Kissing the Corpse.

Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000, by Stephen Kotkin (Oxford, 245 pp., $25)

In 1970 the Soviet Union was in command of swathes of the globe, and motivated by ideology toward further armed conquest. A few short years later, there is only ruin and pollution and demoralization to show for all that power. Communism is a bad memory, and its rapid and all- encompassing collapse raises questions fundamental to our understanding of the times and the societies in which we live.

Two main explanations of the whole phenomenon are on offer. Communism was inhuman in principle, the Right argues, and free people were under an obligation at least to contain it. A coalition developed of the United States and its NATO allies, the Vatican, Polish Solidarity, and dissident movements. Applying steady pressure to the Soviet Union in all spheres, this coalition exposed the criminality and inefficiency of Communism, and so "won" the Cold War. Not at all, the Left replies: The collapse was an unforeseeable and self-inflicted accident, and not much of a commentary on the nature of Communism. The Soviet experiment could have worked, and might still do so in the future.

During the Cold War, colleges and universities were full of specialists, known as Sovietologists, who fantasized that the Soviet Union was becoming a civil society, "converging" with the United States and even, in some fields, overtaking it. Here was a failure of intellect and humanity for which it is hard to find a parallel; and in today's Left, it lives on. In this short, often clever but always opinionated essay, Stephen Kotkin, the director of Russian studies at Princeton, has refined the standard left-wing apology in the hope of giving a kiss of life to the corpse of Communism.

In Kotkin's view, Communism did provide some measure of social justice and equality, and in its imperfect way modernized Russia; lots of worthy people "had a deeply felt urge to make socialism live up to its promise." But he concedes that while short-term economic changes-higher oil prices, say, or falling steel-production costs-might have permitted Communism to survive the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, it would nonetheless have become obvious, one fine day, that the planned economy cannot deliver the goods. Rectification was impossible: The Soviet system "had no mechanisms for self-correction" and for that reason was set on a competition with capitalism that it could not win. To concede that Communism was vulnerable through its inherent flaws is prodigious progress on the part of an apologist like Kotkin.

Capitalism, and the liberal democracy that goes with it, gave the U.S. and its allies the strength to devise and implement policies for containing the Soviet Union. But nothing like that features in this book, which baldly states that Ronald Reagan and other American leaders "pirated" a victory for which they deserve no credit. Communism is alleged to have collapsed solely on account of Gorbachev and the reforms that he inflicted upon a system not open to reform.

Kotkin condescendingly portrays Gorbachev as a hayseed and country bumpkin-someone who rose to power because he was younger and luckier than other contenders, but whose only real talent lay in "intoxicating wizardry," or the black arts of manipulation indispensable to all Communist party leaders, promoting supporters and eliminating critics. In his pocket Gorbachev always had another plan, and most of them were too clever by half; but his fatal weakness was his failure to understand that it was the Communist party alone that held the Soviet Union together as a state. When Gorbachev deliberately broke the party's hold on power, he had not appreciated that the state must also break apart. According to Kotkin, this outcome arose from the highest of motives: Gorbachev was one of the worthy people with the deep urge to make socialism live up to its promise. The hayseed from Stavropol was also a romantic and a humanist; as reform spiraled out of control into chaos, a cynic or a tyrant would have resorted to war and even the nuclear Armageddon referred to in Kotkin's title. Gorbachev instead let go of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, including the Baltic states, with hardly a shot fired in anger. He bade a swift farewell to the European satellites, and allowed Germany to reunite within NATO. Gorbachev may have destabilized Communism, but he had emerged from "the soul of the Soviet system."

All of this makes him Kotkin's hero; but it is ingenious, to put it kindly, to come up with the argument that the justification of Communism lies in the unintentional manner in which it drove itself from the scene.

In any case, what followed was awful, says Kotkin. Boris Yeltsin is the villain. Under his rule, human nature reasserted itself. Without the party-state, worthy socialist people turned into thieves and swindlers. What had been idealism ended as "basest opportunism," or the cannibalization of movable and immovable assets. Neither Yeltsin's ex- Communist apparatchiks nor imported American advisers had a clue what should be done. They set up almost a parody of the old party structure with its Central Committee. The KGB and interior troops survive under other names. In the absence of a reliable market and banking system, assured property and other rights, life is a free-for-all. Elections and parliament amount to a Potemkin facade without the institutions and rule of law indispensable to a genuine liberal democracy. Struggling to introduce the rule of law, Vladimir Putin is today still wandering in unmapped territory.

Bitterness, in the end, overwhelms Kotkin. From Russia's point of view, he thinks, the upheaval has not been worth it. The modern world is harsh, and Russia's place in it uncertain. Capitalism creates but also destroys. The U.S. exhibits "a combustible mixture of arrogance and paranoia in response to perceived challenges to its global pretensions." It is bad luck for Kotkin to be publishing at this very moment the opinion that Putin harbors no illusion about "partnership" with the U.S., but is identifying Russia's interests, "properly," with Europe. Russia's best hope, Kotkin concludes, is to try to join the euro. That is a strange example of the sort of American-inspired advice Kotkin otherwise so despises. It would also be condign punishment for another generation or two of Russians.

Trust the expert, the poet Virgil famously exhorted-but then he could never have guessed what comes out of our great academies.