Was the collapse of the Soviet Union inevitable? Could Mikhail Gorbachev have managed a transition to market democracy if he had made better economic and political choices? Or was authoritarian modernization after the model of Deng Xiaoping's China a viable alternative for the USSR? Chris Miller offers a fresh approach to these questions in his fine short monograph. Ultimately, he argues that the collapse was, indeed, inevitable. Gorbachev's hands were tied by powerful interest groups, which controlled the Communist Party and had a structural interest in the economic status quo.

Along the way, Miller presents new information about economic policy-making in the 1980s. In particular, he demonstrates the extent to which Soviet reformers followed the early stages of Chinese economic reform, seeing in Chinese innovations a potential way forward for their own country. Influential China watchers, notably Fedor Burlatsky, portrayed Mao Zedong's successors as pragmatists who had decisively broken with the Maoist legacy. Deng's decision to decollectivize agriculture was closely tracked by experts, including both ideological watchdogs and reformers. First Leonid Brezhnev, then Gorbachev, highlighted the new policy in China as the basis for improved relations between the two countries, and Gorbachev specifically admired China's use of incentives and special economic zones to revitalize its economy.

The experience of China seemed increasingly relevant as the Soviet economic position worsened. Heavily dependent on oil and natural gas, the Soviet government lost billions of rubles when the price of oil plummeted in the mid-1980s. Miller nonetheless argues that too much weight has been placed on oil prices as an explanation of the growing budget deficit, to the neglect of other factors. Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign, though quite successful as a public health measure, withdrew a revenue stream from the state that may have approached the losses from petroleum. Meanwhile, state expenditures were rising rather than falling. Rather than adopt an austerity budget, the Politburo elected to cover the deficit by printing money, with inflation and shortages the inevitable consequences.

A puzzle, as Miller rightly highlights, is why Gorbachev failed to grasp the nettle and cut spending. In hindsight, many analysts have castigated him for this refusal. Miller argues that it was not in his power to do so. Entrenched interest groups, specifically the “military-industrial complex,” the “fuel-energy complex,” and the “agro-industrial complex,” together proved more powerful than the weak General Secretary. Although all three complexes were bloated, wasteful, and inefficient, and hence obvious targets for cuts, they had powerful advocates in the Politburo and the wider Communist Party. Gorbachev felt the need to placate these groups as he groped toward economic reform. He eventually surmised that the only way to break their stranglehold over economic policy was democratization, precisely the opposite approach to that taken in China after Tiananmen. To take just one example, whereas China's collective farmers were so impoverished that they clamored for privatization, Soviet collective farmers felt that they had too much to lose. The same could be said of all three complexes. All were aware of their noncompetitiveness on the world market, which they accordingly feared, and all of them benefited from subsidies and excess investment under the status quo.

Miller's analysis is cogent and plausible. He illuminates an aspect of the economic crisis of the perestroika era that has not been so clearly identified before. Yet compared with the evidence that he brings to bear on Soviet policy-makers' views of China, this part of his argument remains sketchy. How exactly did the interest groups obstruct reform? Did they make their case exclusively in closed meetings, or did it appear in the party press? Did they even make their case at all, or did Gorbachev never feel strong enough to put major cuts to the interest groups on the table? The insight that Soviet officials frequently advocated for the institutional interests of the agencies, regions, and enterprises they oversaw is a familiar one, and the Politburo certainly included representatives of the complexes Miller names. Still, more specifics on the dynamics of Politburo discussions would have given a clearer understanding of what Gorbachev actually tried to do and why government spending on agriculture, industry, and the military was not seriously cut until after state itself had collapsed.

This book is clearly written and forcefully argued. It will be read with interest by political scientists as well as historians. Its brevity also makes it a candidate for use in the advanced undergraduate or graduate classroom.