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Could the Soviet Union have survived?

Have Survived? We ask four historians of the Cold War whether the demise of the USSR was as inevitable as it now seems. ‘No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario’ Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91) and author of Armageddon and Paranoia: the Nuclear Confrontation (Profile, 2017).

Soviet scientists were the equal of any in the world, but their country was too poor to afford both guns and butter and their skills were directed towards matching the American military machine, rather than improving the people’s welfare. Aimed at fixing the faults in Soviet society, Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (‘reconstruction’) and glasnost (‘openness’) – it was a time of unprecedented press freedom, for both Russian and international journalists – ended up emphasising them. But the rejection of high-handed colonial rule by other nations in the Soviet Union, who were unofficially expected to kowtow to Russian superiority while officially all the USSR’s peoples were equal, soon became a driving force in the country’s collapse.

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