Moskva, Kreml′, vlast′ (review)

Rudol′f Pikhoia has released a new version of his celebrated book Sovetskii soiuz: Istoriia vlasti, 1945–1991 (The Soviet Union: A History of Power, 1945–91). Published in 1998 and republished two years later, this was the first attempt to provide a synthetic and above all archivally based assessment of the history of the Soviet Union after World War II.¹ According to Pikhoia, the second stage in Soviet history begins in 1945 with the establishment of the Soviet supremacy in Central and Eastern Europe and the re-legitimization of the regime through the victory over the German aggressor and its allies and ends with the breakup of the empire 46 years later. The first version of the monograph was motivated precisely by this breakup, the end of the Soviet superpower: “This study arose as the natural effort by a historian to understand what happened to the country at the end of the 20th century, why the Soviet Union ceased to exist,” Pikhoia wrote in 2000.²

At first glance, Pikhoia adopts another perspective on contemporary Soviet and Russian history in this updated version Moskva, Kreml′, vlast′. Compared with the original edition, it is considerably enlarged. It includes post-Soviet Russia and is split into two volumes, the first covering the time until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and the second with a focus on the years of turmoil and reconstruction of perestroika, the Yeltsin era, and the Putin years until 2005. Given this new framing of the book, the center of gravity is now the transition from the Soviet to the Russian eras, a theme few historians so far have seriously touched upon. It was with these expectations that I opened the second volume promisingly titled “Two Histories of One Country: Russia at the Turn of the Millennium.”

Unfortunately, my hope was misplaced. Pikhoia does not succeed in elucidating and making sense of the political developments of the post-1991, and especially the post-1993, period. He allots to it only a tenth of his book. This is not enough to encompass with some measure of satisfaction 15 years of intricate political events. Moreover, there are, of course, no archival documents yet. Conscious of this difficulty, Pikhoia bases his analysis on publicly accessible statistical documentation (2: 10). Pikhoia is not, however, as comfortable with this kind of source as he is with official documents from the Soviet archives. He does not use economic and sociological data systematically and rigorously enough. The thin chapter devoted to the economic reforms of 1991–92, for example, fails to identify the causes of the socio-economic collapse and its consequences for the Russian population. Pikhoia does a better job on the financial crisis of 1998, for which he furnishes a detailed analysis. Yet even the data from opinion polls, used to show shifts in social and political perceptions among the Russian population, are relevant only for specific points and are never exploited serially and thoroughly.³

This scattered and narrow documentary base and the general difficulty in assessing ongoing trends cast doubt on many of Pikhoia’s assertions. The political transition from Yeltsin to Putin is poorly explained. Pikhoia says too little about the premiership of the latter and about the beginning of the second Chechen War in the fall of 1999, though this event marked a key stage in his road to supremacy within the political system. To Pikhoia the aging president “masterfully fulfilled the task of guaranteeing continuity of power” in making Putin his successor (2: 508). This is an unconvincing attempt to legitimize Yeltsin’s political disability and the regime’s lack of democracy using current Russian political cant. Pikhoia asserts that Russia since the 1993 constitution...