Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (review)

Archie Brown’s Seven Years That Changed the World provides a thorough, balanced, and insightful analysis of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The book is not a straight narrative of events and changing concepts; instead, it discusses the final seven years of Soviet history from several different vantage points. Part I offers a short introduction to Brown’s approach; Part II reproduces four articles on Gorbachev’s policy that were first published as the events were unfolding; Part III, which makes up more than half of the book, contains five essays on the various aspects of Gorbachev’s domestic and foreign policy, written from the vantage point of a historian who has absorbed the evidence of archives, memoirs, and interviews with participants.

The discussion of archival sources in the preface will be valuable for any researcher of the Gorbachev period of Soviet history. The book as a whole is essential reading for any person who wishes to understand the turbulent, and in many ways contradictory, period it describes.

Many previous books on perestroika have approached it by, in effect, taking a snapshot of how the process and policy looked at a given moment. For example, the late Martin Malia, extrapolating from an early analysis, declared that Gorbachev wanted to achieve a “soft” version of the Communist system he inherited. Brown, in contrast, points out, from the first page of his preface, that “perestroika meant not only different things to different people, but also different things at different times between its launch and its demise.” By 1991, Gorbachev’s thinking, pace Malia, was much closer to that of European social democrats than to any variant of Leninism, even though Gorbachev still quoted Vladimir Lenin approvingly—a seeming paradox that Brown discusses with great insight.

The inclusion, in Part II, of four essays written as perestroika unfolded helps us understand the fluid and dynamic nature of a policy in evolution. Often when I am asked, “What did Gorbachev think about x or y,” I counter with, “What year, what month, and, if you really want me to be precise, what day?” My answer is an exaggeration, no doubt, and may give the unfounded impression that I could offer an accurate answer if only the questioner would be more precise. Nevertheless, for those of us observing Gorbachev at close quarters in those days, his policy seemed like a moving train—a train that could shift, not always predictably, to different tracks, that never moved at a constant speed, and that from time to time backed up.

Among the myths that Brown seeks to demolish are: (1) that the Soviet system was doomed to imminent collapse in the 1980s; (2) that the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union were brought about mainly by the Reagan administration; (3) that Boris Yeltsin was primarily responsible for dismantling the Soviet system; and (4) that Yeltsin’s rule was a continuation of perestroika in a more democratic form (p. 3). These judgments are indeed unfounded, and they have induced mistaken policies in the West and unjustified resentments in present-day Russia.

The facts are:

• • The Soviet Union could have hobbled on, probably for decades, if its leader had not attempted to transform the system.

• • The Cold War ended as the result of negotiations between Gorbachev and Western leaders, first of all Ronald Reagan, and was not a defeat for the Soviet Union. In fact, the end of the arms race promised to alleviate one of the burdens on the Soviet economy and opened the possibility of fundamental economic reform.

• • The Communist system was forced out of power by Gorbachev, the CPSU General Secretary, not by any foreign leader.

• • The Soviet Union collapsed as a result of internal contradictions, not external pressure (indeed, the United States did not favor the break-up of the Soviet Union, as President George H. W. Bush made clear in his speech in Kyiv on 1 August 1991...