Ten things
people get wrong
about the Soviet Union.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not predicted by any major Western intelligence agency, academic institution, or political analyst before approximately 1989. The CIA's published National Intelligence Estimates of the mid-1980s consistently assessed the Soviet Union as an institutionally stable adversary; the principal academic Sovietologists (Stephen Cohen, Jerry Hough, the Harvard Russian Research Center) had been arguing for two decades that the Soviet system, whatever its problems, was structurally durable. The retrospective consensus that the Soviet Union was bound to fail is a post-hoc reconstruction. The substantive analysis is that the union dissolved because of specific political decisions taken by Gorbachev (the abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine, the unilateral disarmament initiatives, the loss of internal party discipline through glasnost) and that different decisions could have produced different outcomes.

President Reagan's defence buildup of the early 1980s, his rhetorical posture, and the Strategic Defense Initiative announcement of 1983 were significant factors in the late Soviet strategic environment. They did not, however, produce the Soviet political crisis of the late 1980s. The principal documented causes of the Soviet dissolution were internal: the demographic crisis of the 1970s, the economic stagnation, the war in Afghanistan, the cumulative ideological exhaustion, and Gorbachev's specific reform programme. The Reagan-brought-down-the-Soviet-Union thesis is a partisan American claim that has only modest support among Soviet specialists. The standard scholarly treatment is that American policy was one of many factors in a multi-causal process; Reagan was not its principal author. (Gorbachev, in his own memoirs, gave Reagan substantial personal credit for the international diplomatic dynamics, but rejected the broader claim that American pressure caused the dissolution.)

The opening of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November 1989 was the symbolic moment of the end of Soviet political control over Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union itself did not dissolve for another two years and seven weeks (until the 26th of December 1991). The two events are connected — the loss of Eastern Europe in 1989 was a major contributor to the political crisis that produced the August 1991 coup and the December 1991 dissolution — but they are not the same event. The popular Western framing that conflates them obscures the substantive history of 1990–1991 in the Soviet Union itself, particularly the political emergence of the Russian Federation under Yeltsin in opposition to the union government.

The figure of "sixty million Stalin victims" — associated principally with the Russian dissident statistician Igor Kurganov and popularised in the West by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — is, on the basis of post-1991 archival research, substantially too high. The standard contemporary scholarly estimate, based on Soviet archival access since the early 1990s, places the total of direct deaths from Stalin-era state violence (Gulag deaths, NKVD executions, deportation deaths, famine deaths) at approximately fifteen to twenty million, depending on the counting conventions used for the 1932–1933 famine and the wartime deportations. This is, by any standard, an enormous figure — comparable to the wartime death toll of any twentieth-century state — but it is not sixty million. The history of inflated victim-counts on this subject reflects the political dynamics of the Cold War on both sides and is now substantially clarified by the archival record.

The Soviet economy grew faster than any other major economy in the world from the late 1920s through the late 1960s. The growth was concentrated in heavy industry and military production, was achieved at very high human cost, and was substantially funded by extraction from the agricultural sector — but it was, in its own terms, real. The Soviet system industrialised a peasant economy in two generations, produced the weapons that defeated Nazi Germany, achieved approximate strategic parity with the United States, and supported a first-rate scientific and engineering establishment. From the 1970s, the system stopped working in this productive sense, for reasons that are now well-understood (the exhaustion of extensive growth; the inability of central planning to produce productivity-driven innovation; the rising consumer expectations that the planning system could not satisfy). The Soviet economy worked, badly, for sixty years. The fact that it failed in its last twenty does not mean it never worked.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state in which open political opposition was forbidden, but the level of popular support for the system varied substantially over time and among different population groups. The dissident movement, the underground religious networks, the national independence movements (particularly in the Baltic states, western Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Crimean Tatar community), the second-economy enterprises, and the widespread private speech culture of late Soviet humour all attest to a population that, while operating within the system, did not uniformly endorse it. The collapse of the Soviet state in 1991 — and the failure of any significant attempt to defend it during the August 1991 coup — was substantially evidence that the system had lost the active support of most of its population by that date. Equally, however, post-Soviet polling in the Russian Federation has consistently found significant nostalgia for the Soviet period, particularly among older respondents. The picture is complex.

The Soviet Union was a federation of fifteen union republics, of which the Russian SFSR was the largest. The other fourteen republics — Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the three Baltic states, the three South Caucasus states, the five Central Asian states — are not Russia, were not Russian-majority during the Soviet period (with some exceptions in particular regions), and are now fully independent countries with their own languages, governments, and international policies. The conflation of the Soviet Union with Russia, common in Western popular discussion, is offensive to the populations of the other fourteen successor states (who endured Soviet rule, often with substantial repression directed at their national communities) and obscures the substantive history. Russia is the largest of the Soviet successor states and is the union's continuator in international law. It is not the only one.

The KGB was dissolved in November 1991 and its functions distributed across several successor agencies in the Russian Federation: the Federal Security Service (FSB, for internal counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR, for foreign intelligence), the Federal Protective Service (FSO, for personal protection of senior officials), the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information (FAPSI, dissolved 2003 with its functions reabsorbed), and the GRU (military intelligence, formally a continuation of the Soviet-era service, not under the KGB). The institutional discontinuity is real. The personnel continuity, particularly in the FSB, is also real: a substantial fraction of senior Russian government officials since the early 2000s have come from FSB or KGB backgrounds, including the president Vladimir Putin (a KGB officer 1975-1991, FSB director 1998-1999). The institutional and personnel facts coexist; characterisations that treat one as the whole truth tend to be misleading.

The Soviet state pursued an official policy of atheism (formally, "scientific atheism") through most of its existence, with substantial active repression of organised religion at various periods (the most severe in the 1920s-1930s under Stalin and the 1959–1964 under Khrushchev). The institutional infrastructure of religion was substantially destroyed: of the perhaps fifty thousand Russian Orthodox parishes in 1917, only about ten thousand were operational in 1991; the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate operated under continuous state surveillance; mosques, synagogues, and Buddhist temples were all subject to similar pressures. Notwithstanding all of this, religious belief and practice continued in the Soviet population at substantial levels throughout the Soviet period, particularly in rural areas, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltic states, and the western republics. Post-1991 surveys have found that perhaps half of all Soviet citizens privately maintained some form of religious belief through the Soviet period, even when concealing it from official inquiry. The Soviet Union was officially atheist; its inhabitants were not necessarily.

The Soviet model produced rapid industrialisation in a country that had been substantially agricultural; built a heavy-industrial base that supported a major-power military and a respectable scientific establishment; raised literacy from about forty percent to about ninety-nine percent in two generations; produced full employment; produced universal access to (variable-quality) public housing, healthcare, and education; and maintained these conditions for several generations. It did so at enormous human cost (the collectivisation famines, the Terror, the Gulag, the wartime sacrifices, the post-war repressions) and ended in institutional sclerosis and dissolution. Whether this constitutes a system that "works" depends on what one is measuring and over what time horizon. The simpler framings on this question — both pro-Soviet ("the Soviet system worked, the post-1991 transition destroyed everything") and anti-Soviet ("Communism doesn't work") — are inadequate to the actual record. The honest answer is that the system delivered specific things at specific costs over specific periods, and the moral assessment of the trade-offs is something the reader must work out from the chapters of this volume.