Let’s have a big round of applause for government incompetence.

Had I been aware of it I would have included the following essay in my post a few days ago, Karl Marx’s Christmas Present, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union.

The essay is a review of a recently published book, Collapse: The Fall Of The Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok. That book tries to explain why the USSR collapsed so fast and argues that although the nation was in a lot of trouble and its leaders had known that for at least a decade, the collapse was not foreordained and the final result depended on a lot of turning points and personalities.

However the essay (Russian Bear Market), while praising the book’s details and accepting the main argument that collapse was not inevitable, argues that even had the 1991 coup against Gorbachev succeeded the new leaders would have faced all the same problems that could no longer be solved by Stalinist bloodshed alone, even had that been possible in the late USSR.

There’s some juicy stuff here in the details but this opening paragraph cracked me up and reminded me very much of the final confrontation between the Chief of the KGB and Professor Legasov in the TV mini-series Chernobyl:

When the KGB chief Yuri Andropov became the Soviet leader in 1982, candidates for office besieged him. Whenever someone began, “Let me tell you about myself,” Andropov replied: “What makes you think you know more about yourself than I know about you?”

Brilliant. The whole shitty system in a nutshell. If we know everything about everybody (and everything) we can run this system.

Other interesting bits include this on Ukraine.

Yeltsin soon discovered that republics demanding the right to separate would not consider giving the same right to their own provinces. Reading Zubok’s account, I was struck by the fact that Crimea, which President Putin invaded in 2014, already posed an issue as the USSR was falling apart. With a population overwhelmingly Russian, it had been ceded to Ukraine by the Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. The Donbass, the predominantly Russian area of Eastern Ukraine that is now the scene of armed conflict, also posed an issue as the country was breaking up. Would Ukraine have been better off had it not insisted on retaining these undigestible parts?

I’ve got a fair amount of time for Gorbachev so the following nugget is disappointing, even if it had been typical of such leaders for decades:

Even those familiar with the opulence in which the leaders of the world’s first socialist state lived will be shocked by Zubok’s description of the vacation villa Gorbachev had built in 1988. It cost one billion rubles at a time when the Soviet defense budget, which Zubok believes was fifteen per cent of gdp, was seventy-seven billion rubles. Today, the U.S. defense budget is about $750 billion, which would make the cost of an equivalent villa $9.75 billion. That doesn’t include the upkeep and endless staff, such as the scuba divers making sure no one could infiltrate by water. Given the country’s fiscal crisis, one can’t help but recall the extravagance of Louis XVI.

I recall that the coup seemed very incompetent, a result of a degrading system producing degraded and mediocre leaders, but I had no idea how incompetent they were:

It was a Keystone coup. Right after the organizing meeting of the plotters’ Emergency Committee, Zubok explains, “some members went home and succumbed to various illnesses. Boldin was already suffering from high blood pressure; he went to a hospital. Pavlov . . . tried to control his emotions and stress with a disastrous mixture of sedatives and alcohol. At daybreak, his bodyguard summoned medical help, as Pavlov was incapable of functioning.” Pavlov later took some more medicine to control his nerves and “had a second breakdown that incapacitated him for days.”
…
So incompetent were they that they did not bother to turn off Yeltsin’s phone or prevent him from organizing opposition. One of Yeltsin’s supporters was able to fly to Paris, denounce the coup, and prepare, if necessary, to set up a government in exile. Opposition news sources, who knew what was happening better than the coup leaders themselves, continued their broadcasts to the West. “The situation was unbelievable,” one KGB general recalled. KGB analysts were learning about a crisis “in the capital of our Motherland from American sources.” When Margaret Thatcher accepted advice to telephone Yeltsin, she recalled, “to my astonishment I was put through.”

Let’s have a big round of applause for government incompetence.