The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 73 Munich, Accra, Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam and Washington, D.C. He is the author of Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Random House, 1995), Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (Random House, 2005) and Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray—and How to Return to Reality (Yale University Press, 2010). Comments on his books and an occasional blog post can be found at www.jackmatlock.com. How Dreamers and Schemers Made Today’s Russia The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War Arkady Ostrovsky, Viking Press, 2015, $30/hardcover, $14.99/Kindle, 384 pages. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism Charles Clover, Yale University Press, 2016, $35/hardcover, $16.99/Kindle, 376 pages. Reviewed By Eric Green For decades—perhaps centuries—into the future, historians will debate the significance of the 1990s in Russia. Was it a brief, freakish deviation from Russia’s pattern of having a suffocating state dominate individual initiative, or was it a turning point when Russians decisively embraced Western values of individual freedom and accountable government? While the answers to these questions are still unknowable, it is indisputable that the 1990s were a colossal setback, both economically and spiritually, to the vast majority of Russians. Liberal reformers were disap- pointed by their fail- ure to leap-frog their country to Western levels of prosperity, civility and stabil- ity (Sweden wasn’t built in a day), while the masses of bureaucrats, military and intelligence officers and academics were in a state of shock at the loss of the Soviet Union’s social hierarchies at home and great-power status abroad. Both books under review recognize how pivotal the dramas of the 1990s are to understanding contemporary Russia. The events are well known: Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to allow the Warsaw Pact to disintegrate as Ger- mans peacefully destroyed the Berlin Wall; the failed 1991 putsch in Moscow that backfired so spectacularly that the USSR’s 15 republics became indepen- dent countries with less advance notice than a wedding, while allowing Boris Yeltsin to punctuate his own coup over Gorbachev; and then Yeltsin’s Shake- spearean presidency, which saw bloody rebellion in Chechnya and in his own parliament, intrigue among his court- iers and family members, and epic theft of state property. Against this background, Russia’s foreign policy tried to perpetuate Mos- cow’s image as a superpower, but failed to either block the eastern enlargement of the European Union and NATO or to reconcile Russia’s strategic interests with this process. Though Ostrovsky and Clover are describing the same events, they choose opposite points of entry. Clover follows the defenders of aggressive Russian nationalism, who rebounded from the collapse of the USSR to achieve unprecedented influence under Putin. Ostrovsky tells the story from the perspective of the shestdesiatki (1960s) generation who emerged during the Khrushchev era and, after being forced underground following Brezhnev’s crushing of the Prague Spring, were brought to center stage by Gorbachev in the late 1980s. Ostrovsky masterfully describes the people within this movement, concen- trating on journalists who employed the media to propel reformers into power in large part by using Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) to discredit the Soviet regime. It’s difficult to imagine how dizzying a time this was. In the space of 10 years, an odd assortment of men from the society’s margins (where they sold jeans, wrote for underground papers or marked time in academic institutes) assumed leading roles in Russia. From underdogs, they were now seen as instruments of an inevitable wave of change that would end Europe’s ideological fissures, the “end of history” in Fukayama’s phrase. What could pos- sibly go wrong? The early days of Kommersant , the country’s first private, pro-market newspaper, was an indication, and Ostrovsky’s description encapsulates the complexities of a changing Russia. Kommersant ’s reformist owners were all too willing to con investors and manip- ulate their shares, even as their paper advocated for free markets and private property. These million-dollar swindles were a prelude to the massive manipu- lations a few years later, when Yeltsin pawned Russia’s most valuable compa- nies to seven oligarchs in exchange for positive media coverage and financial backing for his 1996 re-election bid. Ostrovksy points out that this trans- action was unnecessary and short-