A Cold War endgame or an opportunity missed? Analysing the Soviet collapse Thirty years later

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Jack Matlock develops this concept in his books: Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2005) and Superpower Illusions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

² William Safire, ‘After the Fall’, New York Times, August 29, 1991.

³ Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 613–14.

⁴ Stephen F. Cohen, ‘Was the Soviet System Reformable?’ and Karen Dawisha, ‘The Question of Questions: Was the Soviet Union Worth Saving?’ Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (2004): 459–88, 513–26.

⁵ George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage, 1999), 559–624.

⁶ Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 128, 133; and Stephen Kotkin and Jan Tomasz Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009).

⁷ Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Last Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

⁸ Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2007).

⁹ Rudolf Pikhoia, ‘Why the nomenklatura did not defend the Soviet Union?’ http://www.russ.ru/Mirovaya-povestka/Rudol-f-Pihoya-Pochemu-nomenklatura-ne-stala-zaschischat-Sovetskij-Soyuz accessed 27 September 2021; also his presentation at an international workshop, ‘Reevaluating the Soviet Collapse: Domestic and International Frameworks of Politics and Economics’, London School of Economics, London, March 23, 2018.

¹⁰ Vladimir Kontorovich, ‘The Economic Fallacy’, The National Interest 31 (1993): 44.

¹¹ Frank Costigliola, ed., The Kennan Diaries (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 199.

¹² Mark Harrison, ‘Secrets, Lies, and Half Truths: The Decision to Disclose Soviet Defence Outlays’ (working paper no. 55, Political Economy Research in Soviet Archives, September 2008), https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/persa/055.pdf accessed 27 September 2021. On the Russian view see: Iu. D. Masliukov and E. S. Glubokov, ‘Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promyshlennosti v SSSR’, in Sovetskaia voennaia moshch ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, ed. A. V. Minaev (Moscow: Voennyi parad, 1999), 82–129.

¹³ Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilisation and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 54, 55.

¹⁴ More detailed analysis is in: Una Bergmane, Politics of Uncertainty: The US, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the USSR (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

¹⁵ Vladislav Zubok, interview with Gennady Burbulis, April 20, 2021, by phone.

¹⁶ Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974).

¹⁷ According to one reviewer, if one wanted ‘to understand Putin’s actions’ one ‘should read’ Szamuely’s ‘book’, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russian-Tradition-T-Szamuely/dp/0070626618 accessed 27 September 2021.

¹⁸ Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).

¹⁹ Alec Nove was born in Petrograd in 1915. His family emigrated to England in 1924 which, according to one of the many obituaries written about him, was perhaps ‘wise … especially given the family’s Menshevik associations’. See Archie Brown, ‘Professor Alec Nove: 1915–1994’, Development Studies 31, no. 2 (1994): 7–11.

²⁰ Hillel Ticktin, founding editor of the journal Critique, and author of Towards a Political Economy of the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992). The institute in question was the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies, Glasgow. Amongst other things, the Institute published the main British journal on the USSR, Soviet Studies. The Institute was founded by Jacob Miller and Rudolf Schlesinger. Schlesinger was born in 1901 in Vienna and later went to Moscow to study under the Soviet economist, Eugene Varga. In 1936 he was declared to be ‘alien to the Communist Party’. He left on the last boat to leave Poland for Great Britain England in 1939. He died in 1969.

²¹ The Polish economist, Oscar Lange, was perhaps the most famous advocate of ‘market socialism’.

²² For a summary of these often torrid discussions see Mark Harrison, ‘Soviet Economic Growth Since 1928: The Alternative Statistics of G.I. Khanin’, Europe-Asia Studies 45, no. 1 (1993): 141–67; and John Howard Wilhelm, ‘The Failure of the American Sovietological Economics Profession’, Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 1 (2003): 59–74.

²³ Abram Bergson, The Real National Income of Soviet Russia Since 1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). One of the first attacks on those writers in the West who, in his view, were far too uncritical of Soviet statistics was launched by Naum Jasny in his The Socialised Agriculture of the USSR (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1949). This was followed by his The Soviet Economy during the Plan Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951). Jasny’s main target was Abram Bergson and Bergson’s associates at RAND. Founded with support from the US Air Force, RAND as a public policy body pioneered, in its own words, ‘the social scientific analysis of Leninist systems’.

²⁴ However, for a robust defence of the CIA, and whether or not there was ‘a failure of intelligence’, see Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Assessing Soviet Economic Performance During the Cold War: A Failure of Intelligence?’ Texas National Security Review 1, no. 2 (February 2018), https://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performance-cold-war/ accessed 27 September 2021.

²⁵ For a critical guide to this debate see Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1984); and Christopher L. Xenakis, What Happened to the Soviet Union? How and Why American Sovietologists Were Caught By Surprise (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002).

²⁶ Richard Pipes, Survival is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

²⁷ It should be added that there were several other ‘predictions’ about the end of the USSR made in the 1970s and 1980s, all of which made some fairly questionable claims about why the USSR would come to an end. One writer, for instance, claimed the end would come following a war with China. See Andrei Amalrik, Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). In a widely cited study, Helene Carrere ‘d’Encausse, the French writer (of Georgian background) argued more persuasively that it would be nationalism that would hasten the end of the USSR, though did not foresee that it would be the imperial centre in the form of Russia that would deliver the coup de grace to the ‘empire’. See her The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

²⁸ ‘In the traditional extensive Soviet model, economic growth was limited by capital and also depended on the availability of a labor force and of cheap circulating capital inputs (raw materials). But, since the end of the 1960’s, the USSR was suffering both of labour scarcity and of the depletion of natural resources at a low cost that existed during the earlier phase’. Numa Mazat, ‘Structural Analysis of the Economic Decline and Collapse of the Soviet Union’, https://www.boeckler.de/pdf/v_2015_10_24_mazat.pdf accessed 27 September 2021.

²⁹ According to the leading Western demographer, the average life span of a Soviet man had ‘decreased sharply from 66 years on the average for 1965–66 to 64 years on the average for 1971–72’, then falling to as ‘low as 62–63 years’ by the late 1970s. See Murray Feshbach, ‘Reading between the Lines of the 1979 Soviet Census’, Population and Development Review 8, no. 2 (June 1982): 347–61.

³⁰ See Charles Wolf et al., The Costs of the Soviet Empire, RAND Report, September 1983.

³¹ See the relevant sections in Soviet Economy in the 1980s: Problems and Prospects, Joint Economic Committee of the United States, December 31, 1982.

³² See Linda J. Cook, ‘Brezhnev’s “Social Contract” and Gorbachev’s Reforms’, Soviet Studies 44, no. 1 (1992): 37–56.

³³ The full text of Gorbachev’s speech to the UN on December 7, 1988 can be found in The Wilson Center Digital Archive, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116224 accessed 27 September 2021.

³⁴ ‘The economy … approaches the borderline, beyond which one can speak not of economic crisis but of catastrophe’ noted Komsomolskaya Pravda, April 23, 1991. Quoted in Alec Nove, ‘The Soviet Economic Crisis’, The National Economic Review, no. 138 (November 1991): 84.

³⁵ Mark Katz cited in Patrick J. Kiger, ‘How George H. W. Bush Finished What Reagan started in ending the Cold War’, History (December 5, 2018).

³⁶ For a more sympathetic discussion of Gorbachev’s role than the one presented here, Archie Brown’s work remains the indispensable source. See his The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

³⁷ In 2006, an interviewer asked Gorbachev if he had contemplated the use of lethal force as a means of keeping the USSR intact. ‘Of course not’, Gorbachev insisted. ‘It never came into my head, because if it had, I wouldn’t have been Gorbachev’. Quoted in Strobe Talbott, ‘The Man Who Lost an Empire’, New York Review of Books (December 7, 2017).

³⁸ For one of the best studies still on the ‘enigma’ that was 1989, see Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). For the definitive work on the ‘accident’ that led to the unification of Germany see Mary E. Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

³⁹ William C. Wohlforth, ‘Realism and the End of the Cold War’, International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994–95): 91–129; and Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

⁴⁰ John Mearsheimer, ‘Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War’, Atlantic Monthly 26, no. 2 (August 1990): 35–50; it is no longer fashionable to quote Francis Fukuyama, but in 1989 he did talk of ‘an unabashed victory of political and economic liberalism’ in his hugely influential essay, ‘The End of History’, The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18.

⁴¹ For a typically robust attack on counterfactual history, see E. H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961).

⁴² For my own early contribution to the debate about Soviet collapse see Michael Cox ed., Rethinking the Soviet Collapse: Sovietology, the Death of Communism, and the New Russia (London: Francis Pinter, 1999).

⁴³ Washington Post, January 22, 1952.

⁴⁴ G. Kennan, ‘The Foundations of Soviet Policy’, Record Group 59, Policy Planning Staff Records, PPS Members – Chronological File, National Archives (NARA), College Park, MD, USA.

⁴⁵ George Kennan, ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 580–1.

⁴⁶ Meeting of November 20, 1950, RG 59, Records of Policy Planning Staff, Country and Area Files, USSR1946-1950, Box 23, NARA.

⁴⁷ Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 36.

⁴⁸ Quoted in Geoffrey Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 199.

⁴⁹ Leslie H. Gelb, ‘Foreign Affairs: Who Won the Cold War?’ New York Times, August 20, 1992, 27, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/20/opinion/foreign-affairs-who-won-the-cold-war.html accessed 27 September 2021.

⁵⁰ Anne H. Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998), 1–2.

⁵¹ President George H. W. Bush, State of the Union message, January 28, 1992.

⁵² Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the U.S.S.R., and the Successor States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

⁵³ Yeltsin’s words at the United Nations cited in Robert D. McFadden, ‘Leaders Gather in New York to Chart a World Order’, New York Times, January 31, 1992; ‘Dawn of a New Era’, New York Times, February 2, 1992. For a discussion of the global ‘hinge years’ of 1989–92, see Kristina Spohr, Post Wall Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989 (London: William Collins, 2019 / New Haven, NJ: Yale University, 2020).

⁵⁴ Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, ‘Послание Федеральному Собранию Российской Федерации’, April 25, 2005, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22931 accessed 28 September 2021.

⁵⁵ Putin’s interview with the Financial Times in the lead up to the G20 summit, ‘Путин разъяснил свои слова о “геополитической катастрофе” в контексте распада СССР’, June 27, 2019, https://tass.ru/politika/6603347 accessed 28 September 2021.

⁵⁶ See, for example, George Soroka and Tomasz Stępniewski, ‘Russia and the Rest: Permeable Sovereignty and the Former Soviet Socialist Republics’, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 6, no. 2 (2020): 3–12; See also Willliam Safire, ‘ON LANGUAGE: The Near Abroad’, New York Times, May 22, 1994.

⁵⁷ Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996).

⁵⁸ Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (London: Verso, 2003).

⁵⁹ The Nobel Peace Prize 1990, Press release, October 15, 1990, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1990/press-release/ accessed 28 September 2021.

⁶⁰ ‘Europe as a Common Home’, Address given by Mikhail Gorbachev to the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, July 6, 1989, https://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/gorbachev-speech-7-6-89_e3ccb87237.pdf accessed 28 September 2021.

⁶¹ Putin cited in ‘Заседание Совета по развитию гражданского общества и правам человека’, December 10, 2019, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62285 accessed 28 September 2021.

⁶² The most prominent advocate of such a view is of course Vladimir Putin. For a discussion of his take on the former USSR, see Sergey Radchenko, ‘Putin and Xi Eye Soviet Collapse’, Asian Forum, March 19, 2020, https://theasanforum.org/putin-and-xi-eye-the-soviet-collapse/ accessed 27 September 2021.

⁶³ With notable exceptions – for example, see Stephen Cohen, ‘Was the Soviet System Reformable?’ Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 459–88.

⁶⁴ For example, Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

⁶⁵ Karen Dawisha, ‘The Question of Questions: Was the Soviet Union Worth Saving?’ Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 513–26.

⁶⁶ On this see, in particular, Mark Kramer, ‘The Reform of the Soviet System and the Demise of the Soviet State’, Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 505–12.

⁶⁷ The proliferation of public opinion polls in the final months before the Soviet collapse (many of which do not in fact inspire confidence due to their small sample size and dubious methodologies) makes it difficult to arrive at clear conclusions about the direction of public opinion in the USSR. Scholars have thus been free to pick and choose data that aligns best with their convictions. One (random) example: Mark Beissinger argues that ‘a majority of Russians in December 1991 favoured the Belovezhskoe Treaty that put an end to the USSR’. His source for this statement is Matthew Wyman who, in his analysis of Russian public opinion, in fact presents a much more nuanced picture: ‘this decision [Belovezha] was itself strongly supported by citizens throughout the USSR, despite their support for maintaining a union’. Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in the Postcommunist Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 166; and Mark Beissinger, ‘Soviet Empire as “Family Resemblance”’, Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 295.

⁶⁸ Stephen Cohen, ‘Was the Soviet System Reformable?’

⁶⁹ Now, this is strictly speaking not true. Occasional opinion polls were conducted even in the Turkmen SSR with numbers showing a distinct opposition to the prospect of secession. See, for example, Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in the Postcommunist Russia, 158. The reliability and scientific accuracy of these polls cannot be taken for granted. Turkmen SSR also took part in the flawed March 1991 referendum, with 97.9% voting for the continuation of the Union.

⁷⁰ Mark Beissinger, ‘Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism’, Journal of Contemporary European History 18, no. 3 (2009): 331–47.

⁷¹ For an insightful discussion of how populist slogans about the economic benefits of independence helped sway opinion in the December 1991 Ukrainian referendum, see Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

⁷² For a discussion of related concepts, see Alexander Murinson, ‘The Secessions of Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabagh: The Roots and Patterns of Development of Post‐Soviet Micro‐secessions in Transcaucasia’, Central Asian Survey 23, no. 1 (2004): 5–26.

⁷³ Even among the more nuanced writers, there is an astonishing confusion of terminology. For example, Charles Wolf, while attempting to define the term, extends the Soviet Empire all the way to Angola, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam (among others). See Charles Wolf, ‘The Costs and Benefits of the Soviet Empire’, in The Future of the Soviet Empire, eds. Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf (London: The Macmillan Press, 1987).

⁷⁴ Examples abound. Among many are Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), where McFaul repeatedly refers to the ‘Soviet empire’ without exploring the meaning of the term (though he does in fact briefly compare it on one occasion to the British, French and Portuguese empires). Beissinger defends the use of the word ‘empire’ in relation to the USSR but not because it resembled any other empires (it admittedly did not) but in that it entailed an element of ‘foreign domination’. However, he does not attempt to explain either the meaning of ‘foreign’ or the meaning of ‘domination’ and merely alludes to perception of such domination by some Soviet citizens. See Mark Beissinger, ‘Soviet Empire as “Family Resemblance”’, 302. The problem with seeing empire (as Beissinger does) as merely a term that denotes how ‘populations came to relate to authority as a large-scale system of foreign domination and appropriated a similar vocabulary of resistance’ is that the term becomes too blurry to be of any, but polemical, use. Such ‘vocabulary of resistance’ has, for instance, been appropriated by various anti-US and anti-EU activists, which does not make the US, much less the EU, any more (or less) ‘imperial’.

⁷⁵ Archie Brown, The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

⁷⁶ William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (London: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

⁷⁷ V. P. Buldakov, Quo vadis? Кризисы в России: пути переосмысления. М.: РОССПЭН, 20.

⁷⁸ S. V. Zhuravlev, К вопросу о способности советской системы к реформированию (на примере периода перестройки // Распад СССР: дискуссии о причинах, обстоятельствах и последствиях: Сб. статей / отв. ред С.В. Журавлев. М. Центр гуманитарных инициатив, 2019), 13–22.

⁷⁹ ‘Petr Aven: “U Gaidara bylo vpolne imperskoe soznanie”’, Kommersant – 30 let bez SSSR (2021), https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4702608 accessed 27 September 2021.

⁸⁰ ‘Anatolii Chubais: “Ia izvestnyi liberal’nyi imperialist”’, Kommersant – 30 let bez SSSR (2021), https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4803922 accessed 27 September 2021.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² The literature espousing this view is extensive; for perhaps the most succinct and influential version, see Stephen Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

⁸³ On the (surprising) robustness of the Soviet economy in 1985, see Isaac Scarborough, Moscow’s Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming), ch. 3.

⁸⁴ See, for example, Gorbachev’s frustration over the production of undergarments in the USSR, expressed to the Politburo in 1986: A. Cherniaev, A. Veber, and V. Medvedev, eds., V Politbiuro TsK KPSS … Po zapisiam Anatoliia Cherniava, Vadima Medvedeva, Georgiia Shakhnazarova (1985–1991). Izdanie vtoroe (Moscow: Gorbachev-Fond, 2008), 50. Most memoirs by prominent Soviet politicians of the 1980s contain similar remarks.

⁸⁵ M. S. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 169; and Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), 56.

⁸⁶ As remarked by the Deputy of the Tajik Supreme Soviet, Nazarshoev, in early 1991. See Stenogramma zasedaniia Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta Tadzhikskoi SSR ot 08.04.1991, Central State Archive of the Republic of Tajikistan (TsGART), f. 297, op. 40, d. 1237, l. 22.

⁸⁷ Later calculations showed that the Soviet economy went into recession from 1989, a trend that had initially been masked by the rise in profit margins at enterprises, which were now holding onto – and often siphoning off – large portions of their profits. For supporting data, see V. N. Pavlov, Iu. A. Petrov, and A.V. Kiselev, ‘Otsenka dinamiki promyshlennoi produktsii v 1986-1989 godakh’, Ekonomika i organizatsiia promyshlennogo proizvodtsva (EKO) 20, no. 5 (1990): 105–7; and Nikolai Nestorovich, ‘Reform of the Supply System’, in The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insider’s History, eds. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 264.

⁸⁸ Take, for example, the case of the Tajik Silk Factory ‘Tajikatlas’, which after the passage and implementation of the 1987 Law on Enterprises increased prices, decreased production and shrunk its workforce, allowing it to increase profits by an aggregate of more than 70% by 1990 – profits that it now retained, legally, and neither reinvested nor provided to the Republican or federal Soviet budget. See: Finansovyi plan na 1989 g. po P/O ‘Tadzhikatlas’, MMP Tad. SSR, TsGART f. 355, op. 16, d. 48, ll. 134-135; for 1990, see f. 355, op. 16, d. 175, l. 135; Raschet otchislenii v biudzhet ot fakticheskoi raschetnoi pribyli po p/o Tadzhikatlas za god 1990, Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Tadzhikistan (TsGART) f. 355, op. 16, d. 175, l. 138; also d. 122, l. 1. [q][q]

⁸⁹ Isaac Scarborough, ‘Importing Sour Grapes: Economic Order and Economic Justice During the Collapse of the USSR in Tajikistan’, Law and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Tajikistan, Oxford, October 2019.

⁹⁰ Cherniaev, Veber, and Medvedev, V Politbiuro TsK KPSS, 68.

⁹¹ For the interplay between Russian political ambitions and the slow – and then sudden – disintegration of interrepublican ties in 1990 and 1991, see Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

⁹² Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworlds and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

⁹³ Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to the New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1991 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 199.

⁹⁴ Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok eds., Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), 614.

⁹⁵ Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton, The Last Superpower Summits: Reagan, Gorbachev and Bush. Conversations that Ended the Cold War (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016).

⁹⁶ See Mikhail Gorbachev, ‘Perestroika and New Thinking: A Retrospective’, Democratizatsiya 29, no. 3 (2021) 211-238.

⁹⁷ Izbrannoe (Moscow: Sobranie, 2011), 253.

⁹⁸ See Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 201; and Brent Scowcroft Memorandum to Bush, 1 March 1989 in Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton eds., Gorbachev and Bush, The Last Superpower Summits: Conversations that Ended the Cold War (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2020), 22.

⁹⁹ Martin Gilman, No Precedent, No Plan: Inside Russia’s 1998 Default (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).

¹⁰⁰ Mikhail Gorbachev, ‘Perestroika and New Thinking: A Retrospective’.

¹⁰¹ Talbott memorandum to Christopher, February 1993. On file at the National Security Archive, F-2017-13804 State Department FOIA.

¹⁰² George H.W. Memorandum of conversation between President Bush and Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, April 6, 1990, Bush Presidential Library Texas, USA.

¹⁰³ Gorbachev-Baker memcon, May 18, 1990, in Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton eds., Gorbachev and Bush, The Last Superpower Summits: Conversations that Ended the Cold War (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2020).

¹⁰⁴ Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Penguin, 1992).

¹⁰⁵ For more on concerns about this issue, see M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021).

¹⁰⁶ Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021).

¹⁰⁷ Joel Brinkley, ‘Bush and Yeltsin Declare Formal End to Cold War’, New York Times, February 2, 1992.

¹⁰⁸ On the idea of a Mars mission, see Memorandum of Conversation (Memcon), George H. W. Bush–Boris Yeltsin, first expanded meeting, June 16, 1992, 2:30–4:10pm, Electronic Briefing Book (EBB)-447, The National Security Archive (NSA). George Washington University, Washington DC, USA

¹⁰⁹ On post-Cold War nuclear cooperation between the US and Russia, Sarotte, Not One Inch.

¹¹⁰ For background on the Kosovo crisis, see the NATO summary in ‘NATO’s Role in Relation to the Conflict in Kosovo’, 15 July 1999, https://www.nato.int/kosovo/history.htm#B accessed 27 September 2021.

¹¹¹ William J. Clinton Library (CL), Little Rock, Arkansas, USA Memorandum of Telephone Conversation (Telcon), Bill Clinton–Helmut Kohl, August 7, 1998, 2015-0776-M, Clinton Presidential Library (CL) ; see also interview with Madeleine Albright, August 30, 2006, William Clinton Presidential Historical Project, Miller Center, University of Virginia.

¹¹² Telcon, Clinton–Yeltsin, October 5, 1998, State Dept. Cable (SDC) 1998-State-189900, October 14, 1998. On Yeltsin hanging up on Clinton, see Strobe Talbott, Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 300.

¹¹³ Memcon, Clinton–Yeltsin, 2015-0782-M, CL, document dated March 24, 1998, but from context must be from 1999.

¹¹⁴ Memcon, Clinton–Yeltsin, 2015-0782-M, CL, document dated March 24, 1998, but from context must be from 1999.

¹¹⁵ Gaidar quoted in Talbott, Russia Hand, 307.

¹¹⁶ William Drozdiak, ‘Russia’s Concession Led to Breakthrough’, Washington Post, June 6, 1999.

¹¹⁷ Talbott, Russia Hand, 335–44; Robert G. Kaiser and David Hoffman, ‘Secret Russian Troop Deployment Thwarted’, Washington Post, June 25, 1999; SDC 1999-State-120192, June 19, 1999. For more on Putin’s time in office, see EBB-731, NSA.

¹¹⁸ Telcon, Clinton–Yeltsin, June 13, 1999; Telcon, Clinton–Yeltsin, June 14, 1999, both in 2015-0782-M, CL.