Before and after the End of the World: Rethinking the Soviet Collapse

It is the unicorn subject of East European history: the end of the Soviet Union. Its synchronic and diachronic complexities are tremendous, its impact on world history gigantic. Contemporary historians still approach it with caution and warily. They do so to an extent that even separates the field as a whole. Specialists in the field consider themselves to be specialists in Soviet or post-Soviet studies. This is not the result of in-depth analyses of the Soviet collapse. To the contrary, we do so because we have not dealt enough with the transitional period around the end of the Soviet Union.

In recent years, contemporary historians and social scientists have continuously asked why the Soviet Union collapsed. While many contemporary historians currently explore integrating structures and practices to understand how the Soviet Union existed for so long, others focus directly on the question of disintegration.¹ Scholars point to “horizontal” and “vertical” forms of disintegration, as well as to the “pressure” of nationalist mobilization, see perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union as a success, or focus on democratization.² Others, however, do not take the end of the USSR as a given and engage with the question of the inevitability of the dissolution. They ask whether a leadership other than Gorbachev’s would have enacted consistent reforms, whether the Soviet Union would have existed for much longer without reform, whether reform was even possible, or whether the utopian but nonviolent visions of a new generation led inevitably to the dissolution.³

This debate is irritating, because historians and social scientists usually do not engage much with contrafactual arguments. The issue at hand is not just this, though. More important, both approaches—the decision to take the end of the Soviet Union for granted, as well as the contrafactual debate against it—prevents us from really conceptualizing the chronological barrier of 1989/91.⁴ Only some authors have posed a challenge to this watershed.⁵ Most prominently, Stephen Kotkin claims to reconsider the chronology of Soviet collapse: “Virtually everyone seems to think the Soviet Union was collapsing before 1985. They are wrong. Most people also think the Soviet collapse ended in 1991. Wrong again.”⁶ His first claim is complicated, because it results from weighing deeper historical reasons for the Soviet collapse and the relative stability of the Soviet order prior to 1985–87.⁷ Kotkin’s second claim, however, touches on the sore spot of the debate. How can we evaluate the end of the Soviet Union if we refrain from asking about continuities and discontinuities, and thereby contextualize the end of the Soviet Union within a broader chronological framework?⁸

Two specific approaches do cross the barrier of 1989/91 already: biographical writing and economic history.⁹ How do we construct the political biographies of transitional political personalities whose careers began within the Soviet system and continued after its end? How were private initiative, ownership, and markets introduced and fostered? These two questions simply cannot be answered without considering post-Soviet outcomes. If so, what methodological challenges do the authors of biographical and socioeconomic works face in engaging with the times before and after the end of the world?

Boris Minaev’s Boris Yeltsin: The Decade That Shook the World is a journalistic effort. As the title suggests, the life of Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin is used as a prism to describe the decade on both sides of the Soviet Union’s end. Consequently and in a way that borders on funny, most of...