Why should we want to read yet another thumping great book about the collapse of the Soviet empire? Sergey Radchenko attempts an answer in his well-constructed new work. Based on recently opened Soviet archives and on extensive work in the Chinese archives, it places particular weight on China’s role in Soviet policy-making. The details are colourful. It is fun to know that Mao Tse-Tung sent Stalin a present of spices, and that the mouse on which the Russians tested it promptly died. But the new material forces no major revision of previous interpretations.
Perhaps the book is best seen as a meditation on the limitations of political power. Stalin and his successors were trying to pursue what they thought of as the national interest – a slippery concept which even our own ‘realists’ find hard to define in practice. At the same time, they sought to balance the conflicting requirements of leading world communism and being a great power.
At home, in Europe and in the Third World, which the Soviets saw as the most promising arena for their competition with the capitalist-imperialists, their successes in pursuing their contradictory objectives were often matched by failure. Their efforts were undermined by personal ambition, a shaky grasp of the facts and sheer incompetence. They were no better at planning for the future than the bourgeois democrats they affected to despise. Henry Kissinger once commented that Richard Nixon acted as if he had an election next year, but Leonid Brezhnev as if he had an election every week. And autocrats, too, are continually knocked off course by unforeseen events.
Radchenko deals neatly with another common source of misapprehension.
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