THE REVOLUTION, NOT THE REGIME:

'We just cannot go on living like this', Mikhail Gorbachev tells his wife, Raisa, on the eve of his nomination as Soviet leader. Nor did they. Gorbachev was to be the last leader of the Soviet Union. Instead of solving the moribund Marxist-Leninist system's many problems, the reforms Gorbachev initiated ended in its downfall - or collapse, to borrow the title of Vladislav Zubok's insight-filled and engaging new history of the end of Soviet power. 

Such an outcome was never Gorbachev's intention. He aimed instead to bring new life to a system in which he seems to have believed until the last. After coming to power in 1985, Zubok tells us: 'For the next five years, Gorbachev would invoke Lenin's name constantly.' It was not the system that was wrong, Gorbachev apparently believed, but a 'glitch' in its design that had led to 'tyranny and mass murder'. An aide remembers volumes of Lenin's work on Gorbachev's desk, from which Gorbachev would read aloud and compare what he found there with 'the present situation'. The last Soviet leader comes across as a religious devotee searching sacred texts for solutions to contemporary secular challenges. 

Alas, in Gorbachev's case, this was not adequate reading material. Zubok persuasively argues that Gorbachev 'willingly overlooked history lessons apparent to those who had read widely on world and Russian history'. Perhaps more serious is the charge of ignorance of the way the Soviet economy worked, especially given that its system of a cashless economy functioning between state enterprises, alongside the notes and coins used for wages and shopping, was, Zubok writes, 'not an easy matter for a novice'. In 1990, as the Soviet Union hurtled towards its final crisis, 'Gorbachev did not understand' the plans advanced by an official from the Soviet Ministry of Finance. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd