of the Union. For a discussion, see Hough, Democratization, 241– 45; Fowkes, Disintegration, 152–56; and on this issue more broadly, Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

31. Lieven, Empire, xii. Similarly, see Suny, Revenge ; Fowkes, Disintegration ; and Astrid S. Tuminez in JCWS (Fall 2003): 135.

32. Cheshko, Raspad, 6; and, similarly, in Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia, 445. For the first quote, see Malia in Daedalus (Spring 1992): 66.

33. For this argument, see, e.g., Buckley, Redefining ; Caroline Ibos in de Tinguy, ed., Fall, 134 –53; and Leon Aron, Russia’s Revolution (Washington, D.C., 2007), esp. chaps. 1–3. Similarly, see Holmes, Post-Communism, 57; David Lane in Michael Cox, ed., Rethinking the Soviet Collapse (New York, 1998), 159; and Lieven, Empire, 335. Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Post-Communist Russia (New York, 1997), 86, also argues that there was a “legitimacy crisis,” but his own data seem not to confirm it.

34. See, respectively, Strobe Talbott in JRL, June 8, 2002; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire (New York, 1993), 219, 230, 270; Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 8, 37; and Bernard Gwertzman in Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, eds., The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York, 1992), x. Similarly, see Strayer, Why, 132, 149; Keep, Last, 3, 333; Dina Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union (New York, 2003); and several items cited this chapter, n. 24.

35. R. G. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz (Moscow, 1998), 674 –75; and, similarly, Solovei, Russkaia istoriia, 147. For Central Asia and Azerbaijan, see, respectively, Fowkes, Disintegration, 190 –91; and Geidar Aliev in OG, Aug. 16 –22, 2001. Not even three of the purportedly most independent republic leaders—Zviad Gamsakhurdia of Georgia, Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan—openly resisted. See, respectively, Gennadii Ianaev in OG, Aug. 15–21, 1996, who comments also on Kravchuk; and Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremen “Tsaria Borisa” (Moscow, 1995), 259–60. For Kravchuk and Nazarbaev, see also Anatolii Butenko in Pravda, Sept. 18, 1991; and on the former, Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 166 –68; and George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, 1998), 554.

36. Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), 3– 4; Boris Kagarlitskii in NG, Jan. 16, 1997; and NG-Stsenarii, May 23, 1996. Similarly, see Astrid S. Tuminez in JCWS (Fall 2003): 115–16; and Edward W. Walker, Dissolution (Lanham, Md., 2003), 2, 15n. 9. On the latter point, see Aleksandr Tsipko’s early warning in Izvestiia, Oct. 1, 1991. For a fairly typical republic, see Martha Brill Olcott, Kazakhstan (Washington, D.C., 2002), 16, 35.

37. Beissinger’s Nationalist Mobilization is a prime example of where, as Stephen Kotkin observed, “everything seems to be coded as nationalist” ( Kritika [Summer 2007]: 530n. 127).

38. Cheshko in Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia, 451; and Boris Kagarlitskii in NG, Jan. 16, 1997. And, similarly, Boris Pankin, The Last Hundred Days of the Soviet Union (New York, 1996), 266 –67; and Valery Tiskov, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union (London, 1997), 44 – 46.

39. Pravda, March 16, 1990. For a study, see Walker, Dissolution .

40. Oleg Rumyantsev in MT, June 17, 1995. Similarly, see Viktor Bondarev in Rodina, no. 7 (1995): 27; Nikolai Ryzhkov in NS, no. 2 (2006): 164; and even Sergei Shakrai, a drafter of the Union abolition documents, in NG, May 16, 2000. One leading Russian democrat thought it did not mean “any more genuine sovereignty than [have U.S.] states” (Sergei Stankevich in Demokratizatsiya [Spring 1994]: 319). And though Gorbachev would later blame the resolution for undermining the Union, he is reported to have said at the time: “I don’t see anything terrible…. It doesn’t threaten the Union” (F. D. Bobkov, KGB i vlast [Moscow, 1995], 365).

41. For the confusion, see Wilson, The Ukrainians, 165; Pankin, Last, 264; Hough, Democratization, 479–80; and for the more widespread confusion, Walker, Dissolution, 6, 13. From the beginning, some Politburo members worried about possible interpretations of “sovereignty” (V. I. Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak… [Moscow, 1995], 282). For the elite, see Joan DeBardeleben, Russian Politics in Transition, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1997), 129–30; Roman Laba in Transition, Jan. 12, 1996, 13; Henry E. Hale, “The Strange Death of the Soviet Union,” Harvard University Davis Center, Ponars Series, No. 12, March 1999), 19–27; and this chapter, n. 44.

42. Hale, “Strange Death,” 24 –25. Similarly, see Walker, Dissolution, 15n. 9, 153–54; Brown, Gorbachev, 303; and for a Russian expert, Viacheslav Mikhailov in NG, April 12, 2001. For Gorbachev, see Hough, Democratization , 479–80; and, similarly, Andrei Grachev, Dalshe bez menia… (Moscow, 1994), 184 –85. Another top Soviet leader, Anatolii Lukianov, later made the same point. SR, July 30, 1998.

43. U.S. State Department analysis in JRL Supplement, June 15, 2002; and Roman Solchanyk, citing a 2003 survey done in Kyiv, in JRL, Oct. 18, 2004. Similar survey results were reported by Interfax, Jan. 10, 2006, in JRL, Jan. 11, 2006.

44. Hale, “Strange Death,” 19, 24. Similarly, see Fedor Burlatskii, Glotok svobody, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1997), 2:24, who calls the Ukrainian elite the “main battering ram” of the Union’s destruction; and DeBardeleben, Russian Politics, 129–30, who notes the “definition of reality constructed by the elites.”

45. Aleksandr Umnov in NG, Jan. 19, 2000; Stephen White, Communism and Its Collapse (New York, 2001), 77. Similarly, see Roi Medvedev, who adds Western Ukraine, in OI, no. 4 (2003): 113; Rutland in Transitions (Feb. 1998): 17; and Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms (Washington, D.C., 2001), 245.

46. See, respectively, Phillip J. Bryson in Slavic Review (Winter 2005): 920; Barner-Barry and Hody, Politics, 3; Åslund, How, 52; and M. Steven Fish in PSA (Oct.–Dec. 2001): 355. Similarly, see Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 464, 473, 492–93; Aron, Yeltsin, 481–83; William Moskoff, Hard Times (Armonk, N.Y., 1993), 6 –7, 233–35; and Orlando Figes in NYT Book Review, March 19, 1995.

47. See, e.g., the fervently anti-Marxist scholars in Lee Edwards, ed., The Collapse of Communism (Stanford, Calif., 1999); and the Marxist Hillel H. Ticktin in Cox, ed., Rethinking, chap. 4; and, similarly, Boris Kagarlitskii, Marksizm ne rekomendovano dlia obucheniia (Moscow, 2005), 302. For a Marxist objection to this explanation, see David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above (New York, 1997), chap. 5 and page 226.

48. See, e.g., Egor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Moscow, 1996), chap. 5; Gaidar, Gibel imperii, esp. chaps. 7–8; and, similarly, Otto Latsis in Izvestiia, June 28, 1996. For similar criticisms of their claims, see Oleg Davydov in NG, Jan. 27, 2000; Renald Simonian in SM, no. 7–8 (2006): 20 –21; Karen Shakhnazarov in LG, Jan. 24 –30, 2007; and Valerii Bushuev in SM, no. 1 (2007): 196 –97. According to a once-imprisoned dissident, it was only in 1992, after the onset of Gaidar’s “reforms,” that “for the first time, hungry people were visible” (Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia [New York, 1997], 29–30). And by the end of the decade, according to a leading American authority, there was “the specter of a hungry Russia, immersed in poverty” (Stephen K. Wegren in PPC [Jan./Feb. 2000]: 38.

49. For similar arguments, see White, Communism, 79; Kotz and Weir, Revolution, 74; Vladimir Tikhomirov in EAS (March 2000): 227; Valentin Pavlov in LG, July 18, 2001; and V. Shliapentokh in VE, no. 10 (2005): 153.

50. For similar points, see Robert V. Daniels in Cox, ed., Rethinking, 122; Moskoff, Hard Times, 234; Kotz and Weir, Revolution, 74 –75; Nekipelov in ONS, no. 4 (2005): 9; and Shliapentokh in VE, no. 10 (2005): 153. For a debate on the subject, see Vladimir G. Treml and Michael Ellman in RFE /RL, June 4, 1993, 53–58.

51. For the economist, see James Millar quoted by Robert D. English in International Security (Spring 2002): 90n. 69. And for similarly revisionist analyses of earlier periods in Soviet economic history, G. I. Khanin in EAS (Dec. 2003): 1187–212; and Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory (Princeton, N.J., 2003). For accounts warning against exaggerating the crisis at the time, see Richard Parker in Atlantic Monthly (June 1990): 68 –80; and Peter Passell in NYT, April 7, 1991. And for some bright spots, see Lynn Turgeon in JRL, April 2, 1997; and V. S. Pavlov in Izvestiia, June 15, 1991, and later in LG, July 18, 2001.

52. For such warehouses, see Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 67–68; and Alexandra George, Escape from “Ward Six” (New York, 1998), 584. The leadership understood that official price policy was the main cause of the problem. See, e.g., Anatolii Lukianov in KP, March 13, 1991; and Gorbachev cited in Novaia zhizn, Oct. 25, 2002. The same kind of “artificially created” shortages had occurred in 1928 and 1929, contributing to the end of NEP, a point made by Anatoly Sobchak in FBIS, Sept. 24, 1991, 68.

53. For the general hysteria, see Hough, Democratization, 262–65; Lewin, Russia/USSR /Russia, 301; and Dallin in Dallin and Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System, 674. The dire predictions were fueled both by Gorbachev’s enemies and by his own representatives, who were trying to frighten the West into granting major financial aid lest a destabilized Soviet Union lose “control over one of the world’s largest nuclear potentials.” See, e.g., the letter by Grigory Yavlinsky and Yevgeny Primakov to the G7 in NYT, May 30, 1991; and Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels (Boston, 1993), 384. For the “salt frenzy” of 2006, see Moscow News, Feb. 17–March 2, 2006.

54. Shakhnazarov in LG, Jan, 24 –30, 2007. I ate in such cafeterias many times from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Similarly, see Braithwaite, Across, 296 – 97; and Renfrey Clarke in JRL, July 6, 1998. For personal testimony that the food situation was actually better before the abolition of the Soviet Union, not after, see Sinyavsky, Russian Intelligentsia, 29–30 and 47– 48.

55. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, eds., The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System (Armonk, N.Y., 1998), 26 and passim; and, similarly, Kotz and Weir, Revolution ; and Nelson and Kuzes, Radical Reform, chap. 1. Several political scientists and historians also agree. See, e.g., Hahn, Russia’s Revolution, 217, 228 –29; Hough, Democratization, chaps. 4, 11, 14; and Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 182.

56. A. N. Iakovlev in Trud, Sept. 27, 1991; and for Gorbachev, see Cherniaev, 1991, 23. Similarly, see Gorbachev in FBIS, April 11, 1991, 15; and quoted in Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened, exp. ed. (New York, 1992), 372.

57. For these developments, see this chapter, note 55. For railways, see Kramer in JCWS (Winter 2005): 44. For political sabotage, see A. N. Iakovlev, Gorkaia chasha (Yaroslav, 1994), 253, and quoted in Hough, Democratization, 353–54; Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), 97, 141; Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 242, 277–78; and A. A. Sazonov, Predateliami ne rozhdaiutsia (Moscow, 2006), 11–14.

58. For an approving account of Yeltsin’s actions, see John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 266 –69.

59. Gorbachev, Zhizn, 1:583.

60. Na perepute (Novye vekhi) (Moscow, 1999), 3. Similarly, see Natan Eidelman, “Revoliutsiia sverkhu” v Rossii (Moscow, 1989); Vladislav Surkov in Ekspert, no. 20 (2006): 105; Aleksandr Ianov, Ten groznogo tsaria (Moscow, 1997), esp. chap. 6; and for a somewhat different view, Solovei, Russkaia istoriia, chap. 5. See also Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, chap. 1.

61. Anatolii Cherniaev in SM, no. 4 (2005): 126. For the tragedy, see Ianov, Ten ; this chapter, nn. 60 and 62; and for a similar thesis, Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea (Princeton, N.J., 1966).

62. For Gorbachev’s place in this tradition, see, e.g., Aleksandr Tsipko in KP, March 16, 1991; Fedor Burlatskii on the “fate of reformers” in LG, June 27, 1990; M. F. Shatrov on the same subject in SM, no. 10 (1994): 23; V. Medvedev in Proryv k svobode: o perestroike dvadtsat let spustia (Moscow, 2005), 9; and Gorbachev’s own famous lament, “I don’t know any happy reformers.” Elsewhere, commenting on the history I summarize in this paragraph, he explained, “The fates of Russian reformers are tragic” (M. S. Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii [Moscow, 1993], 25; in KP, Aug. 19, 1993); and, similarly, in Tolstykh, ed., Perestroika, 213. His wife put it more bluntly: “The thing about innovations is that sooner or later they turn around and destroy the innovators.” Quoted in Beschloss and Talbott, Highest Levels, p. 230. For Lenin as a “tragic figure,” see Iurii Burtin in Krasnye Kholmy Almanakh (Moscow, 1999), p. 462. For a critique of this “deterministic” interpretation of Russian reform, see A. B. Kamenskii in VF, No. 6, 2006, esp. pp. 25–26.

63. This is also the standard Western view. See, e.g., Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition (London, 1974), chap. 10; Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), chap. 10; and Timo Vikavainen, The Inner Adversary (Washington, D.C., 2006). For a more differentiating account, Aileen M. Kelly, Toward Another Shore (New Haven, Conn., 1998); and for a Russian view, Aleksei Kiva in SM, no. 4 (2005): 170 –80.

64. Aleksandr Tsipko, in NG, April 13, 1993; and, similarly, E. L. Petrenko in OI, no. 4 (2002): 200. For Western studies, see, e.g., Jonathan Steele, Eternal Russia (Cambridge, 1994), 58, 269–73; Hough, Democratization, 491– 93; Lewin, Russia, 3– 4, 301–3; McDaniel, Agony, 3–21, 147– 48; and Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War (University Park, Penn., 2003), which argues rather differently (esp. xiii–xiv) that a benign Russian intelligentsia, influenced by decades of official exchange programs with the United States, played a decisive role in the “collapse of Communism.”

65. Iurii Poliakov in SM, no. 2 (1996): 23; Vladimir Iordanskii in SM, no. 8 (1997): 88; and Svetlana Shipunova in SR, May 16, 1995. According to another scholar—Iurii Oleshchuk in SM, no. 10 (2002): 27–34—it was not the real intelligentsia but a debased “semi-intelligentsia.” For other academic examples, see A. A. Galkin in “Perestroika” v transformatsionnom kontekste (Moscow, 2005), 72–74; Na perepute ; O. T. Bogomolov, Moia letopis perekhodnogo vremeni (Moscow, 2000), 163–66; and S. I. Romanovskii, Neterpenie mysli, ili istoricheskii portret radikalnoi russkoi intelligentsii (St. Petersburg, 2000). And for other Russian writers, Aleksandr Tsipko in NG, April 9 and 13, 1993, NG, April 6, 1995, and LG, Nov. 21, 2001, and April 25–May 3, 2007; Andrei Siniavskii in LG, March 16, 1995; Andranik Migranian in NG-Stsenarii, no. 7 (1999); S. Kara-Mirza, Anti-sovetskii proekt (Moscow, 2002); several contributors to Proryv, 83, 237, 309–13, 326 – 29, 336 – 42; Naum Korzhavin in Novaia, Oct. 10 –13, 2005; and Mikhail Antonov in LG, Feb. 21–27, 2007.

66. V. Ginzburg in Izvestiia, May 17, 1990; Aleksei Kiva in KP, April 15, 1991, Izvestiia, Feb. 26, 1991, and Dec. 10, 1990; Aleksandr Protsenko in Izvestiia, May 3, 1990; Kiva in Izvestiia, Jan. 24, 1991; and Nikolai Stoliarov in Pravda, April 2, 1991. Similarly, see Andranik Migranian in LG, Dec. 27, 1989; Fedor Burlatskii in LG, June 27, 1990; Leonid Ionin in NV, no. 27 (1990): 4 –7; Gleb Pavlovskii in Vek XX, no. 4 (1991): 54 –63; and on the evolutionary alternative, Kiva in Izvestiia, Feb. 26, 1991; and Leonid Abalkin in Izvestiia, March 14, 1991.

67. Aleksandr Tsipko in KP, March 16, 1991; G. Bordiugov and V. Kozlov in Pravda, Oct. 3, 1988. On NEP, see also Andrei Nuikin in NM, no. 1 (1988): 208 –9; Tsipko in SK, May 26, 1990; Vladimir Volzhskii in Nedelia, July 23–29, 1990; A. N. Sakharov in Kommunist, no. 5 (1991): 60 –71; and Aleksei Klimenko in Pravda, June 25, 1991. For the leadership, see Gorbachev’s comments in Pravda, April 25 and July 26, 1991; and Aleksandr Iakovlev’s analogy with the fate of the pro-NEP Bukharin group in the Politburo in 1929, in Izvestiia, July 26, 1991, and LG, Aug. 28, 1991.

68. See, respectively, N. Ia. Petrakov, Russkaia ruletka (Moscow, 1998), 93; V. Anfilov on Iurii Afanasev in Pravda, Feb. 22, 1991; and Nikita Bogoslavskii on himself in Ogonek, no. 45 (1990): 27. For similar comments on past conformity and penance, see Petrakov, Russkaia ruletka, 131, 279–81; Aleksandr Tsipko in SK, May 26, 1990; Aleksei Kiva in NM, no. 8 (1993); Judith Devlin, The Rise of the Russian Democrats (Brookfield, Vt., 1995), 16. Gorbachev is quoted by Tsipko in Proryv, 336. For a different explanation of their ideological conversion, see Kotz and Weir, Revolution, 65–66, 69–70; and for a critical interpretation of the intelligentsia in Soviet and post-Soviet times, Boris Kagarlitsky, Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin (London, 2002), chap. 2; and Sinyavsky, Russian Intelligentsia . For contrasting examples of leading intelligenty who changed radically and those who did not, see, respectively, Iurii Kariakin, Peremena ubezhdenii (Moscow, 2007); and Anatolii Rybakov Roman-vospominanie (Moscow, 1997).

69. For the plan, see 500 Days (Transition to the Market) (New York, 1991); and for the IMF, Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 176. Influential Western specialists insist that Gorbachev’s rejection of the plan exposed him as a pseudoreformer or was a “fateful error.” See, e.g., Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 479–80; Jack, F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire (New York, 1995), 419. And, similarly, Kaiser, Why Gorbachev, 363; and George Soros in Moscow News, Oct. 30 –Nov. 5, 1997. But even supporters of shock therapy under Yeltsin later admitted the 1990 plan was a “fairy tale,” “utopianism,” and “not realistic.” See Gaidar, Dni, 68; V. V. Sogrin in NNI, no. 1 (1999): 86; and McFaul, Russia’s, 100. Indeed, Yeltsin himself, who had supported the plan in 1990 and 1991, later called it a “child-like” example of “maximalism” ( MN, Oct. 21, 2003).

70. D. Furman, Nasha strannaia revolutsiia (Moscow, 1998), 5. Another moderate called them a “party of fools” (Petrakov, Russkaia ruletka, 278 –86). For a detailed account of intelligentsia politics, see Devlin, Rise .

71. See, e.g., Tatiana Zaslavskaia in Sociological Research (Jan.–Feb. 1993): 62, and in OG, March 8 –14, 2001; Stanislav Govorukhin cited in NG, July 22, 1994; Liliia Shevtsova in 10 let bez SSSR (Moscow, 2002), 28 –29, in Proryv, 350, and in MN, March 3–9, 2006; L. I. Saraskina in Gorbachevskie chtenii, no. 1 (Moscow, 2003), 99–102; and Tatyana Tolstaya, Pushkin’s Children (Boston, 2001), comparing her views on pp. 27– 48 with those on pp. 182– 83, and who is quoted here (59). For a harsh criticism of their earlier behavior, see Sinyavsky, Russian Intelligentsia .

72. See MN, Nov. 18 –25, 1990; and for January 1991, the accounts in A. S. Cherniaev, Shest let s Gorbachevym (Moscow, 1993), 405–15, and 1991 god, 56 –57, 86.

73. Pankin, Last, 269. Similarly, see this chapter, n. 124.

74. John B. Dunlop in JCWS (Winter 2003): 124. Similarly, see Malia, Soviet Tragedy ; Holmes, Post-Communism, 58; and V. V. Sogrin in OI, no. 2 (1995): 9–10. The most insistent Russian “objectivists” are those who played leading roles in the abolition of the Union or in the post-Soviet government that emerged from it but who denied their personal—that is, subjective—responsibility, as was noted even at the time (Sergei Markov in Trud, Dec. 15, 1991). See, e.g., Yeltsin’s interview with Moscow Russian Television, on March 14, 1996, where he insisted that “the collapse” was “an objective process” and therefore “inevitable” (in FBIS, March 15, 1996, 18), and, similarly, Boris Eltsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Moscow, 1994), 152; Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya, The Challenge of Revolution (New York, 2001); Gaidar, Dni, 148 –51; Vladimir Lukin in LG, Jan. 24 –30, 2007; and Stanislav Shushkevich and the Russians cited in this chapter, n. 98.

75. Valerii Solovei in SM, no. 7 (2001): 95; and Dallin in Dallin and Lapidus, eds., Soviet System, 686. Similarly, see George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (New York, 2002); Joel M. Ostrow in EAS (Dec. 2002): 1340; Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 228; Robert V. Daniels in The Nation, Jan. 3, 2000, 25; the evidence presented in Brown, Gorbachev ; and the sources cited in this chapter, nn. 76 and 77.

76. Roi Medvedev in OI, no. 4 (2003): 112. Similarly, see I. P. Osadchii, ed., Ot katastrofy k vozrozhdeniiu (Moscow, 1999); Cheshko in Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia, 466; Zigmund Stankevich, Istoriia krusheniia SSSR (Moscow, 2001), 439– 41; Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 356 –57; R. Kh. Simonian in NNI, no. 2 (2003): 57–58; and Tsipko in LG, Dec. 20, 2006. For public opinion, see Shlapentokh, Normal, 262n. 1; and a VTsION survey done on July 17–21, 2003, reported at wcion.ru.

77. William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 393; Joel C. Moses in Wieczynski, ed., Gorbachev, 141; and, almost identically, Shakhnazarov, Tsena, 133. Even authors who think other factors were primarily or powerfully responsible nonetheless strongly emphasize Gorbachev’s role. In addition to Odom cited here (393, 397), see, e.g., Kotkin, Armageddon ; Strayer, Why ; Hough, Democratization ; Fowkes, Disintegration, 196; and Treadgold, Twentieth-Century Russia, 430.

78. For the first view, see, respectively, Matlock, Autopsy, 663; Eduard Samoilov in NG, Oct. 13, 1992; Olga Chaikovskaia in LG, Oct. 21, 1992. And, similarly, Aleksandr Tsipko cited by John Lloyd in FT, April 24, 1995; and Vitalii Tretiakov in Tolstykh, ed., Perestroika, 9. For the second, see Joel M. Ostrow in EAS (Dec. 1997): 1537, and (Dec. 2002): 1340. Similarly, see Michael Mandelbaum in Wilham Barbour and Carol Wekesser, eds., The Breakup of the Soviet Union (San Diego, 1994), 44 –50; Leonid Smoliakov in NG, Jan. 16, 1997; the section entitled “Katastroika” in Aleksandr Zinoviev, Smuta (Moscow, 1994), 5–183; Aslanbek Shogenov in SR, March 2, 2006; and the criticisms of Gorbachev’s economic policies in Ellman and Kontorovich, eds., Destruction . And for “konspirologiia” ( Zavtra, no. 26 [2003]), see, e.g., Aleksandr Zinoviev, Gibel russkogo kommunizma (Moscow, 2001), 80 –87; V. Chertishchev quoted by F. Sizyi in KP, April 26, 1991; A. P. Sheviakin, Razgrom sovetskoi derzhavy (Moscow, 2005); Osadchii, ed., Ot katastrofy, 18; and S. G. Kara-Murza, Vtoroe preduprezhdenie (Moscow, 2005).

79. For Russian examples, see the preceding note. For fulsome examples on the U.S. side, see Peter Schweizer, Victory (New York, 1994) and Reagan’s War (New York, 2000). For a very different view of Reagan’s intent, see Jack F. Matlock Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev (New York, 2004).

80. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, 269; Vladimir M. Zubok in William C. Wohlforth, ed., Cold War Endgame (University Park, Penn., 2003), 216; and Zubok, A Failed Empire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), chap. 10. Similarly, see Brown, Gorbachev .

81. Aleksandr Iakovlev in MN, March 11, 2005.

82. For accounts, see Dunlop, Rise, 267–69; Hahn, Russia’s Revolution, 214 –20; Stankevich, Istoriia, chap. 6; and A. S. Barsenkov and A. I. Vdovin, Istoriia Rossii, 1938–2002 (Moscow, 2003), 386 –89. Even an admirer, Dunlop, describes these acts as Yeltsin’s “autumn putsch” (267). Similarly, see Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition (Washington, D.C., 1994), 479.

83. Nursultan Nazarbaev quoted by V. A. Popovich in SR, Oct. 5, 2002

84. Simes, After, 55; Brown, Gorbachev, 303. For the Belorussian leader, Shushkevich, who had been Lee Harvey Oswald’s Russian tutor in Minsk (Steven Lee Myers in NYT, May 30, 2003), see his evasive remarks to Gorbachev on November 25, 1991, quoted by Iurii Baturin in Novaia, Dec. 11–13, 2006; his odd, contradictory account in Ogonek, no. 49 (1996): 10 –14; and Gaidar, Dni, 150. An informed Russian reports that Yeltsin and Kravchuk had been conniving against the Union since September 1991, with Yeltsin encouraging the latter’s separatist impulses (Sazonov, Predateliami, 123, 128). Similarly, see Nikolai Ryzhkov in NS, no. 10 (2006): 194 –98; and Bush and Scowcroft, A World, 556.

85. Yeltsin quoted in FBIS, March 15, 1996, 18.

86. Yeltsin quoted in Medvedev, Sovetskii Soiuz, 20; and G. E. Burbulis cited by Boris Slavin in Pravda, Dec. 28, 1995. Similarly, see this book, chap. 4, n. 83; and for the polls, Gorbachev, Poniat, 338.

87. For a similar argument, see Brown, Gorbachev, 307. Gorbachev always believed that Ukraine would return to a union, and some Western specialists agree. See Gorbachev, On My Country and the World (New York, 2000), 151, and in V. T. Loginov, ed. Piat let posle Belovezhia (Moscow, 1997), 5–10, 104 –5; and, e.g., Simes, After, 65–66. For Yeltsin’s decision, see Hough, Democratization, 469. And, similarly, Gorbachev, My Country, 147; Aleksandr Tsipko in Izvestiia, Oct. 1, 1991; and this chapter, n. 84.

88. Aleksandr Gelman in MN, Feb. 25–March 3, 1996; and V. A. Nikonov in 10 let, 36. On Gorbachev’s “will,” see also his comment in NG, Jan. 16, 1997; and Dmitrii Volkogonov, Sem vozhdei, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1995), 2:323. For Gorbachev’s own comment on the purpose of power, see Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynár, Conversations with Gorbachev (New York, 2002), 210; and, similarly, Brown, Gorbachev . Regarding the end of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, U.S. officials at the time had no doubt that Gorbachev’s will was the decisive factor. See Don Oberdorfer, The Turn (New York, 1991), 361; and Beschloss and Talbott, Highest Levels, 92. Similarly, see Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989 (Berkeley, 1997). Gorbachev’s enemies did not disagree about who ended the Cold War: “This village idiot Misha Gorbachev vanquished Russia” (Rustem Vakhitov in SR, July 30, 2002).

89. For an opposing interpretation of Gorbachev’s motivations, arguing that most of these developments resulted primarily from his struggle for power against Politburo opponents, see Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York, 1998). For Gorbachev’s remark, see Cherniaev, 1991, 324.

90. Gorbachev in LG, Dec. 4, 1991. Similarly, see Pravda, April 12, 1990; Izvestiia, Dec. 1, 1990; FBIS, Jan. 24, 1991, and Oct. 15, 1991, 30; MN, Nov. 3, 1991; and Gorbachev, Gody, 288. For the same point, see Dmitrii Furman in NG, March 3, 2006, and in Proryv, 333. One Gorbachev supporter later saw this as a grievous mistake in Russia (Tsipko in LG, Jan. 19, 2005).

91. For the quotes, see Zubok in Wolhforth, ed., Cold War, 229–32, which includes a discussion; and Alexandr Iakovlev, Omyt pamiati, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2001), 2:84. For being uniquely without blood on his hands, see also Ales Adamovich in FBIS, Dec. 24, 1990, 61; Gorbachev’s assertion to Vitalii Korotich, “There’s no blood on these hands, not a drop,” in Stolitsa, no. 15 (1992): 7; and, similarly, Sergei Chuprinin in Znamia, no. 12 (1994): 163. For the uniqueness of his non-violence in the history of Russian leadership, see also Proryv, 105–6, 208 –9, 283, 333; and Shevtsova in MN, March 3–9, 2006. For arguments that Gorbachev should have used more force, see, e.g., Grigory Pomerants and Vladimir Lukin in Demokratizatsiya (Winter 1996): 14 –15, 24 –25; Sergei Roy in Moscow News, Nov. 13–19, 1997; Andranik Migranyan quoted by John Lloyd in FT, April 24, 1995; and Pavel Iurev in SM, no. 2 (2007): 208 –11.

92. For the quotes, beginning with “revolution,” see, respectively, FBIS, Oct. 1, 1987; Gorbachev in NG, Jan. 16, 1997; Zubok in Wohlforth, ed., Cold War, 232; Gorbachev quoted in Kak “delalas” politika perestroiki, 1985–1991 (Moscow, 2004), 9; Liliia Shevtsova in Valentin Tolstykh, ed., Mnogaia leta… Mikhailu Gorbachevu—70 (Moscow, 2001), 455; and Fedor Burlatskii in NG, June 7, 1994. For similar remarks by Gorbachev, see his Gody, 10; and Cherniaev, Shest let, 279, 380. For similar arguments that his nonviolence was ultimately “fatal” for the Soviet state, see Grachev, Gorbachev, 443; and Hough, Democratization, 250, 332, 488 –89, 498. Gorbachev’s refusal to arrest Yeltsin and his co-conspirators against the Union in December 1991—“I cannot do that”—is often misinterpreted as a lack of “political will” when it was actually his will to adhere to his credo. See, e.g., Sazonov, Predateliami, 135–36.

93. Gorbachev in Novaia zhizn, Oct. 25, 2002; and interviewed by NTV, Moscow, March 7, 2004, in JRL, March 8, 2004. On Yeltsin as a “tsar,” see also Gorbachev quoted in Dzhuzeppe Boffa, Ot SSSR k Rossii (Moscow, 1996), 226. For the critic, see Otto Latsis in Izvestiia, Aug. 22, 1991.

94. See, respectively, Donald Murray, A Democracy of Despots (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 5; John Lloyd quoted in Hough, Democratization, 328; Yeltsin, Zapiski, 269; Vitalii Tretiakov in PK (April 2006), politklass.ru; and Vyacheslav Kostikov quoted by Jean Mackenzie in Russia Review, Feb. 26, 1996, 14. Similarly, see Sergei Markov quoted in Murray, Democracy, 222; Sergei Roy in Moscow News, March 3–9, 1999; Roy Medvedev interviewed by Giulietto Chiesa in FBIS, Aug. 15, 1989, 61; Andranik Migranian in KP, Jan. 23, 1991; and Konrad Lyubarsky and Andrei Pionkovsky quoted by Richard Sakwa in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 261.

95. See, e.g., his memoirs: Eltsin, Zapiski, and Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (New York, 2000); Aron, Yeltsin ; Herbert J. Ellison, Boris Yeltsin and Russia’s Democratic Transformation (Seattle, 2006); and Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin (New York, 2008).

96. Ivan Laptev quoted by Egor Iakovlev, two men who knew Yeltsin well, in OG, Feb. 14 –20, 2002. As is clear from Yeltsin’s memoirs ( Zapiski and Midnight Diaries ), the hatred grew first from an envy of Gorbachev’s top position, then from resentment over having been appointed a candidate rather than a full Politburo member by the leader, and later from humiliation over the way Gorbachev ousted him. (Their relationship is treated by Marc Zlotnik in JCWS [Winter 2003]: 128 –64.) Once Yeltsin had the power, he humiliated Gorbachev in various large and petty ways. Years later, Yeltsin continued to make it clear that “I dislike him” (ORT interview, Oct. 7, 2000, in JRL, Oct. 12, 2000).

97. For the quotes, see, respectively, Yeltsin cited by Sergei Belyayev in FBIS, June 20, 1991, 57 (and, similarly, his radio address in FBIS, June 3, 1991, 74 –75, and quoted by Boris Slavin in Proryv, 151); Riina Kionka in Report, Feb. 1, 1991, 15; Robert V. Daniels in Dissent (Fall 1993): 493; Matlock, Autopsy, 403; and Furman in Proryv, 329. To take an important example, it was reported that “Yeltsin had not read the Five Hundred Days Plan which he was backing so enthusiastically,” while Gorbachev, who opposed it, “had read every word twice” (Braithwaite, Across, 293). Similarly, see Matlock, Autopsy, 418. For examples of Yeltsin’s other conflicting positions, see, on perestroika, FBIS, Jan. 18, 1990, 131; June 3, 1991, 72; and Cherniaev, 1991, 39. And on shock therapy, KP, Aug. 8, 1990; and Izvestiia, Dec. 4, 1991. In one such instance, Gorbachev remarked: “I didn’t understand whether or not this was one and the same person” ( Pravda, April 16, 1991), and, similarly, Poniat, 358, where Gorbachev reports Yeltsin was still sending him Leninist greetings on holidays right up to 1991. Yeltsin’s enemies later itemized his shifting positions. See, e.g., Mikhail Chelnokov, Rossiia bez soiuza, Rossiia bez Rossii (Moscow, 1994), 30 –33; and Viktor Trushkov in Pravda, March 16, 1996. Similarly, see Hough, Democratization, 279, 308, 333–34, 339– 40. Yeltsin later seemed to acknowledge the validity of the charge, at least in part. See Eltsin, Zapiski, 32. For a similar interpretation of Yeltsin’s political nature, see Kagarlitsky, Russia Under, 77–83.

98. Stanislav Shushkevich in Logionv, ed., Piat let, 156. Similarly, see Gennadii Burbulis in Rodina, no. 9 (1995): 74; Sergei Shakhrai in NG, Dec. 10, 1996; Iu. M. Baturin et al., eds., Epokha Eltsina (Moscow, 2001), 181–82; Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, 688, 718; Egor Gaidar in NI, June 1, 2006; and Yeltsin himself and the other Russian writers cited this chapter, n. 74. Many Western scholars agree. See, e.g., Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 438; and Aron, Yeltsin, 472–79. For accounts (and assertions) of Gorbachev’s growing possibilities, see Yuriy Afanasyev in FBIS, Sept. 20, 1991, 20 –21; Grachev, Dalshe, 184, who is quoted here; Boris Slavin in Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 3 (Moscow, 2005), 111; Cheshko, Raspad, 278, and in Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia, 266; and Gorbachev, Poniat, 351–55.

99. FBIS, Dec. 10, 1991, 16. Diverse authors have made this point. See, e.g., Burlatskii, Glotok, 2:201–2; Anatolii Karpychev in Pravda, Jan. 25, 1992; and Simes, After, 65–66. The leader of Soviet Kazakhstan, for example, refused to sign the Belovezh documents on the grounds that “without the agreement of my parliament and government, I can’t sign anything!” (N. A. Nazarbaev in Loginov, ed., Piat let, 157).

100. Braithwaite, Across, 266; Iakovlev, Omyt, 2:82. For other independent Russians, see, e.g., the journalist Vitalii Tretiakov in NG, Dec. 19, 1991, and again in RG, Aug. 19, 2004; the democratic deputy Nikolai Engver quoted by Fred Hiatt in WP, Feb. 5, 1992; the poet Naum Korzhavin in OG, Jan. 11–17, 2001; Cheshko in Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia, 466; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in MN, April 28, 2006. Until they contrived a legal fig leaf, Yeltsin’s aides knew the act was illegal. See A. V. Kozyrev in Loginov, ed., Piat let, 161–62; and the discussion of this issue in Stankevich, Istoriia, 299– 312, and in Walker, Dissolution, 169. In 1998, the Belovezh act was the main article of impeachment brought against Yeltsin by the Communist-led parliament. See SR, Aug. 6, 1998. On fearing arrest, see Viacheslav Kebich quoted by Grigorii Iavlinskii in MN, Feb. 11–18, 1996, Grachev, Gorbachev, 409, Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 351, Hough, Democratization, 482–83; and for the military chief, Gaidar, Dni, 150. For “super-secrecy,” see Eltsin, Zapiski, 150. Kravchuk later remarked that Belovezh “was not for people with weak nerves” (quoted in Wilson, The Ukrainians, 169). Many Western specialists have justified or glossed over Yeltsin’s coup as a “democratic coup d’etat” or Gorbachev having “been voted out of office” (Hosking, First, 498; and Strobe Talbott in NYT, Feb. 24, 2005).

101. See, e.g., Brown, Gorbachev, 287; Hough, Democratization, 459, 481; Brent Scowcroft, VOA interview, in JRL, Dec. 3, 1999; Iurii Afanasev in LG, Sept. 15, 1993; V. A. Nikonov in 10 let, 38 (who contrasts them as follows: “Mikhail Sergeevich liberated East Europe in order to continue reforms… Yeltsin let go the other Soviet republics in order to be done with Gorbachev’s government”); Boris Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels (New York, 1994), 174, Burlatskii, Glotok, 2:201; Ivan Laptev quoted by Egor Iakovlev in OG, Feb. 14 –20, 2002; Cheshko, Raspad, 278; Grachev, Gorbachev, 257; Sergei Parkhomenko and Sergei Stankevich quoted by David Remnick in NY, March 11, 1996, 78, 79; Tatyana Tolstaya in NYRB, June 23, 1994, 3–7; Sazonov, Predateliami, 134; Ilia Milshtein in NV, no. 4 (2006): 13; and even one of Yeltsin’s collaborators at Belovezh, Stanislav Shushkevich in Ogonek, no. 49 (1996): 13. This was, of course, always Gorbachev’s opinion. When asked by Gorbachev what he would tell the people after Belovezh, Yeltsin replied: “I will say I am taking your place” (quoted by N. A. Nazarbaev, who was present, in Loginov, ed., Piat let, 158).

102. Leonid Shebarshin, a former high KGB official, quoted in Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy (New York, 2003), 497. Similarly, Iurii Afanasev in SM, no. 1 (2005): 48; and Shakhnazarov, Tsena, 261. Two of the plotters later bitterly blamed the others for this lack. See Oleg Shenin in Trud, Aug. 19, 2004; and Valentin Varennikov in Zavtra, no. 38 (Sept. 20, 2006). For reflections on the importance of a “will to power” ( volia k vlasti ) at this time, see L. Shevtsova in Izvestiia, May 15, 1991; and for Yeltsin’s need for the Kremlin, Vitalii Tretiakov in PK (July 2006), politklass.ru.

103. Burlatskii, Glotok, 2:186; George F. Kennan in NYRB, Nov. 16, 1995, 8. On the 1917 analogy, see also K. L. Maidanik in “Perestroika” v transformatsion-nom, 76; and Vadim Mezhuev in Proryv, 313.

104. See, e.g., Z. L. Serebriakova in Loginov, ed., Piat let, 111; Osadchii, ed., Ot katastrofy, 24; Grachev, Final Hours, 150; and Aleksandr Afanasev in LG, July 11, 2001. A few authors insist, on the other hand, that “overwhelming majorities… voted to abolish” the Soviet Union, but there is no record of any such voting (M. Steven Fish in PSA [Oct.–Dec. 2001]: 356). Similarly, see V. V. Sogrin in VF, no. 1 (1998): 9; and Ariel Cohen in Washington Times, Aug. 21, 2001. On the contrary, as a Russian with impeccable political credentials put it, Belovezh was “a seizure of power ‘behind the back’ of the people” (Dmitrii Furman in Novaia, June 7–9, 2004). Another Russian scholar thinks “Russians had lost… even the will to struggle—to struggle for the preservation of the country” (Solovei, Russkaia istoriia, 182).

105. Similarly, see Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 353–54. For a different explanation, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton, N.J., 2006), which argues without empirical evidence and unconvincingly that the Soviet people were inwardly, though unknowingly, ready for the end of their state and country.

106. Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 351, 353, where Barsenkov notes that even Gorbachev initially thought this was the case; and Vladimir Kuznechevskii in RG, Dec. 26, 1991. Similarly, see B. Kagarlitskii in SM, no. 1 (2002): 122; Sergei Karaganov cited in RFE /RL, Oct. 7, 2002; and Valerii Bushuev in SM, no. 2 (2005): 121. Even the astute Soviet journalist Otto Latsis termed it “a new version of the union treaty” (quoted in Ellison, Boris Yeltsin, 62). Certainly, that was the impression given by Kravchuk and Shushkevich immediately after Belovezh. See their remarks in A. P. Nenarokov, ed., Nesostoiavshiisia iubilei (Moscow, 1992), 490 –91; and, similarly, Yeltsin’s in Isakov, Raschlenenka, 295–301 and those of his foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, quoted by Fred Hiatt in WP, Dec. 13, 1991. Initial Russian polls favorable to the announced Commonwealth reflected this misperception, not anti-Soviet sentiment, as Beissinger concludes in Nationalist Mobilization, 387.

107. Sergei Markov in Trud, Dec. 15, 2001; and, similarly, Kagarlitskii in SM, no. 1 (2002): 122. Yeltsin and Kravchuk are reported to have worried that “if we go to the people and announce that there is no Union and propose nothing in its place—there will be an inevitable explosion” (Wilson, The Ukranians, 169–70). Yeltsin’s defenders later insisted that “Kravchuk’s separatist interests shattered” the aspiration (Mikhail Leontev in Segodnia, March 1, 1996). Whatever the case, the divergences, or “betrayals,” were immediately apparent. See, e.g., Fred Hiatt in WP, Dec. 13, 1991; and John Lloyd in NR, Jan. 6 and 13, 1992, 18 –20. For the drinking, see Remnick in NY, March 11, 1996, 78 –79; and Sazonov, Predateliami, 135; and for Shushkevich feeling “deceived,” Ogonek, no. 49 (1996): 10 –14. Reports of the influence of alcohol persisted. See, e.g., Yelena Lankina in Moscow News, Dec. 8, 2006; and Alyaksandr Lukashenko cited in RFE /RL, Dec. 8, 2006.

108. The proceedings are reprinted in Isakov, Raschlenenka, 294 –364.

109. Vitalii Tretiakov in NG, June 14, 2000; Gorbachev in Pravda, Aug. 16, 1995, and, similarly, in Novaia zhizn, Oct. 25, 2002.

110. V. I. Sevastianov in Isakov, Raschlenenka, 325. Similarly, see Evgenii Shaposhnikov, Vybor, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1995), 139. For having “rubberstamped,” see Markov in Trud, Dec. 15, 2001.

111. Vadim Pechenev, “Smutnoe vremia” v noveishei istorii Rossii (Moscow, 2004), 88. Similarly, see Markov in Trud, Dec. 15, 2001; Gorbachev, On My Country, 158 –59; and Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 353–56. One deputy who voted against ratification, Sergei Baburin, opposed this misconception at the session ( Natsionalnye interesy, no. 5–6 [2001]: 3). For Yeltsin, see Isakov, Raschlenenka, 295–301; and, similarly, his remarks soon after that the Commonwealth was “capable of preserving the many-centuries-old common political, legal, and economic space, which we almost lost,” as quoted by Fred Hiatt in WP, Dec. 13, 1991.

112. For the quotes, see, respectively, Gennadii Ziuganov in SR, June 26, 2004; Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels, 161; R. A. Medvedev in NNI, no. 2 (2003): 167– 69; and Vartazarova in Zavtra, no. 31 (Aug. 1995). Similarly, on the fears of a “witch hunt” and even a repetition of 1937 and the general mood of Communists, see Prokofev, Do i posle, 266 –68; Markov in Trud, Dec. 15, 2001; Baturin, ed., Epokha, 177; Aleksandr Bessemetnykh in KP, Aug. 31, 1991; Valentin Falin in NYT, Aug. 31, 1991; and Vitaly Ganyushkin in NT, no. 43 (1991): 12–13. For Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, see Vasilii Lipitskii in NG, Aug. 12, 1993.

113. For the military and KGB, see, respectively, Brian D. Taylor and John B Dunlop in JCWS (Winter 2003): 17–66, 94 –127; and for the military, also, Hough, Democratization, 483–89. For a bitter lament over the army’s compliance, see Aleksandr Tsipko in Proryv, 343.

114. Vladislav M. Zubok in Geir Lundestad, ed., The Fall of the Great Powers (Oslo, 1994), 169; and, similarly, Matlock, Autopsy, 400.

115. For examples of the former, see Furman, Nasha, 47–54; Zubok in Lundestad, ed., Fall, 161–66; Buzgalin and Kolganov, Stalin, 51–56, 67–68; Zykin, “Model”; Vadim Belotserkovskii in SM, no. 10 (2005): 94; and Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York, 2000), 256 –74. For the latter, see Egor Gaidar, Gosudarstvo i evolutsiia (Moscow, 1995), 135; Gennadii Lisichkin in LG, Aug. 8, 2001; Olga Kryshtanovskaia, Anatomiia rossiiskoi elity (Moscow, 2005), 318; and Stephen L. Solnick, Stealing the Soviet State (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and, on East Europe, Kramer in JCWS (Fall 2004): 60 –63. Long before, several formerly pro-Soviet Marxists had worried about this possibility, notably Leon Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, first published in 1937; and Milovan Djilas in The New Class (New York, 1957).

116. For the former, see, e.g., Gaidar, Gosudarstvo, chaps. 4 –5; A. B. Chubais in Chubais, ed., Privatizatsiia po-rossiiski (Moscow, 1999), 287–88; Kotz and Weir, Revolution, part 2; and Hough, Democratization, 1–3. For the latter, see Sergei Kara-Murza in SR, Nov. 30, 1995; Iurii Burtin in Oktiabr, no. 8 (1997): 161–76; V. I. Zhukov, Reformy v Rossii 1985–1995 gody (Moscow, 1997), 26; and A. Kolev, Miatezh nomenklatury (Moscow, 1995).

117. For good overviews of the process, see Kryshtanovskaia, Anatomiia, 195– 201, 291–318; A. D. Radygin, Reforma sobstvennosti v Rossii (Moscow, 1994), 48 –57; R. Nureev and A. Runov in VE, no. 6 (2000): 18 –31; Andrew Barnes, Owning Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006), chap. 3; and, in Moscow, Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels . For an insider view of the process in the oil industry, see Lev Tchurilov, Lifeblood of Empire (New York, 1996), chap. 17.

118. See Barnes, Owning, chap. 3; for the Communist Party youth organization, Solnick, Stealing ; for a partial inventory of the Party’s property, KP, June 4, 1998; and for the military, Col. A. Kandalovskii in KP, Nov. 27, 1991. The best-known example and trend-setter was Viktor Chernomyrdin, Soviet minister for gas and oil, who became head and billionaire shareholder of the privatized gas giant Gazprom. See Marshall I. Goldman, The Piratization of Russia (London, 2003), chap. 6.

119. Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels, 155.

120. A number of scholars have emphasized this point. See, e.g., Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions (New York, 1999); and Robert V. Daniels, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia (New Haven, Conn., 2007), chap. 32. For republic leaders who wanted to be presidents like Gorbachev, see Vorotnikov, A bylo, 366 –67; and Grachev, Gorbachev, 323.

121. As Fedor Burlatskii pointed out early on, in Izvestiia, Feb. 10, 1990. Similarly, see Sazonov, Predateliami, 43, 72.

122. As many scholars and observers concluded. See, e.g., Jeff Hahn in PSA (Jan.–March 2000): 64 –68; Tuminez in JCWS (Fall 2003): 82, 126, 133; S. Barzilov and A. Chernyshov in SM, no. 4 (2002): 44 – 45; Roi Medvedev in OI, no. 4 (2003): 114; and Cheshko, Raspad, 238, 263, for a similar point. In Nationalist Mobilization (36 –37), Beissinger argues, to the contrary, that elites did not create but followed popular “tidal forces” of nationalism, though he appears to contradict himself on 428 –29.

123. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 428 –29; and, similarly, Pankin, Last, 266 –67. In this connection, Shevardnadze warned the Bush administration against trusting Kravchuk (Bush and Scowcroft, A World, 554).

124. Aleksei Kiva in PG, April 4, 2003; Iurii Afanasev, ed., Sovetskoe obshchestvo, (Moscow, 1997), 2:595; Medvedev in OI, no. 4 (2003): 112. Similarly, see Pankin, Last, 269, who speaks of “imposed dissolution”; Cheshko, Raspad, 282, who calls it “abolition” ( otmena ); Josef Joffe in NYT, Feb. 10, 2003, who terms it “suicide by self-destruction”; and Samuilov in SM, no. 3 (2006): 42, who prefers “self-liquidation” ( samolikvidatsii ).

125. John Higley and György Lengyel, eds., Elites After State Socialism (Boulder, Colo., 2000), 237; and Solnick, Stealing, 7. Similarly, see Kotz and Weir, Revolution ; Fritz W. Ermarth in National Interest (Spring 1999): 6; Furman, Nasha, 53–54; Nureev and Runov in VE, no. 6 (2000): 18 –31; and Gaidar, Gosudarstvo, chap. 4. For other arguments that property was not the primary cause of the Soviet breakup, see Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 8; Ellman and Kontorovich, eds., Destruction, 3, 27; David Lockwood, The Destruction of the Soviet Union (New York, 2000), 130 –32; and Latsis, Tshchatelno, 461–62. Many overviews of various factors do not even include property. See, e.g., Holmes Post-Communism, chap. 2; Smith, Fall ; Leon Aron on the “mystery” of the Soviet breakup in JOD (April 2006): 21–35; and the sources in this chapter, n. 19.

126. For the argument, see Bunce, Subversive Institutions ; and Daniels, Rise and Fall, chap. 32.

127. Private communication from a former Kremlin staffer. That is, “they were not all prepared to fight for their independence” (Cheshko, Raspad, 275). Also, see this chapter, n. 122.

128. For the argument that the outcome was a post-Soviet system based on “nomenklatura capitalism,” see Iurii Burtin, Ispoved shestidesiatnika (Moscow, 2003), 330 –71; and, similarly, Boris Kagarlitskii, Restavratsiia v Rossii (Moscow, 2000); Stanislav Menshikov, Anatomiia rossiiskogo kapitalizma (Moscow, 2004), 21–34; Andrei Bunich, Osen oligarkhov (Moscow, 2005); Aleksandr Lebed in MN, May 12–19, 1996; and Kotz and Weir, Revolution .

129. An Estonian independence activist quoted by R. Kh. Simonian in VI, no. 12 (2002): 37.

130. A point emphasized by Hahn, in a somewhat different context, in PSA (Jan.–March 2000): 60; and by a Russian writer who remarked, “Yeltsin threw the match” (Lisichkin in LG, Aug. 8, 2001). For Gorbachev, see Novaia, Feb. 21–23, 2005.

131. For the quotes, see Nikolai Nikolaev in Novaia, Aug. 15–17, 2005; and Leonid Zamiatin in NV, no. 16 (1997): 17. For a survey of the economic and political preferences of the Moscow elite in mid-1991, see Judith S. Kullberg in EAS 46, no. 6 (1994): 929–53.

132. For Gorbachev, see, respectively, Pravda, June 1 and 17, 1991; FBIS, May 16, 1991, 34, and Sept. 19, 1991, 20. For perestroika, see Tsipko in LG, Jan. 19, 2005; and, similarly, N. Bikkenin in SM, no. 11 (2000): 102; A. V. Riabov in “Perestroika” v transformatsionnom, 56 –60; Vladlen Loginov in Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 3, 159; and Gorbachev himself in Poniat, 375. In the end, in order to negotiate a new Union treaty, Gorbachev had to increasingly cede property on their territories to the republics. See Barsenkov, Vvedenie, 117; and Cheshko, Raspad, 268, 272.

133. For similar interpretations, see Furman, Nasha, 50 –54; and Kotz and Weir, Revolution, chaps. 7–8. The personal values of Gorbachev, for whom “the pursuit of property was not a motivating force,” were also important; while in power, he did not even own a dacha. See Archie Brown and Oksana Gaman-Golutvina in Brown, ed., Contemporary Russian Politics (New York, 2001), 290 –91, 307; Aleksandr Iakovlev and Gorbachev in MN, March 11, 2005 (and, similarly, Tsipko in Proryv, 344); and Sazonov, Predateliami, 170. Elsewhere, Tsipko points out Yakovlev’s refusal even to “privatize his state dacha,” though it was a commonplace practice after 1991 ( VA, no. 2 [2006]: 217). For an opposing view insisting that Gorbachev, too, had abandoned socialism, see Stanislav Menshikov in Monthly Review (Oct. 1997): 51–52; and Boris Kagarlitsky in In These Times, April 14, 1997.

134. Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 34, 89, 171–72, 253.

135. For somewhat different versions of Yeltsin’s exhortation, see Hahn in PSA (Jan.–March 2000): 64; and Stankevich, Istoriia, 257. For the reformer, see Fedor Burlatsky in WP, Nov. 10, 1991. Gorbachev later remarked that Yeltsin had “solved this problem of the nomenklatura simply: he gave it everything” ( Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 1 [Moscow, 2003], 163); and, similarly, in PK, no. 2 (2005): 57. And indeed observers quickly noticed that republic officials were in “a rush to seize all-union property and to declare ‘sovereignty’ over local resources” (Serge Schmemann in NYT, Oct. 8, 1991).

136. For example, he gave Moscow’s mayor some of the city’s valuable real estate; gave Kravchuk traditional Russian territories and valuable holdings in Ukraine; and, it seems, gave generals their state-owned dachas (David K. Shipler in NY, Nov. 11, 1991, 50; Liudmila Butuzova in MN, Aug. 19, 2005; Nikolai Ryzhkov in NS, no. 10 [2006]: 198; and Hough Democratization, 487–88). For Yeltsin’s confiscations, see this chapter, note 82. For the elites, see Pankin, Last, 257; Grachev, Gorbachev, 287; and, similarly, Hahn in PSA (Jan.–March 2000): 60, 76.

137. Pavel Voshchanov quoted by Vladimir Isakov in SR, Dec. 7, 1996.

6. GORBACHEV’S LOST LEGACIES

1. Or as his leading interpreter has written: “the country Gorbachev bequeathed to his successors was freer than at any time in Russian history” Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World [New York, 2007], 330). On Gorbachev as democratizer, see also Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York, 1997); and his contributions to Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova, eds., Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin (Washington, D.C., 2001).

2. See, e.g., Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York, 1987), 57; M. S. Gorbachev, Izbrannye rechi i stati, 7 vols. (Moscow, 1987–1990), 4:316; and in Izvestiia, April 17, 1991.

3. Charles Krauthammer in WP, April 27, 2007; NYT editorial, May 9, 2000; David Remnick in NY, May 21, 2001, 37. Similarly, see Margaret Shapiro in WP, Dec. 9, 1993; Michael Wines in NYT, June 5, 2000; and Trudy Rubin in Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 13, 2003. For an early example of this revisionism, see NR editorial, Sept. 9, 1991, 7–9. President Bill Clinton led the way. See the exchange on “democracy” and “reform” in his joint press conference with Yeltsin, in WP, April 5, 1993. Even later, Clinton’s national security adviser insisted that Yeltsin “should be remembered as the father of Russian democracy” (Samuel R. Berger in WP, Nov. 15, 2001).

4. Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul in PPC (July/Aug. 2003): 12. Similarly, see Michael McFaul, Nikolai Petrov, and Andrei Ryabov, Between Dictatorship and Democracy (Washington, D.C., 2004), esp. 2; and McFaul in The Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2000): 42. It is a central theme of three American biographies of Yeltsin, though more balanced in the latter one: Leon Aron, Yeltsin (New York, 2000); Herbert J. Ellison, Boris Yeltsin and Russia’s Democratic Transformation (Seattle, 2006); and Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin (New York, 2008). In contrast, see this chapter, n. 1; Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms (Washington, D.C., 2001); Robert V. Daniels in The Nation, Oct. 20, 2008, 30 –36; and Russia’s leading political scientist, Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia (Washington, D.C., 1999) and her Russia—Lost in Transition (Washington, D.C., 2007).

5. See, e.g., Iu. M. Baturin et al., eds., Epokha Eltsina (Moscow, 2001); Oleg Moroz, Khronika liberalnoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 2005); and Marsha Lipman cited by David Hoffman in WP, May 8, 1999, who is quoted here.

6. Eduard Samoilov in NG, Oct. 13, 1992. Similarly, see Vladimir Motyl in Izvestiia, Sept. 7, 1991; and Olga Chaikovskaia in LG, Oct. 21, 1992.

7. See, respectively, Michael Wines in NYT, June 14, 2001; Liesl Schillinger in NYT Book Review, July 2, 2006; Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, June 16, 2003, 33; and Nicholas D. Kristof in NYT, Dec. 15, 2004.

8. See, respectively, Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York, 1994), 499; Stephen Kotkin in JMH (June 1998): 406; Adam Ulam in TLS, Nov. 6, 1992, 23; Edward W. Walker, Dissolution (Lanham, Md., 2003), 170; Rajan Menon in The Harriman Forum (Spring 1997): 13; and Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (New York, 2002), 441. Similarly, see M. Steven Fish in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 241– 53; this book, chap. 4, n. 85; the critical comments on part of this chapter by Karen Dawisha and Stephen E. Hansen in Slavic Review (Fall 2004): 527–52; Glennys Young on “triumphalist belief” among historians, in RR (Jan. 2007): 100, 117; and, on the “mythical” alternatives NEP and perestroika, Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York, 1998), 172; and Martin Malia in Daedalus (Spring 1992): 74. For dissenters from the revived no-alternative orthodoxy, see Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, esp. 5, 9, 16, 252–55, 636 – 41; Nelson and Kuzes, Radical Reform; Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR (Washington, D.C., 1997); Brown, Gorbachev, chaps. 5–9; Robert V. Daniels, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia (New Haven, Conn., 2007), part 4; and Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (New York, 2005), chap. 27.

9. Richard E. Ericson in Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1991): 25; and Eugene Huskey in APSR (Dec. 1998): 968. Similarly, see Michael McFaul in FA (Jan.–Feb. 1995): 89; Malia in Daedalus (Spring 1992): 69; Richard Pipes in Commentary (March 1992): 30 –31; and, for more examples and a discussion, Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade, updated ed. (New York, 2001), 40 – 42, 293n. 69.

10. See, respectively, Vitalii Tretiakov in MN, Nov. 26, 1989; Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened (New York, 1991), 171; and James Billington in NYT Book Review, June 17, 1990.

11. A. S. Cherniaev, Shest let s Gorbachevym (Moscow, 1993), 345; Gorbachev quoted on “heresy” by Valerii Badov in RT, Aug. 30, 1990; and by Anatolii Strelianyi in Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 12 (1990): 12; Gorbachev in Izvestiia, March 25, 1991; William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 94; and David Price-Jones, The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire (New York, 1995), 5. See also Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, Gorbachev (New York, 1990), who reported early on that fundamentalists feared the “Soviet government had been hijacked by a heretic” (176).

12. Michael McFaul in WP, Sept. 30, 2000. See also this chapter, n. 4; and, similarly, Padmai Desai, Conversations on Russia (New York, 2006), vii–viii, 3.

13. For such “modernization,” see A. V. Fadin in Kentavr (Jan.–Feb. 1993): 92–97; and for the tradition, Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy.

14. For the quotes, see, respectively, LG, Dec. 4, 1991; Materialy obedinennogo plenuma tsentralnogo komiteta i tsentralnoi kontrolnoi kommissii KPSS (Moscow, 1991), 8; M. S. Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii (Moscow, 1993), 10; Gorbachev, Izbrannye, 4:327, 360; and Pravda, July 26, 1991. A top Gorbachev aide characterized their goal as a “non-catastrophic” transformation (Vadim Medvedev, V komande Gorbacheva [Moscow, 1994], 234).

15. The first quote is from Tatiana Vorozheikina in ONS, no. 5 (2005): 17–22. See also this chapter, n. 28. The strongest proponents of perestroika as a “lost alternative” and the Soviet breakup as a “tragic mistake” were, of course, Gorbachev partisans. See, e.g., four publications on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his rise to power: Proryv k svobode (Moscow, 2005); “Perestroika” v transformatsionnom kontekste (Moscow, 2005); V. I. Tolstykh, ed., Perestroika (Moscow, 2005); and Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 3 (Moscow, 2005). For Gorbachev himself, see, e.g., his Poniat perestroiku… (Moscow, 2006), esp. 365–79; M. S. Gorbachev and B. F. Slavin, Neokonchennaia istoria, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 2005); and, of course, his memoirs, Gorbachev, Zhizn i reformy, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1995).

16. Colton and McFaul in PPC (July/Aug. 2003): 20

17. Vitalii Tretiakov in RG, Nov. 19, 2003; and, similarly, A. V. Buzgalin in JRL, Feb. 2, 2002.

18. Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, in MT, July 7, 2005. Similarly, see Yevgenia Albats quoted by Oksana Yabloka in MT, June 7, 2006. Gorbachev’s own daughter lamented, “Journalism now is a dangerous business” (quoted by Gregory L. White in WSJ, Dec. 1–2, 2007).

19. Russians involved in the 1989 and 1990 campaigns later made this point. See, e.g., Alla Iaroshinskaia and Boris Vishnevskii in Novaia, March 25–28, 2004, and March 21–23, 2005.

20. See Valerii Vyzhutovich in Izvestiia, May 4, 1994; Konrad Liubarskii and Aleksandr Sobianin in NV, no. 15 (1995): 6 –12; and Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 96 –97.

21. M. Steven Fish in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 248; and Aleksandr Kolesnichenko in NI, Nov. 13, 2006. Similarly, see Boris Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels (New York, 1994), 5, 16; Grigorii Iavlinskii in Itogi, March 20, 2004; and Dmitrii Furman in NG, March 3, 2008.

22. For Gorbachev’s reluctance, see Jonathan Steele, Eternal Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 261. Oddly, Steele nevertheless concludes that Gorbachev merely “paid lip-service to the notion of parliament” (256). Reading the published proceedings of the Soviet legislatures of 1989 through 1991 is a vivid reminder of a singular political moment in Russia to date.

23. Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White in PSA (Oct.–Dec. 2003): 289– 306; and Kryshtanovskaya quoted by Arkady Ostovsky in FT, Feb. 24, 2003. For a full study, see Olga Kryshtanovskaia, Anatomiia rossiiskoi elity (Moscow, 2005).

24. Yakovlev in NV, no. 32 (2004): 21. For a more measured analysis of civil society during and after perestroika, see Gorbachevskie chteniia, no. 5 (Moscow, 2007).

25. Jonathan Weiler, Human Rights in Russia (Boulder, Colo., 2004), 2. In 2005, the leading civil rights activist, Sergei Kovalev, said that the “human rights situation in Russia is simply catastrophic” (Radio Ekho Moskvy, Sept. 22, 2005). The early stage of this development after Gorbachev is discussed by several contributors to Carol R. Saivetz and Anthony Jones, eds., In Search of Pluralism (Boulder, Colo., 1994).

26. L. Piiasheva in Pravda, April 21, 1995; Liliia Shevtsova in Valentin Tolstykh, ed., Mnogaia leta: Mikhailu Gorbachevu—70 (Moscow, 2001), 453; Gavriil Popov, Snova v oppozitsii (Moscow, 1994), 81.

27. Mikhail Khodorkovskii quoted by Anastasia Kornia in NG, Sept. 12, 2005. The adage continues: “And anyone who thinks it can be reconstructed has no head.” There are harsher variations: “Everyone except perhaps liberals and other members of the ‘fifth column’ regret the breakup of the USSR. Sensible people can’t conduct themselves otherwise” (L. G. Ivashov in SR, Dec. 7, 2006).

28. Aleksandr Galkin in Proryv, 86. For examples of non-Gorbachevists, see Dmitrii Furman in SM, no. 11 (2003): 9–30 and his Nasha strannaia revoluitsiia (Moscow, 1998), part 1; Fedor Burlatskii in NG, March 2, 2001; Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 14 –15; Boris Kagarlitskii in SM, no. 1 (2002): 122; and Aleksandr Buzgalin in JRL, Jan. 21, 2000. On the other hand, Russians directly involved in the abolition of the Soviet state or the ensuing Yeltsin regime were politically constrained from rethinking what had happened. See, e.g., Baturin et al., eds., Epokha Eltsina, and the latter two authors of Joel M. Ostrow, Georgiy A. Saratov, and Irina M. Khakamada, The Consolidation of Dictatorship in Russia, (Westport, Conn., 2007). It was also true of non-Russian citizens, as, e.g., Andrei Shleifer, A Normal Country (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). Of course, there were also Russian intellectuals who thought there had been no perestroika alternative. See, e.g., V. V. Sogrin in ONS, no. 4 (2002): 95–100; and a number of contributors to Baturin et al., eds., Epokha Eltsina .

29. See, respectively, Mortimer B. Zuckerman in US News and World Report, Feb. 26, 2007; Stephen Sestanovich in WP, March 3, 2005; WP editorial, Dec. 11, 2007; NYT editorial, Sept. 14, 2004; and Michael McFaul in WS, Nov. 17, 2003. Indeed, the New York Times initiated a series of articles devoted to “Putin’s Counterrevolution” (see nytimes.com/world ). Similarly, see WP editorial, Nov. 16, 2003, and Feb. 8, 2007; Fred Hiatt in WP, Sept. 20, 2004; Amy Knight in TLS, May 28, 2004, 7; McFaul in WP Book World, Feb. 6, 2005, 8; Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kremlin Rising (New York, 2005); Colton and McFaul in PPC (July/Aug. 2003): 12; McFaul, Petrov, and Ryabov, Between Dictatorship, esp. 2; McFaul in The Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2000): 42; Aron, Yeltsin ; Ellison, Boris Yeltsin ; and Colton, Yeltsin .

30. See, e.g., Fiona Hill in JRL, Nov. 28, 2003; this chapter, n. 1; Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy ; Daniels in The Nation, Oct. 20, 2008, 30 –36; and Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia . For “rollback,” see, among many others, Philip P. Pan in WP, Sept. 21, 2008.

31. Anders Aslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C., 1995), 2. The very few include Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy ; Brown, Seven Years ; Daniels, Rise and Fall, part 4; Lynn D. Nelson and Irina Y. Kuzes, Property to the People (Armonk, N.Y., 1994), esp. 31–32; and, perhaps alone among mainstream American journalists, William Pfaff in IHT, Sept. 24, 1999. As Reddaway and Glinski remind us (2), most Western commentators “exulted” over the Soviet breakup. Indeed, an American political scientist warned against anyone ready to “forgive a communist leader who thought [democratization] might be possible” (Karen Dawisha in APSR [June 1999]: 476).

32. See, e.g., Robert Service, Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 4 –5 and chap. 22.

33. See, e.g., Valerie Bunce in PSA (Oct.–Dec. 1998): 324 –25, 348; Gordon M. Hahn and Walter D. Connor in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 166, 189; and David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above (New York, 1997), 6 –7. For Russian objections to the “myth,” see Karen Brutents in SM, no. 1 (2005): 174; Viktor Kuvaldin in Olga Zdravomyslova, ed., 10 let bez SSSR (Moscow, 2002), 110; Dmitriy Ryurikov, Russia Survives (Washington, D.C., 1999), 15–18; and Ignat Pavlov in SM, no. 7–8 (2006): 223.

34. The nineteenth-century conservative thinker M. N. Katkov quoted by Kirill Aleksandrov in NV, no. 27 (2005): 8; and, similarly, Anatolii Karpychev in Pravda, Jan. 25, 1992.

35. Even one of Yeltsin’s former press secretaries could still write nearly fifteen years later, “We can in no way understand what the disintegration of the USSR meant for us” (Viacheslav Kostikov in AF, Nov. 9, 2005).

36. A. S. Barsenkov and A. I. Vdovin, Istoriia Rossii, 1938–2002 (Moscow, 2003), 382–93. For the correspondent, see John Lloyd in NR, Jan. 6 and 13, 1992, 18.

37. See, e.g., Lilia Shevtsova in Anne de Tinguy, ed., The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 86; A. V. Buzgalin in JRL, Feb. 2, 2002; Dmitrii Furman in SM, no. 11 (2003): 9–30; Ryurikov, Russia, 15–20; Aleksandr Panarin in LG, Feb. 20, 2002; and, similarly, Vladimir Putin, kremlin.ru (Sept. 2, 2005). For similar formulations of “revolution from above” in 1991, but without the historical reference to Stalin’s, see Kotz and Weir, Revolution ; and Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002); and for one with the analogy, V. P. Danilov in T. I. Zaslavskaia and L. A. Arutiunian, eds., Kuda idet Rossiia? vol. 1 (Moscow, 1994), 125–26.

38. See this volume, chap. 5, n. 100; and, similarly, Julia Wishnevsky in Report, Nov. 13, 1992, 22.

39. See, e.g., Aleksandr Tsipko, in KP, Nov. 7, 1991, and in VA, no. 3 (2008): 29; Burlatsky in WP, Nov. 10, 1991; Anatolii Sobchak in LG, Jan. 15, 1992; Viktor Petrovskii in NG, Feb. 26, 1993; Furman, Nasha, 73–74; S. V. Cheshko in G. N. Sevostianov, ed., Tragediia velikoi derzhavy (Moscow, 2005), 466; Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, whose subtitle is Market Bolshevism Against Democracy ; and, similarly, Nelson and Kuzes, Radical Reform, 12–16. In Russia, we are told, “there is almost general agreement” that the ideology of post-Soviet Yeltsinism was “Soviet Communist ideology turned inside out” (Boris Kagarlitsky, Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin [London, 2002], 55).

40. For a similar point, see Joel Hellman in Andrew C. Kuchins, ed., Russia After the Fall (Washington, D.C., 2002), 96; and, early on, Vasilii Lipitskii in NG, Aug. 12, 1993.

41. Dmitrii Furman in SM, no. 11 (2003): 12. Even a democratic reformer known for her moderation called Belovezh “simply high treason” (Tatyana I. Zaslavskaya in Demokratizatsiya [Spring 2005]: 299).

42. Nikolai Shmelev in Trud, April 13, 2005. The extent of poverty was disputed. Following official Russian statistics, many Western commentators thought it affected less than 20 percent of the people. Shmelev, a highly respected economist of moderate views, put the figure at “70 to 80 percent,” which was almost certainly correct. For production, see Ryurikov, Russia, 19.

43. Iurii Afanasev in SM, no. 11 (2004): 3. Similarly, see Nikolai Petrakov, Ekonomicheskaia “Santa-Barbara” (Moscow, 2000), 223; and Vitalii Tretiakov in NG, Dec. 18, 1999, and in Novaia, Sept. 8 –10, 2005.

44. For the first episode, see K. V. Kharchenko, Vlast-imushchestvo-chelovek (Moscow, 2000); for the second, V. Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1999–).

45. Aleksandr Tsipko in LG, May 23, 2001.

46. Aleksandr Libman in SM, no. 9 (2005): 54. Similarly, see Aleksandr Panarin in LG, Feb. 20, 2002; Garri Kasparov in Novaia, Dec. 15, 2008; and Hellman in Kuchins, ed., Russia, 106. For the nomenklatura’s “top-down” wishes, see Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 34, 268, 319.

47. For a fuller account of these developments, see Cohen, Failed Crusade, 135– 41, 158 –77; and Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (New York, 2000), 232–34.

48. For a fuller account, see Cohen, Failed Crusade, part 2.

49. Tatyana I. Zaslavskaya in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 312, uses a more decorous translation. For the “off-shore” elite, see V. Iu. Surkov, Osnovnye tendentsii i perspektivy razvitiia sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow, 2007), 32. Surkov, the Kremlin ideologist, used the expression for his own purposes but not entirely unfairly, adding that the elite does not “see its future or the future of its children in Russia.” For the survey, see VN, Aug. 24, 2005; and, similarly, NG, Aug. 16, 2005.

50. Aleksandr Tsipko in LG, Dec. 20, 2006.

51. See, e.g., James H. Billington, Russia Transformed (New York, 1992); and Malia, Soviet Tragedy . For a discussion of their persistence and the policy implications, see Cohen, Failed Crusade .

52. Aleksandr Zinoviev in Zavtra, no. 2 (1993). For “exulting,” see Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 2.

53. See Thomas L. Friedman in NYT, Aug. 2, 2006; Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 485, 487, and in PC (Jan.–April 1992): 93; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire (New York, 1993), 219, 230 (and, similarly, Billington, Russia ); Bukovsky in NR, Jan. 6 and 13, 1992, 44; Leon Aron in Commentary (December 2006): 20; Service, Russia, 338; and Marshall T. Poe, The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton, N.J., 2003), 89. Gordon M. Hahn is similarly critical of this myth, in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 167, as are Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy . An equally large myth saw the breakup freeing “reformers in the republics” from “reactionaries in the center” (Roman Szporluk in NYT, Jan. 23, 1991). In reality, freed from a reforming Soviet Moscow, reactionaries took control of property and power in many republics.

54. For this development, see Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, chaps. 5–6; and, similarly, Judith Delvin, The Rise of the Russian Democrats (Brookfield, Vt., 1995), chap. 8. For the quote, see Egor Gaidar, Gosudarstvo i evolutsiia (Moscow, 1995), 135.

55. Vek XX, no. 6 (1990): 15–19. Dated March 30, 1990, this little-known document was drafted by a group headed by Chubais, later Yeltsin’s leading practitioner of shock-therapy privatization (see V. Ia. Gelman in ONS, no. 4 [1997]: 66 –67; and Boris Vishnevskii in NG, Feb. 14, 1998). It grew out of a larger debate, begun in 1989, over the need for an “iron-hand” regime in the Soviet transition. It may be that these anti-Marxist intellectuals initially “favored the free market more than democracy” (Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, 59), but once in power they did not practice either.

56. Stanislav Shatalin in FBIS, March 27, 1991, 29. Similarly, see Ales Adamovich in FBIS, Nov. 27, 1992; and Svetlana Klishina in Izvestiia, April 17, 1992. For the preceding quote, see Valentin Tolstykh, ed., O strategii rossiiskogo razvitiia (Moscow, 2003), 198; and, similarly, Gelman on their views, in ONS, no. 4 (1997): 66 –67. For early alarm over the fate of elected soviets, see German Diligensky in NT, no. 51 (1991): 16 –17; and Tatiana Vorozheikina in Vek XX, no. 1 (1992): 25–30. A property-driven campaign against the Moscow Soviet was already under way. See Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels . For Russia and the “Pinochet Option” in international context, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York, 2007), chaps. 11–12.

57. Natalia Borova in LG, July 11–17, 2007; and, similarly though less harshly, Devlin, The Rise, 258.

58. For continued “dreaming of a Russian Pinochet,” see Nikolai Rabotiazev in NG, Sept. 23, 2000. Similarly, see Vitalii Naishul in LG, Nov. 30 –Dec. 6, 1995; Boris Vishnevskii on Alfred Kokh in Novaia, Feb. 28 –March 3, 2002; Andrei Riabov on Gaidar in Novaia, Feb. 16 –19, 2006; Oleg Liakhovich’s apologia for Pinochet in Moscow News, Dec. 15–21, 2006; and Irina Khakamada quoted by Michael Spector in NYT Magazine, Jan. 29, 2007, 57. For similar Russian criticisms of the role of “liberals” in de-democratization, see note 39. Even some of Chubais’s admirers admit he was uninterested in democracy. See, e.g., Leonid Radzikhovskii in RG, May 31, 2005; and M. Berger and O. Proskurina, Krest Chubaisa (Moscow, 2008). A few of Yeltsin’s intellectual supporters later regretted the antidemocratic consequences of his measures. See, e.g., Evgenii Iasin in MN, Nov, 11, 2003; and Evgenii Kiselev in Novaia, Oct. 6 –8, 2008. For a “lighthearted” and distasteful self-justification of the role played by Chubais’s team, see Alfred Kokh and Igor Svinarenko, A Crate of Vodka (New York, 2009).

59. For this sad episode, see Cohen, Failed Crusade.

60. Following “liberals,” see, respectively, Natalia Gevorkian in Liberaly o narode (Moscow, 2006), 43; Yuri Karyakin quoted in Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1997), 20; Dmitrii Furman in OG, July 12–18, 2001; Viktor Erofeyev in NYT, Feb. 29, 2008; and Alfred Kokh quoted by Vladimir Shlapentokh in EAS (Nov. 1999): 1168. Similarly, see Galina Starovoitova in NG, July 30, 1991; the letter to Putin signed by intellectuals in Izvestiia, Dec. 5, 2000; Kokh quoted in SR, Feb. 2, 2002; Kokh and Svinarenko, Crate ; Artemii Troitskii in Novaia, Nov. 24 –26, 2003; Vladimir Gryaznevich in St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 7, 2006; and Sergei Kovalev in NYRB, Nov. 22, 2007. Liberaly o narode is a malicious but representative sampler of such statements, and Sinyavsky, Russian Intelligentsia, a protest against them, esp. 16, 20 –21, 31.

61. S. A. Korobov in SR, Aug. 19, 2006. For the argument that there were post-Soviet alternatives to shock therapy in 1992, see, e.g., Aleksei Kiva in SM, no. 2 (2007): 64 –65; and Vadim Belotserkovski in SM no. 12 (2007): 54 –55.

62. Shevtsova in Tolstykh, ed., Mnogaia, 453.

63. Gorbachev’s speech on receiving the American National Constitution Center’s 2008 Liberty Award (Sept. 19, 2008), on the Center’s Web site. More fully, see Gorbachev, Zhizn i reformy, vol. 2. For historians and participants, see this chapter, n. 75.

64. Dan Bilefsky and Michael Schwirtz in NYT, Sept. 8, 2008. Similarly, see the survey of Russians reported in Novaia, Aug. 11–13, 2008; the Ossetian quoted by Andrew Kramer and Ellen Barry in NYT, Sept. 11, 2008; the Russians by Michael Schwirtz in NYT, Sept. 30, 2008; the Georgian by Ellen Barry in NYT, Oct. 10, 2008; and V. Trifimov in SR, Sept. 20, 2008, who wrote: “America fought Russia… in South Ossetia.” Henry Kissinger and George Schultz worried that the war “will be treated as a metaphor for a larger conflict” ( WP, Oct. 8, 2008). And rightly so. See, e.g., Aleksei Bogaturov and Aleksei Fenenko in SM, no. 11 (2008), who, from a Russian perspective, see the war as a watershed moment in U.S.-Russia relations. For the background and an analysis, see George Friedman in NYRB, Sept. 25, 2008, 24 –26.

65. For the surprise, see, e.g., the report of the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute in JRL, Aug. 31, 2008; and a U.S. military officer responsible for Georgian affairs quoted by Helene Cooper and Thorn Shanker in NYT, Aug. 13, 2008. Similarly, see the war having been a “shock” that “jolted” the Bush administration, as remarked by Stephen Sestanovish in FA (Nov./Dec. 2008): 12, and reported by Stephen Lee Myers and Thom Shanker in NYT, Aug. 15, 2008.

66. Rice in JRL, Jan. 24, 2008; and David Ignatius in WP, Sept. 4, 2008. Similarly, see Michael McFaul’s congressional testimony in JRL, Sept. 9, 2008; Ambassador William J. Burns in JRL, Nov. 12, 2007; John R. Bolton in WP, Oct. 20, 2008; Ronald D. Asmus and Richard Holbrooke in WP, Aug. 11, 2008; U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in JRL, Oct. 24, 2007; WS editorial, Aug, 25, 2008, 7; and Robert Kagan in NR, April 23, 2008, 44.

67. On the latter point, see, e.g., U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Matthew Bryza in JRL, Sept. 24, 2008; on ideology, see Tom Nichols, National Review Online, Dec. 8, 2008; and for all of the reasons, see Pavel K. Baev in AAASS Newsnet, Oct. 2007, 1. The points appear regularly in official and media statements, but for a sophisticated defense of the argument see Brown, Seven Years, 240 – 41.

68. Robert Kagan in WP, May 2, 2008, is supported by Stephen Kotkin in NYT, July 6, 2008. In 2003, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow complained that a “values gap” was the main obstacle in the relationship (quoted by Stephen Sestanovich in FA [Nov./Dec. 2008]: 12, though here I am quoting Ronald D. Asmus in WP, Dec. 13, 2008). For ideologues on the American side, see, e.g., Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York, 2008); Sestanovich in FA (Nov./Dec. 2008): 12–28; McFaul’s congressional testimony in JRL, Sept. 9, 2008; Council of Foreign Relations, Russia’s Wrong Direction, Task Force Report No. 57 (New York, 2006); most of the Russia-related events of the American Enterprise Institute, as, e.g., the one reported in JRL, Oct. 15, 2008; and for an Anglo-American example, Edward Lucas, The New Cold War (New York, 2008). On charges that Putin’s Russia is “fascist” or analogous to Nazi Germany, see, e.g., Leon Wieseltier in NR, Feb. 27, 2008, 48; Richard Pipes’s letter in FT, July 22, 2008; Zbigniew Brzezinski interviewed at huffingtonpost.com , Aug. 8, 2008; and WP editorial, Sept. 2, 2008.

69. See Friedman in NYRB, Sept. 25, 2008, 24 –26.

70. Steven Lee Myers in NYT, Aug. 16, 2008; and for the preceding quote, NYT editorial, Aug. 27, 2008.

71. Almost immediately in 1985, for example, Gorbachev privately nullified the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which gave the Kremlin the right to decide the domestic and foreign policies of Eastern Europe’s Communist states, and made clear his intention to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. See Brown, Seven Years, 242– 43.

72. For the history of “New Thinking,” see Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West (New York, 2000); for its application, Brown, Seven Years, chap. 9; and for insider accounts of the new policies, Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park, PA, 2000), Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev’s Gamble (Malden, Mass., 2008), and Jack F. Matlock Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev (New York, 2004).

73. Quoted in Norman A. Graebner, Richard Dean Burns, and Joseph M. Siracusa, Reagan, Bush, Gorbachev (Westport, Conn., 2008), 142. Similarly, see Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev, xiv, and for “another era,” 302.

74. Bush quoted in Graebner et al., Reagan, 130. On Malta “symbolically representing the end of the… Cold War world,” see Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition (Washington, D.C., 1994), 404 –8.

75. See, e.g., Graebner, et. al., Reagan ; Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev ; Grachev, Gorbachev’s Gamble ; Brown, Seven Years, chap. 9; Kiron K. Skinner, ed., Turning Points in Ending the Cold War (Stanford, Calif., 2008); William C. Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (Baltimore, Md., 1996); and Dick Combs, Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe (University Park, Penn., 2008), chaps. 9–10.

76. George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, 1998), xiv; Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany United and Europe Transformed (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 363. Reagan agreed: “I think both sides won” (quoted by Jack Matlock Jr. in Desai, Conversations on Russia, 331). The secretary general of NATO concurred: “There are no losers, only winners,” as quoted by Flora Lewis in NYT, July 21, 1990.

77. At the Republican National Convention later that year, Patrick J. Buchanan, one of Bush’s rivals for the nomination, gave primarily Reagan and secondarily Bush credit for “the policies that won the Cold War.” The party’s 2008 nominee, Senator John McCain, was no less certain: “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War” (quoted by Michael Cooper in NYT, Feb. 24, 2008). Bush adumbrated this revised view in December 1991, claiming that the end of the Soviet Union was “a victory for the moral force of our values” (transcript of his speech on Dec. 25, NYT, Dec. 26, 1991). For the reaction in Moscow, see, e.g., Viacheslav Stepin in Tolstykh, ed., Perestroika, 69.

78. NYT, Oct. 28, 2002.

79. Michael McFaul in Skinner, ed., Turning Points, chap. 7; and James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose (Washington, D.C., 2003), where it is said that Yeltsin’s abolition of the Soviet Union had the effect of “erasing the cold war in an instant” (1). For a more sophisticated but equally triumphalist account, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005). Upon reading it, a reviewer wrote: “The Soviet Union was no more. The cold war was over” (William Grimes in NYT, Dec. 18, 2005).

80. Tony Judt, reviewing Gaddis, The Cold War, and quoting David Caute, in NYRB, March 23, 2006, 11–12, 15.