The best thing about the Soviet Union – arguably the only good thing – was the manner of its going. Though it lost its European empire when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, almost nobody predicted that the USSR itself would fall apart so quickly. Most historians, Moscow-based journalists and the world’s espionage agencies thought it would limp on for decades, like the Ottoman empire. Yet the world’s second most powerful state withered away, and not in the classical Marxist sense: it just ceased to exist.
As Robert Service shows, the Soviet people destroyed the Soviet Union, not outsiders, and without any significant violence. Now in his 80th year, Service – the biographer of the troika of the USSR’s founders, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin – has long been our leading historian of Soviet Russia. He is on sparkling form here, armed with plenty of new material. Of the numerous books about the last years of the Soviet era, this is the most definitive.
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He identifies the key moment in the story: the coup attempt in August 1991, when a group of diehard Stalinist apparatchiks tried to turn the clock back to ‘re-emphasise the first word in the term dictatorship of the proletariat’, as one of them admitted later.
