According to the third theory, external factors rooted in the Cold War and global economy caused the Soviet collapse. The most extreme such view holds that the betrayal of Soviet socialism was due to the CIA’s penetration of the Soviet leadership. Admittedly, this penetration reached further than most outsiders realized. According to one later report, “by 1985, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. had developed the most impressive inventory of spies against Russia in American history” and had “riddled” the K.G.B. and G.R.U. (military intelligence) with moles.678 Still, unless future revelations show that Gorbachev or Yakovlev served as CIA agents, it stretches credibility to suppose that the CIA brought down Soviet socialism. Of course, more powerful external factors than the CIA were at work.
As many writers have suggested, external pressure generated by the world economy, technological changes, and the Carter and Reagan policies unquestionably figured in the Soviet difficulties. Andre Gunder Frank, for example, points out that the worldwide recession of 1979-82 encouraged Presidents Carter and Reagan to increase military spending and this compelled the Soviet Union to spend more. The recession also put a strain on socialist countries in Eastern Europe that had borrowed money from Western banks.679 Manuel Castells and Emma Kiselova argue that the main strain on the Soviet Union came from having to adapt to the “information society.”680 Aside from these economic and technological factors, the main external strain on the Soviet system was that imposed by the intensification of the Cold War in the early 1980s.
Soviet society never enjoyed the luxury of internal development free of the threat of outside aggression. The cost of defending itself and aiding its allies escalated yearly and drained resources away from socially useful domestic investments. By 1980, Soviet aid to its allies cost $44 billion a year, and arms spending consumed 25 to 30 percent of the economy. This drain on the Soviet economy exceeded by a factor of two to three what Western experts at the time estimated.681 The strain of the Cold War increased during the late Carter and early Reagan years. As both the conservative, Peter Schweizer, and the leftist, Sean Gervasi, have pointed out, Reagan opened up a second Cold War and initiated a multipronged strategy of destabilizing Soviet society. The strategy consisted of doubling military spending (“spending them into bankruptcy”), projecting the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), aiding anti-Communists in Afghanistan, Poland and elsewhere, driving down the price of oil and gas on the world market (the Soviet’s main source of hard currency), as well as engaging in various forms of economic and psychological warfare.682
Certainly, the external factors pressing on the Soviet regime challenged the Soviet system in varied and powerful ways and have a place in a full explanation of the Soviet collapse. Still, that is a far cry from saying, as Peter Schweizer does, that it is “not possible to understand the collapse of the Soviet Union separate from Ronald Reagan,” who “won the cold war.”683 Frances Fitzgerald provides the most persuasive refutation of the decisiveness of Reagan’s policies. Fitzgerald argues that no clear cause-and-effect relationship existed between the external factors and an internal crisis.684 For example, Fitzgerald maintains that increases U.S. military spending under Reagan for Star Wars and other projects did not increase Soviet military spending.685 Many Soviet insiders likewise rejected the idea that the arms race caused either Gorbachev’s reforms or the collapse. A Soviet official in military intelligence said, “The notion that Gorbachev’s perestroika was started as a result of Reagan’s Star Wars was concocted in the West and is completely absurd.”686 A member of the Soviet Institute for the U.S.A. and Canada opined, “I am deeply convinced that neither SDI [the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars] nor the arms race in general contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”687 Authoritative opinion differs on the importance of the arms race. To a large extent the debate misses the crux of the matter. However great and in whatever form, the external pressure coming from the United States represented less of an external threat than earlier economic sanctions, sabotage, and foreign invasion. Moreover, the external pressure did not dictate the particular shape and direction of the Soviet response. In the end, Gorbachev’s particular responses to the external pressures and internal problems provided the most proximate and decisive cause of the debacle.
A fourth theory is that the cause was a bureaucratic counter-revolution. This theory bears a striking similarity to Leon Trotsky’s views of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Trotsky argued that the Soviet system was “transitional,” and that if a new socialist revolution did not overthrow the bureaucracy, then the bureaucracy itself could become the base for a capitalist restoration or could even transform itself into “a new possessing class.”688 The idea that the bureaucracy transformed itself into a new possessing class through a revolution from above is more or less the argument of David Kotz and Fred Weir,689 Jerry F. Hough,690 Steven L. Solnick,691 and Bahman Azad (though Azad does not regard this new group as a class).692 The accounts of Kotz and Weir and Azad deserve attention.
In Revolution From Above, Kotz and Weir illustrate matter-of-factly and convincingly the positive achievements of the USSR and the many democratic and humane features of Soviet life. They argue that the reform course launched by Gorbachev unleashed processes that created new coalitions of groups that favored replacing socialism with capitalism. Boris Yeltsin became the leader of the anti-socialist bloc. With the support of “the party-state elite,” he was able to push aside two rival groups, the Gorbachev social reformists and the CPSU “Old Guard.” The breakup of the USSR as a multinational federation occurred because of the specifics of the power struggle between the Yeltsin and Gorbachev forces. Yeltsin’s anti-socialists held power in Russia while the Gorbachev social reformists held most of the Union institutions. The Yeltsin forces concluded they could maintain power and pursue capitalist restoration only by withdrawing Russia from the Soviet Union. Hence, the USSR fell apart.
The Kotz and Weir thesis has several strengths. It can explain why most of the top managers and capitalists in present-day Russia are former Soviet officials, often former CPSU members. As Yeltsin increasingly signaled his intention to go down the capitalist road, the party-state elite concluded that its power and privileges could be maintained and possibly improved by a shift to private ownership, with its members as the new owners. The swift collapse of the so-called coup in August 1991 may, in this way, be explained by the elite’s shift of loyalties both to Yeltsin and capitalism. The absence of elite (as well as mass) support for either Gorbachev or the “coup” leaders is the chief reason why the “plot” fizzled and Gorbachev’s fortunes sank between August and December 1991. It explains the rapid and relatively peaceful nature of the capitalist restoration as well as the great difficulties in making the new capitalism work.
The “bureaucratic revolution from above” thesis is, however, not completely convincing. An authoritative study693 based on interviews with former members of the Party-state elite found “no evidence” for the “fashionable theory” that “the Soviet system was toppled by the Party and state officials in order to turn their power into private wealth.” Indeed, such officials were “incapable of collective action to defend the system and incapable of consciously hastening its demise.” The “top bureaucracy,” if it can be said to have enough substance to be judged an authentic social group at all, clearly was too heterogeneous and scattered to act as a cohesive political force. Moreover, if the interests of the party-state elite were determining the pro-capitalist direction of events, how can one explain that both Gorbachev’s perestroika and Yeltsin’s free-market initiatives slashed the central bureaucracy by tens of thousands? Kotz and Weir posit an elite with wholly arbitrary boundaries of 100,000. If the elite was capable of conscious independent action in its own self-interest, why did it back Andropov’s Marxism-Leninism in 1983, and Gorbachev’s revisionism in 1987, and Yeltsin’s free-market shock therapy in 1993? Were all three highly inconsistent ideologies in the bureaucracy’s self-interest? The stealing of state assets by the bureaucratic elite was embryonic in 1987694 as the dismantling of the CPSU began in earnest, and the stealing became fully developed only in 1990-1991, lending credence to the view that the developments elsewhere, not in the party-state elite, drove the collapse. The party-state elite was reacting to events, not initiating them. Some in the elite reacted opportunistically by seizing state assets to maintain their power and privileges, but they were not the protagonists of the process.