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Triumphalists make no effort to understand why the Soviets disarmed, reformed, and collapsed. They simply assume the Reagan administration caused these policy changes. Chapters 4 and 5 correct this misperception. Drawing upon Soviet sources, these chapters examine decision making within the Kremlin and the causes of Soviet behavior. Chapter 4 discredits the claim that the Soviet Union became more cooperative with the West and withdrew from its war in Afghanistan because the Reagan administration compelled it to do so. It demonstrates that a reform movement had been growing in the USSR since the 1950s. Soviet reformers sought to modernize the economy, end the arms race, and improve relations with the West. Moreover, within weeks of launching the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, Soviet leaders concluded that it was a mistake and began looking for a face-saving way out. Thus, these policies were rooted in domestic needs and debates and were not examples of Moscow acquiescing to American demands, as triumphalists claim. In short, the Reagan administration did not compel Moscow to adopt democratic reforms and withdraw from Afghanistan.

Told from the Kremlin’s perspective, this chapter debunks the myth that Reagan’s military buildup—and SDI in particular—compelled the Soviets to agree to arms reductions and then to collapse. In reality, the US buildup had a negligible effect on the USSR. By the 1980s Soviet reformers believed nuclear arsenals were of little value: they were costly, could not be used, and incited fear in the West, which prompted the United States to increase its arsenal. The USSR would be more secure, they reasoned, if arsenals were greatly reduced, if not eliminated. Moreover, although some Soviet scientists were initially worried about SDI, this concern dissipated as scientists determined Reagan’s plan was not feasible. In short, for a variety of strategic, financial, and ethical reasons Moscow sought to end the arms race. It therefore did not build its own SDI-style system, nor did it match increases in US defense expenditures, as triumphalistsassume. The Reagan administration’s policies did not compel the Soviet Union to disarm and then collapse.

The trail along the eastern shore of the Holy Nose south of our campsite is maybe a foot wide, just a narrow track of compacted leaves and dirt, a path that could just as easily have been made by centuries of hooves and paws as by shod human feet. And perhaps it was. I’ve walked such trails in the Arctic, etched into the tundra by caribou and wolves and musk oxen. It’s a humbling and exhilarating experience, the trails a simple but stark reminder that you are in someone else’s habitat and that humans are not the only species to have left their mark on the planet. This one weaves between thick-barked evergreens and leathery aspens, clinging precariously to a slope that could easily throw a clumsy hominid to the waves fifty or more feet below. Andrei is lost in the thickets ahead, charging on to the next clearing, at which he’ll wait for us, again. James, Elisa, Chanda, and I keep to a more leisurely pace, in no more of a hurry to see the next sparkling facet of Baikal than this one, or to catch a toe on the next stone or gnarled root than the previous one. Igor stayed behind with our stuff at the campsite, to be picked up by the Lonesome Boatman. We’ll rendezvous with them farther down the coast this afternoon. Yesterday’s ragged clouds blew out in the evening, and the sky over Baikal today has the clarity of vodka and carries a cool, yellowish luminescence, as if after their ninety-three million mile dash the sun’s photons have slowed down to admire the little corner of the solar system that they’ve been lucky enough to have been sent to. There is no sign that any of the billions of humans who have ever lived have set foot in this place. We walk mostly in silence. From high above the lake, the trail drops down to the water, the steep slope giving way ahead to a thin, gracefully arcing beach dividing the lake from a narrow stand of wispy wetland trees and a soft amber field beyond.

“I have not tested this—it is secret recipe!” Sergei Filippov says, as he tends to a pot of what look like meatballs simmering on his small stove, and his kitchen fills with their aroma. “I don’t know if it will be any good. If not, we will have fish!” There are seventeen kinds of fish in the Barguzin River, Sergei tells me, and he has three varieties on hand tonight, in case his secret beef recipe fails to please. “Omul, sig, and—how do you say in English?—carp? I cook often. My wife is a teacher, she works a lot. I like to cook, but not all the time!” Sergei may well be the only person in his town who speaks more than a few words of English, and he didn’t learn it in school. He’s taught himself. “I began to learn English from an American friend of mine,” Sergei says. “Patricia. She came to stay with us. She did not speak Russian. I did not speak English. We began writing to each other, in both languages, side by side, on one piece of paper.” Sergei’s round face and wavy, dark hair carry hints of both Buryat and Russian, but mostly they carry a warm smile and a soft and welcoming demeanor not immediately found in many of his countrymen. He’s the first Russian I’ve met whom I felt immediately drawn to. We’ve come fifty kilometers up the Barguzin River from Baikal to stay with Sergei and his wife, Tania, here in the town of Barguzin. Through Andrei, we’re paying them for dinner, breakfast, and a night’s lodging in their small apartment. But I get the feeling that if he could afford it, Sergei might pay us for the visit. Sergei’s world barely even reaches Baikal, much less far beyond. But in this tiny town, he is a traveler. A few times a year, Andrei arrives with people like us, from America, Europe, Japan. And with each visit, Sergei’s world expands as he learns a bit more about life beyond Barguzin, beyond Baikal, beyond Russia.

This chapter explores the disciplinary spaces and pressures that moderate liberal biases. Conservatives often gravitate to such spaces where they thrive, despite their numbers, because they share with their liberal colleagues a common intellectual orientation that is more important than their political differences. Conservative philosophers, for example, unite with liberal colleagues in the "analytic" tradition against "continental" theory. Traditionalists in history tend to resist disciplinary fads, whatever their politics. Meanwhile, defenders of the humanities, whether liberal or conservative, rally together to defend "great books." And in political science wars over methodology divide the discipline more deeply than partisanship.

This chapter discusses the 3^rd Floor – an artistic movement of the late Soviet and early independence years in Armenia (1987-94) – in its complex relationship with the cultural politics of the perestroika period, the official art of the Union of Artists of the Soviet Republic of Armenia, and National Modernism. It argues that the 3^rd Floor, thought its strategy of hamasteghtsakan art both reproduced the dynamic of the perestroika politics and surpassed it. The 3^rd Floor affirmed the separation between autonomous art and all that falls outside this autonomous sphere – the social world replete with antagonism and discontent.

Chapter 1 addresses the postcommunist ‘remnant’ of Stalinism, which survived the demise of the USSR and has been undergoing rehabilitation under Putin. We trace the logics of the two ‘destalinizations’ in the Soviet Union (1956-1964, 1985-1991) and argue that it was the confluence of these two logics that enabled the revival of Stalinism in the postcommunist period. While in the Khruschev Thaw Stalinism was denounced as a personal deviation from and betrayal of ‘true’ Leninism and ascribed to pathological features of Stalin’s personality, in the Gorbachev period the denunciation of Stalinism gradually embraced Communist ideology in its entirety, which was judged terrorist and criminal. If the logics of the two processes are superimposed on one another, Stalin appears as a traitor to a criminal system that deserved to be betrayed and hence as a positive figure, the saviour of Russia from the excesses of Bolshevism. Emerging in the fringes of the political discourse in the 1990s, this image was embraced during the Putin presidency, though Stalinism was no longer understood in terms of the synthesis of communism and nationalism, but rather in terms of the effective constitution and management of a new social reality. In this chapter we also address the paradoxical orientation of Putinism to the Stalinist past, concluding that in today’s Russia Stalinism in its biopolitical sense has become a quasi-transcendental condition of political discourse as such.

This short chapter looks at developments in Cuba during the thawing of the Cold War. While the Soviet Union and other communist nations embarked on a process of reformism away from socialism and absolutist rule, Cuba hardened its position on communist principles and dictatorial rule. This process came to be known as the Rectification Campaign, a process whereby Cuba returned to orthodox Marxism and ended opportunities for private entrepreneurship and self-employment. Cuba's economic recession emboldened both the U.S. government and Cuban exile organizations to take a harder line against the regime.

This epilogue discusses the influence of Central Television's experimental television shows of the 1970s—including game shows, musical contests, talk shows, and foreign news programs—on the iconic, groundbreaking shows of the Gorbachev era such as Twelfth Floor, Before and After Midnight, View, and Spotlight of Perestroika. The election of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party brought major changes at Central Television. In particular, Central Television's Information and Youth Desks received instructions from the Central Committee to create new news and entertainment programs aimed at attracting young people and combatting the influence of foreign media. This epilogue first considers the continuities between the leading news and discussion programs of perestroika and Central Television's programming before 1985. It then examines the use of music to create liveness and immediacy in perestroika-era shows. It also discusses the ways that the Gorbachev-era programs invited audience participation as explicitly as possible.

This chapter examines the renaissance of comics or komiks during the era of Perestroika (“restructuring”) under Mikhail Gorbachev, who assumed power in March 1985 as president of the Soviet Union. It looks at Gorbachev’s policies of a new engagement with the West, economic reform, and loosening of censorship and their impact on publishing in general and comics in particular. More specifically, it explores how Perestroika and Glasnost led to the emergence of a comics industry in Russia. It also considers KOM, a group of Russian artists dedicated to comics works, as well as Vladimir Sakov’s Moscow-based Tema.

This chapter examines the “Second Wave” comics or komiks subculture in Russia from 1991 to the present. It begins with an assessment of the situation not only for comics but for many other areas of Russian culture following the collapse of Communist rule. It then looks at the rebirth of Russian comics under Perestroika reforms. It considers the success of Mukha (The Fly), an anthology journal published by Vitaly Mukhametzyanov and which represented native Russian comics in their most commercialized, mainstream form. Furthermore, it discusses the rise of a number of komiks journals at the turn of the twentieth century; Russian scholars’ attitudes toward production advances and professionalization of komiks in the late 1990s; and the impact of the Internet on comics, with reference to Komiksolyot, one of the first venues to publish work in a relatively new genre, Cyberpunk. Finally, the chapter analyzes the influence of manga and anime on Russian comics.

This chapter explores the meaning of ‘economic reform’ in the USSR. Many scholars have suggested that ‘the idea of the West’ was a significant driver of Gorbachev’s policies. That may have been true in domestic policy, but this chapter shows that during the 1980s, Soviet analysts—like their American colleagues—believed that the Western economic model was being eclipsed by Asian competition. In the USSR as in the West, the 1980s were the decade of ‘Japan as Number One’. This chapter examines why Soviet analysts believed the West was in decline. It concludes by noting Gorbachev’s personal interest in Asian development models—and in China in particular.

China and the USSR had been stark ideological opponents throughout much of the Cold War as they feuded over the meaning of Marxism-Leninism. In the early 1980s, however, their relationship rapidly changed as Soviet intellectuals realized that Deng Xiaoping was transforming China’s economy. This chapter examines Soviet economists and analysts who visited China, studied the changes underway, and reported on China’s new policies to top Soviet leaders.

This chapter discusses the political challenges that Gorbachev faced while devising policy during the late 1980s, and highlights the role played by economic interest groups, including the farm lobby, heavy industries, and the military industrial complex. These lobbies dominated economic policymaking and constrained Gorbachev’s ability to implement his desired policies. The chapter describes the political base of each of the major interest groups, and assesses their goals in shaping economic policymaking. Each of these groups, the chapter notes, had strong economic reasons to oppose Chinese-style reform.

This chapter shows that China’s experience played an important role in Soviet debates about restructuring enterprises. Many of Moscow’s reform efforts, such as the demand that enterprises become self-financing, and the decision to let individuals start small businesses, mirrored Soviet understanding of Chinese practice. Using documentation from Soviet research institutes and from Politburo meeting notes, the chapter shows that Gorbachev struggled to change Soviet economic policy. Conservatives managed to delay Gorbachev’s initiatives, sometimes for several years. When confronted with conservative opposition, Gorbachev often cited China’s successes as evidence that his reforms would also boost growth. However, after much delay, Gorbachev succeeded in pushing through reforms that were as radical as China’s, creating a private sphere and de facto privatizing many firms.

This chapter addresses the Soviet Union’s approach to foreign investment. In the early 1980s, the USSR was skeptical of foreign capital. Poland’s debt crisis in the 1980s seemed to prove Marxist-Leninist ideas that foreign capitalists would undermine socialism. Hence Gorbachev’s early reform concepts had little to say about attracting investment. Only after China’s success in using foreign capital to develop its industrial base did Soviet policymakers begin to take another look. By the late 1980s, the Kremlin began replicating the techniques that China used to attract foreign capital, including creating Special Economic Zones, territories in which foreign businesses were given special incentives to invest. Despite bureaucratic opposition, Gorbachev and his allies explicitly copied China’s special economic zones when devising proposals to create similar institutions in the Soviet Far East.

Gorbachev is often criticized for ignoring agriculture in his reforms. In fact, as this chapter shows, Gorbachev was an agriculture expert and sought to implement Chinese-style reforms to give individual households control over farm land. Gorbachev argued that China’s experience showed that private ownership improves agricultural productivity. Nonetheless, political conflict constrained Gorbachev’s ability to adopt Chinese-style agriculture reforms in the USSR. The agro-industrial lobby, which was represented by provincial leaders and by top Politburo officials in Moscow, stubbornly opposed decollectivizing farmland and cutting subsidies. Decollectivization would have benefitted farmers, but reforms threatened farm managers and the fertilizer and tractor industries. By 1991, Gorbachev finally succeeded in pushing through structural reforms, though opposition had managed to stall reform for five years and demanded higher subsidies that left a massive hole in the Kremlin’s budget.

This chapter examines the growth of the Soviet budget deficit from 1989 through 1991. The government plugged the increasingly large hole in its budget by printing money. This caused a surge of inflation that made economic mechanisms ground to a halt. The security services, backed by allies in heavy industries and collective farms, sought to resolve the problem by emulating post-Tiananmen China. They launched a coup in August, 1991 to reestablish authoritarian rule. The coup leaders hoped this would provide the power they needed to balance the budget. In fact, the subsidies that flowed to the military and other interest groups were the main cause of the budget deficit. The putsch could only have succeeded in resolving the country’s deficit if the new leaders cut spending on the military, farms, and heavy industries—the very groups that supported the coup. That was never a plausible outcome. Lacking fresh ideas to resolve the country’s economic crisis, the coup collapsed and the USSR hurtled toward disintegration.