Volume 42, Number 18 · November 16, 1995
Witness to the Fall
By George F. Kennan
Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of The Soviet Union
by Jack F Matlock Jr.
Random House, 836 pp., $35.00
Reviewing the history of international affairs in the modern era, which might be considered to extend from the middle of the seventeenth century to the present, I find it hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance more inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance from the international scene, primarily in the years 1987 through 1991, of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. History has recorded the decline and final collapse of a number of great empires of the past, and there has been no small number of scholarly and literary efforts to describe the circumstances and analyze the causes of these great developments. But in all these earlier instances the declines had been gradual, and the final collapses consisted normally only of prolonged and dismal trailings off of vitality into the realms of historical insignificance and ultimate oblivion. How then to explain the extreme abruptness, the sharp quick ending, and not least the relative bloodlessness with which the great Soviet Empire came to an end in the four years in question, bearing with it those attributes of the earlier Russian Empire which it had contrived to incorporate into itself?
Review, 5996 words
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