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Can anyone recommend any good books about the 1980’s and early 90s with a focus on what caused the Soviet Union to collapse ? I have just finished reading the Walter isacson Kissinger biography, and while Nixon/kissenger effectively curtailed Soviet influence in the 70s, I’m still amazed at how completely the Soviet Union collapsed by 1991. The usual story is that the ussr was unable to compete with the west and this somehow led to its collapse. I’m sure economic decline contributed to their decline, but would love to learn more about the other external and internal pressures which brought it about.
The same thing that causes all totalitarian regimes to collapse: becoming slightly less authoritarian. An edifice of such lies and violence cannot be maintained by politics. Dictatorships do not fall when they are most oppressive, but when they begin to liberalize too slowly for the populace. See also: France, the US.
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A key thing to understand is that the two largest oil producers for most of the 20th century were 1: USA and 2: USSR. Political science types like to play up the battle of ideologies and play down the battle of the petro nations aspect.
Oil exports were the primary source of the USSRs hard currency and allowed it to import things.
In the 80s the Reagan White House got the Saudis and some other gulf nations on board with a scheme to pump like hell and crash global oil prices. This was combined with advanced military research projects like SDI, sometimes called "Star Wars", forcing the USSR to dump even more money into military research.
As a percentage of GDP the USSR had already been spending what the USA would consider WW2 levels for many decades.
The cash crunch created a crisis in the USSR. They were looking at average Russians having to go back to only eating meat once a week like during the Tzar era. Soviet leaders assumed they could loosen the iron fist a bit, allow some market reforms, and keep the USSR going.
Instead the whole thing collapsed.
Of course there were other issues. Chernobyl made Soviet leadership look dangerously incompetent internally.
Now I don't know any good books on the topic. Reagan is a highly contentious figure and has only grown more so over the years. A lot of academics are loath to admit his gambit killed the USSR.
So books tend to be either ra ra Reagan or to play down what happened.
Thank you that is very interesting and was completely absent from my understanding of the situation. Shame no one has written a book on this.
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And one of the things they were reduced to importing was food. There were a series of droughts and heatwaves there in the early 80s (combined with mismanagement, I'd guess) that led them to miss grain production targets by 25%, 50 million tons a year deficit.
The same thing had happened a decade earlier, albeit to a lesser extent and at a time when they could better afford it (the global price spike that time shocked everyone). I wonder if the most important thing about the 80s wasn't "a succession of bad harvests", but rather "Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s conviction that the country should acknowledge that it has had failures as well as successes". Glasnost in both directions punctured a lot of illusions. A few years later was when Yeltsin went to Texas for a scheduled tour of NASA JSC and was instead blown away by his unscheduled tour of a grocery store. "Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev." "He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution.""
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That seems unlikely to be a major factor
How do you figure? Looking at the graph, oil was at ca 80 in the mid 70s and then crushed all the way down to ca 45 in the mid 80s. I guess you can argue that it can't be the only factor since it was lower beforehand, but it seems reasonable that the USSR was at least partially kept afloat by high crude prices in the 70s and 80s until Reagan pulled the rug on that.
You need to explain why that revenue was so critical in the 80s, when it had not been earlier. Plus, this indicates that total exports were pretty normal even as oil prices dropped (though I cant tell if the data is adjusted for inflation, and exchange rates might have fluctuated).
Finally, did Reagan convince them to "pump like crazy" or merely to return to normal levels of production
PS: Re oil, stronger argument seems to me is that the regime used oil revenues to provide income to various insiders (I am pretty sure that Gazprom was a govt agency) and that reduced oil revenue made it harder to ]buy off those who became increasingly discontented due to other factors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory).
Hmm, I agree that based on the figure of actual oil production, it seems questionable to claim that the Saudis "pumped like crazy", independent of whether Reagan talked them into it or anybody else.
Still, in terms of dependence on oil prices, it's widely accepted afaik that the USSR financed large parts of its own post-war economy by cannibalizing formerly better developed eastern european satellite states such as eastern germany and czechoslovakia. It's at least not only what I was taught in school, but also what contemporaries I personally know have told me. This obviously is not sustainable long-term, but high resource income can prop up a dysfunctional state indefinitely, see Venezuela. It's not a question of necessity, it means that in an alternative world with low crude oil the 70s might have seen a generally worse economy, increasing cannibalization leading to an even worse economy later on, and thus higher chances of earlier riots, protests and revolutions.
You will like an anecdote I have from a contemporary in the DDR who worked in military intelligence. He was a car mechanic/engineer and his main task was procuring, checking & maintaining vehicles both for general use by his colleagues and for various important people. One time, he officially was tasked with organizing multiple high-value cars for long-term use. Inofficially, this was more or less a party thrown to bribe insiders with hard-to-get western cars as the final touch. According to him, he was even offered to keep one of the cars for himself because he did such a good job getting them, but declined since he saw it as a betrayal of soviet principles (he is still a true believer). Obviously I have no way whatsoever to check this for myself, let alone prove it to you. But FWIW, I believe him; He never seemed to me like the type to make this up. And according to his kids he has have never owned any car but his Wartburg.
Ultimately I agree, though I think every system needs to "pay off" different interest groups to keep afloat one way or another, so I don't see a big difference between "high crude oil prices propped up the system" or "high crude oil prices allowed the system to buy off an interest group that would otherwise become unhappy".
Oh. I was referring to the original claim that "Oil exports were the primary source of the USSRs hard currency and allowed it to import things." I think the data re overall exports tends to undermine that specific argument. However, if the regime relied on oil revenues to buy off necessary supporters (or, more likely, gave those supporters control of the oil industry, as is often the case), oil price drops might have undermined the regime even if it did not undermine the ability to import goods.
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It might be a cliche suggestion at this point, but if you really want to understand why the Soviet system collapsed Read The Gulag Archipelago. That which cannot be sustained, won't be.
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Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński is a great book on the subject if you can get your hands on it. Kapuściński was a great observer and in the book he describes his first-hand impressions from the collapse of the USSR based on over 60,000 km of his voyages into the Soviet Union, including the farthest and most obscure parts, little known to the western reader.
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