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Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok was unexpectedly gripping. It’s a big tome, and I can’t keep in mind the way it got here to be in my pile. However maybe it’s as a result of the occasions collectively described because the collapse of Communism marked historical past as a part of my very own life that I discovered the detailed descriptions right here of Soviet politics over time from the arrival of Garbachev and the collapse of the USSR so compelling. Within the late Eighties I used to be working for DRI Europe the place my job included making an attempt to know perestroika and the Soviet financial reforms to elucidate to purchasers. We had been on vacation in distant Herefordshire watching the autumn of the Berlin Wall on a small black and white TV, whose grainy footage felt in some way applicable for a world historic occasion. Then got here the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution and the not-at-all-velvet overthrow of the Ceaucescus in Romania over the Christmas vacation. German re-unfication. And naturally the collapse of the USSR and western ‘victory’ within the Chilly Struggle. If solely we’d realised then that the West was a assemble of the identical system, besides that its collapse on our facet of the Iron Curtain can be a slower enterprise.
Anyway, apart from the fascinating element, the message I took away from Collapse was the perennial: it’s the economic system, silly. If there’s excessive inflation and folks’s residing requirements are falling due to meals shortages and different issues, you should have zero political room for manoeuvre and can open the way in which to political snake-oil peddlers to supply “simple” options. Oh.
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