Soviet bureaucrats reacted to reform by seizing state assets

Evidence

The process that led to the end of the USSR started at the top, driven by Gorbachev and a small group of elite reformers. Perestroika, or “reconstruction,” was aimed at increasing industrial production and rooting out corruption, which necessarily entailed confronting the nomenklatura. But a “velvet purge” (unlike the purges in the 1930s, no one was getting killed) put wily mid-level bureaucrats on the defensive, and the collapse of the command economy structure cut off the flows of profits (and wages) sustaining the system. It was bureaucrats who really reacted to their change in fortunes, not the workers—who often kept going to work without getting paid. The nomenklatura at the national level seized the assets and territories they controlled, and Gorbachev refused to use force to stop them. As Russian historian Vladislav Zubok puts it, the USSR “met its end at the hand of its own leadership.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 108

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The vignette that Soviet workers kept reporting to jobs without pay while bureaucrats dismantled the state quietly offers a thick, counterintuitive picture of how a superpower ends that resists any one-sentence summary.
• XREF: connects to: Post-Soviet state collapse freed security professionals to enter private protection markets. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 671; Former Soviet elites converted state wealth into private oligarch fortunes in Ukraine. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 474; Reformist elites seized party control by displacing the retreating old guard — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 504

Broader Connections

• Former Soviet elites converted state wealth into private oligarch fortunes in Ukraine. #exemplifies (0.85) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 474
• Reformist elites seized party control by displacing the retreating old guard #complicates (0.75) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 504
• Post-Soviet state collapse freed security professionals to enter private protection markets. #exemplifies (0.72) — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 671