Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System

David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System. New York: Routledge, 1997, xiii, 235 pp. + appendix, notes, bibliography, index.

It has become a cliche that the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 took the scholarly community by surprise. While Cold Warriors had long hoped for such a day, few imagined that the Soviet state could crumble so quickly. In Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System, David Kotz and Fred Weir offer readers a provocative, original, and convincing explanation of the USSR's rapid fall. They argue that the collapse of the USSR occurred not because of internal contradictions or flaws within Soviet state socialism, but because Gorbachev and his supporters inadvertently "unleashed processes that created a new coalition of groups and classes that favored replacing socialism with capitalism" (p. 5). The USSR did not disintegrate under the weight of years of economic stagnation and political oppression, but was dismantled by a party-state elite that sought to improve its own material well-being and financial security by embracing free market economics.

Kotz and Weir support their thesis through a careful examination of the roots and evolution of glasnost and perestroika. The work offers a thumbnail sketch of state socialism's development from the start of the Stalin revolution through the Brezhnev era. The authors provide convincing statistics to demonstrate that, while economic growth under Brezhnev had indeed slowed, it had certainly...