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For a child of the Cold War, raised both in Washington and Moscow, there was only one certainty in the superpower game that consumed the world for nearly 50 years. Both sides were so powerful, had amassed such destructive nuclear arsenals and had built up such enormous competing alliances that a peaceful outcome was impossible. Of course the Soviet Union was an economic basket case, once derided as ‘Upper Volta with missiles’. But its empire stretched from Cuba to Angola and Vietnam, not to mention half of Europe and much of Central Asia. The most powerful secret police network ever assembled in history ensured that dissent was uncovered and eliminated long before it posed a real threat to authority.
It is hard to imagine that there are millions of people in Russia and the West for whom this extraordinary period is some weird blip in history. Young Russians cannot understand what it was like spending hours a day queuing for food or dreaming of a pair of jeans and a Beatles album. Their counterparts in the West struggle to grasp the notion of a continent divided by a wall or a world split into two competing ideologies only minutes away from nuclear Armageddon.
Victor Sebestyen brilliantly pulls together the events that led to the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989, a collapse that was so quick and unexpected, and relatively peaceful, that reading about it still takes your breath away 20 years on.
This is a hugely complex story that stretches from the battlefield of Afghanistan, then a Soviet war, to the shipyards of Gdansk, the music lovers of Prague and CIA analysts in Washington. It involves a bewildering cast of characters from grim East German secret policemen to saintly priests and the main hero of the book, Mikhail Gorbachev, who finally buried the legacy of Stalin and allowed millions of Europeans to go free.
Sebestyen correctly argues that Gorbachev did not come to power with the intention of dismantling the Soviet empire but that it became the inescapable outcome as he attempted perestroika (restructuring) of the system and opening it up to glasnost (openness). It was key events in the 1980s that shaped the end. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which the Kremlin at first tried to hush up, forced the Soviet leaders to be more open. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan exposed the weakness of the Russian military. The collapse of the oil price meant that Moscow could no longer subsidise the faltering economies of eastern Europe.
What makes the book so good are the wonderful details of this period. When Jacek Kuron, a veteran Solidarity leader, was finally made Minister for Labour, a government car appeared outside his home. He thought he was about to be arrested again, but discovered that it was just his ministerial limousine and chauffeur showing up for his first day at work. When Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were fleeing from the mob in Romania and hastily throwing their belongings into blue sacks, the contents included two loaves of bread. My favourite is the account of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, described as the most colossal administrative error in history. The East German government decided to relax restrictions on crossing into the West but sent out a confused order. The result was that thousands of East Germans converged on the crossing-points where the border guards were overwhelmed. In the end a couple of low ranking officers simply pushed aside the barricades and Germany never looked back.
There is one point worth taking issue over. Sebestyen correctly states that Western pundits, and for that matter the intelligence services, failed to anticipate the events of 1989. There is one exception, however. Bernard Levin, The Times columnist, predicted in 1977 that the Soviet empire would collapse because it was unsustainable and even described a Gorbachev-type figure who would dismantle it. The date he chose for the fall was 14 July, 1989. Not bad. He was only a few weeks out.
Richard Beeston is Foreign Editor of The Times.
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