Review: A Failed Empire
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Author | Mike Bowker |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300328 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| International Journal | Summer 2008 | 789 |
| Reviews |
A FAILED EMPIRE
The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev
Vladislav M. Zubok
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007. 467pp, US$39.95 cloth
(ISBN 978-0-8078-3098-7)
During the Cold War, analyses of the period were necessarily one-sided.
There was an abundance of material from the American side but little from
the Soviet Union. Censorship was tight and the Soviet archives were closed.
All this has now changed, allowing historians to investigate the Soviet per-
spective on the east-west conflict in a far more informed way. Vladislav
Zubok has been prominent amongst those reassessing Soviet foreign policy
through the newly available primary sources. He co-wrote a highly influential
book on the Stalin and Khrushchev periods that was published in 1996, and
this latest monograph extends the story to the end of the Cold War and pro-
vides an excellent overview of the whole period.
Zubok places himself somewhere within the post-revisionist spectrum
regarding Cold War historiography. Within this framework, he argues—as in
his previous book—that the Soviet leadership acted according to a so-called
“revolutionary imperialist” paradigm. In practice, this does not seem very
far distant from the idea that the USSR acted in line with realist theory and
sought to maximize its power, but a crucial difference is that its actions were
underpinned by a commitment to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Indeed, one of
the themes of this book is the importance of Marxism-Leninism to all Soviet
leaders. Ideology was not used simply to legitimize Soviet behaviour—as
many in the west believed at the time—since Soviet leaders actually believed
it and sought to act according to those beliefs. Even Gorbachev, who was the
first Soviet leader to break from the revolutionary imperialist paradigm, kept
Lenin’s works on his desk and reportedly reread them “for clues and inspi-
ration” (296). A second theme running through this book is Zubok’s un-
Marxist—but nonetheless accurate—claim that every leader in the Kremlin,
through the power of his own personality, made a real difference to policy.
Zubok argues that there was little hope of avoiding the Cold War with
Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. He was determined to control central and eastern
Europe and, despite certain hints after the war, was never willing to give up
the Soviet zone of East Germany. Stalin’s reading of Marxism-Leninism
meant that he always expected communism to triumph over capitalism, but
not before a major war between the two social systems. In his later years,
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