Book Review: Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231166591 |
| Author | J.-Guy Lalande |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
made me reflect—sometimes in the manner of Barker’sownreflections that open
each chapter—on my own actions and approach. Those interested in how Canada
and the United States have come to be, the conceptual and international material pro-
cesses that continue to affirm them, and how we can imagine decolonized futurities,
will find much to take from the book.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
Vladislav M. Zubok
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 535 pp. $35 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-300-25730-4
Reviewed by: J.-Guy Lalande (J.-Guy Lalande, Department of History, St. Francis Xavier
University, P.O. Box 5000, Antigonish, NS B2G 2W5, Canada. Email: jlalande@stfx.ca),
Department of History, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada
DOI: 10.1177/00207020231166591
The collapse of the Soviet Union, arguably the most important event of the late twen-
tieth century, has generated a rich historiography. Indeed, a plethora of comments, arti-
cles, and books have linked this event with the triumph of the West in the Cold War.
Their common narrative tells the story of a Soviet empire exhausted from trying unsuc-
cessfully to keep up with Western technology and military spending. Vladislav Zubok
is a Muscovite-born historian at the London School of Economics and Political
Science. From his standpoint, he argues in this well-written, deeply-researched, and
enthralling monograph that external factors—the collapse of the Communist regimes
in East Central Europe in 1989, the proposal of a new world order based on
co-operation and integration, the rejection of the Marxist-Leninist worldview, and
the end of the Cold War—are secondary to internal causes in explaining the collapse.
Furthermore, rejecting a popular interpretation created in the West and among
anti-Communists inside the USSR, Zubok asserts that the Soviet demise was not inev-
itable; instead, “it was full of contingencies.”
1
Among the latter, he identifies four main
causes of Soviet disintegration: 1) the discontinuation of “Andropov-like
1. VladislavM. Zubok, Collapse:TheFall of the Soviet Union (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2021), 6.
736 International Journal 77(4)
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