The Struggle for a Political Economy from Gorbachev to Putin

For at least the last decade and a half, the different post-1980s fates of the Soviet Union and China have been an object of fascination and debate, both within academia and even more extensively without, reaching a crescendo perhaps ten years ago. The consensus conclusion has become a mantra of our age: Gorbachev's stress on political pluralism in tandem with economic liberalization was a failure; Deng Xiaoping's wager on marketization coupled with continued political repression and control was the winning ticket. The assumptions underlying this consensus are only recently being reconsidered. In light of the recrudescence of Chinese authoritarianism, that metonym for good governance, the "market," has turned out not to be the miracle producer of democracy and liberal emancipation of so much political science theory.

But a different assumption has made a smokescreen of this question. The debate assumed that the defining feature of both societies, the reason they belonged within the same analytical framework, was an ideological commitment to communism. This is a reasonable enough assumption, but it shunts aside issues of demographic and economic development that scholarship and common sense usually make central to social analysis everywhere else.¹ The last debate of the Cold War was used to confirm assumptions about the economy that have lived in the shadow of an overdetermined preoccupation with ideology. Both the growth of communist China and the collapse of the Soviet Union are stories of great complexity that will continue to bear fruitful scholarship for decades to come. Framing the comparative outcomes within an ideological premise will only ever be of limited use. The foundation for any analysis of this comparison, however, is not complicated: the Soviet Union had urbanized and radically transformed over the previous decades; China had also changed but had yet to be built.² The starting points in the 1980s of these two communist societies were fundamentally and incommensurably different.

Chris Miller's The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR does not make this its starting point, but the book owes something to this structural distinction. He argues that entrenched economic interests within the Soviet Union, acting as what he sees as lobbies in Moscow, scuttled all of Gorbachev's attempts at reform, leading to Gorbachev's effort to buy off the opposition through money creation that eventually led to budgetary chaos, inflation, and collapse. In Miller's analysis, the question of whether Gorbachev could have followed a Chinese path to reform and stable growth is a moot point; the recalcitrant system of political economy in place in the late 1980s made it so. A fully built, industrial environment requires governance, and opaque, authoritarian governance has often managed to entrench obdurate interest groups. Miller's assumptions are in the right place. This is a potentially interesting venue of analysis. Unfortunately it is here rendered fallow by a lack of concern in investigating and documenting the reality of the society's political economy,³ and by a distracting but insistent narrative line about the Chinese intellectual origins of Gorbachev's reform efforts.

We will get to that Chinese dimension later. The linchpin of the argument is the existence of what Miller calls lobby groups in the Soviet Union. It is these, rather than Gorbachev, that the book makes accountable for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their power and intransigence made reform impossible, Miller argues. Given the book's reliance on memoir literature and published Politburo transcripts—that is, on the voices of Gorbachev and his team—this is perhaps no great surprise. Miller speaks of three lobby groups in particular: the military-industrial complex, the collective farm lobby, and the energy industry. These entities, however, remain...