'Imperial overstretch', Mikhail Gorbachev, and the end of the cold war

Cold War History

Volumn 1, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-20

  Lundestad, Geir ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33750695366     PISSN: 14682745     EISSN: 17437962     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/713999912     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), p.609, n.18 (italics original).
2. Kennedy also used the term 'strategical overstretch'. A general definition of 'overstretch' is given in Paul Kennedy, 'Conclusions', in Geir Lundestad (ed.), The Fall of Great Powers. Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994): it 'merely means that there exists a mismatch between a Great Power's obligations and its capabilities, between its desired policies and its actual resources' (p.374).
3. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p.xvi.
4. Paul Kennedy, 'Grand Strategies and Less-than-Grand Strategies: A Twentieth-Century Critique', in Lawrence Freedman, Paul Hayes and Robert O'Neill (eds.), War, Strategy, and International Politics. Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp.239-40
5. I have written about the debate caused by the publication of Rise and Fall in The American 'Empire' and Other Studies of US Foreign Policy in a Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), particularly pp.85-7, 105-15
6. and in '"Empire by Invitation" in the American Century', Diplomatic History 23/2 (Spring 1999), pp.216-17.
7. Paul Kennedy has now come to postpone the fall of the United States considerably. In a recent article he writes with reference to those who argued that the United States was in decline that these 'forecasters of doom missed a number of important points': the weaknesses of the Soviet Union, the remarkable capacity of the United States to 're-tool' itself, the new technologies. Kennedy does not name any of these forecasters, but he was of course himself the prime example. For the new article, see Paul Kennedy, 'The Next American Century?', World Policy Journal 16/1 (Spring 1999), pp.52-8.
8. In the rapidly growing literature on Gorbachev and the fall of the Soviet Union I have used the following most extensively: Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
9. Martin McCauley, Gorbachev (London: Longman, 1998);
10. Anders Åslund, Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989);
11. John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
12. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, The End of the Soviet Union. The Triumph of the Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
13. Among even more general accounts I have primarily used Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment. Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
14. Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union 1917-1991. Final Edition (London: Fontana Press, 1992);
15. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy. A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
16. My more general treatment of the end of the Cold War can be found in East, West, North, South. Major Developments in International Politics since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn. 1999), pp.129-37.
17. Soviet economic history through the Khrushchev years is well analyzed in Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
18. The best account of the growing problems in the 1980s is probably Aslund, Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform. For the limited spillover from the military to the civilian sector
19. see Clifford R. Gaddy, The Price of the Past. Russia's Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1996).
20. Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, Soviet Defense Spending. A History of CIA Estimates, 1950-1990 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), pp.190-91.
21. Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998), p.143.
22. Soviet definitions of national income differ from Western definitions of GNP by excluding depreciation and the nonmaterial components of services. During the 1980s GNP may have been roughly one-third to two-fifths greater than national income. For this see Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, p.189.
23. Thus, in the 1980s the CIA certainly concluded that the Soviet Union had many serious economic problems, but it nevertheless continued to forecast that the Soviet economy would continue to grow at two per cent per year. For this, see Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows. The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp.382-9;
24. the quotation is from p.564. For the numbers given, see also Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy. The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp.196-6;
25. Henry Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., 'The CIA's Credibility', The National Interest (Winter 1995/96), pp.111-12;
26. Melvin A. Goodman, 'Ending the CIA's Cold War Legacy', Foreign Policy 106 ( Spring 1997), p.141.
27. Goodman, 'Ending the CIA's Cold War Legacy', pp.141-2;
28. Moynihan, Secrecy, pp.196-8;
29. Rowen and Wolf, 'The CIA's Credibility', p.112;
30. Odd Arne Westad, 'Secrets of the Second World: The Russian Archives and the Reinterpretation of Cold War History', Diplomatic History 21/2 (Spring 1997), pp.261-2.
31. A discussion of Khanin's work is found in Richard E. Ericson, 'The Soviet Statistical Debate: Khanin vs. TsSU', in Henry Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr. (eds.), The Impoverished Superpower. Perestroika and the Soviet Military Burden (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990) , pp.63-92.
32. Dmitri Steinberg, 'The Soviet Defence Burden: Estimating Hidden Defence Costs', Soviet Studies 44/2 (1992), p.237.
33. Gates, From the Shadows, pp.318-19;
34. Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch, p.147.
35. Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr. (eds.), The Future of the Soviet Empire (New York: St. Martin's, 1987), pp.121-40;
36. Rowen and Wolf, The Impoverished Superpower, pp.1-12;
37. Michael Marrese and Jan Vanous, Soviet Subsidization of Trade with Eastern Europe: A Soviet Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Institute of International Studies, 1983);
38. Paul Marer, 'The Political Economy of Soviet Relations with Eastern Europe', in Sarah Meiklejohn Terry (ed.), Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1984), pp.155-88.
39. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence. Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Random House, 1995), p.570.
40. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Bantam Books, 1997), p.277;
41. For the secrecy, see also Dobrynin, In Confidence, p.618.
42. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p.564.
43. Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991) , p.54.
44. See also Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl and Melvin A. Goodman, The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze (London: Hurst & Company, 1997), pp.52-3, 58-61.
45. Eduard Shevardnadze had no previous experience in foreign policy. Thus, his appointment came as a great surprise, not least to Anatoly Dobrynin, who told Secretary of State George Shultz: 'Our foreign policy is going down the drain. They have named an agricultural type.' For this see George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph. My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), p.572.
46. Yegor K. Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p.329.
47. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, 'The Collapse of the Soviet System and the Memoir Literature', Europe-Asia Studies 49/2 (1997), p.261.
48. William T. Lee, 'The CIA's Credibility', The National Interest (Winter 1995/96), p.113.
49. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military, p.115.
50. Ellman and Kontorovich, 'The Collapse of the Soviet System and the Memoir Literature', pp.261-2.
51. Gaddy, The Price of the Past, pp.56, 62.
52. For Gromyko's account of Gorbachev's early days, see Andrei Gromyko, Memories. From Stalin to Gorbachev (London: Arrow Books, 1989), pp.437-40.
53. See also my East, West, North, South, pp.262-3.
54. William D. Jackson, 'Soviet Reassessment of Ronald Reagan, 1985-1988', Political Science Quarterly 113/4 (1998-99), pp.621-2.
55. William Wohlforth (ed.), Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), pp.15, 166.
56. Wohlforth, Witnesses to the End of the Cold War, p.164;
57. Nina Tannenwald, 'Conference on Understanding the End of the Cold War', Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998), p.11.
58. There are many accounts of the Reykjavik meeting. See, for instance, Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era. The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1991 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998), pp.155-209.
59. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, pp.751-80.
60. Cold War International History Project Bulletin 4 (Fall 1994), pp.84-5.
61. See also Diane P. Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman (eds.), Revelations from the Russian Archives. Documents in English Translation (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1997), pp.705-7;
62. Jackson, 'Soviet Reassessment of Ronald Reagan, 1985-1988', pp.625-34.
63. For more general studies, see Aslund, Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, pp.25-37;
64. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, pp.147-50, 160-69;
65. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, pp.6-16;
66. McCauley, Gorbachev, pp.50-132.
67. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p.51.
68. Stephen White, After Gorbachev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edn. 1993), p.212.
69. See also Koenker and Bachman, Revelations from the Russian Archives, pp.765-6;
70. Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition. American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1994), pp.275-6, 284.
71. Jackson, 'Soviet Reassessment of Ronald Reagan, 1985-88', pp.637-43.
72. See also Jack F Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire. The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995), pp.150-52.
73. I based this survey in part on Vladislav M. Zubok, 'Why the Cold War Ended in 1985-89?' in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
74. Garthoff, The Great Transition, pp.751-78
75. Quoted in Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin (New York: Viking, 1990), p.207.
76. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, pp.701-2, 710, 716-17;
77. Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal. Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).
78. Lundestad, East, West, North, South, pp.135-6.
79. The best account of the events in Eastern Europe is found in Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989. The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
80. The best account of the unification of Germany is found in Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
81. Angela E. Stent, Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, the Soviet Collapse, and the New Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
82. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, pp.667-70.
83. Paul Kennedy, 'The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism 1846-1914: Comment', Past & Present 125 (Nov. 1989), pp.186-92.
84. See also Patrick K. O'Brien, 'The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism 1846-1914', Past & Present 120 (Aug. 1988), pp.163-99;
85. and O'Brien's reply to Kennedy's comment in Past & Present 125 (Nov. 1989), pp.192-9;
86. Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenbach, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire. The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860-1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), particularly pp.304-5, 315-16.
87. See, for instance, the statistics in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment. A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p.359.
88. For later years, see, for instance, US Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1995 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1995), p.356.