In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with 5,000 nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterwards the Union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the seismic shifts of the 20th century. In his book, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, which was published 30 years later (in 2021), Professor Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the break-up of the Soviet Union was historically inevitable.
In his talk, Professor Zubok, who personally interviewed Gorbachev, will tell us why he wrote the book when he did and will explore some of the key themes in it, including the reasons for the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms and how a different approach might even have preserved the Soviet Union.
Professor Vladislav Zubok was born and educated in Moscow. He studied for his undergraduate degree at Moscow State University and studied for his PhD at the Institute for the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 he moved to the USA, where he worked for 20 years, at various times serving as Visiting Professor at the Universities of Ohio, Stanford and Michigan. He taught for 11 years at Temple University (Philadelphia), where he was appointed a Professor in 2004. Since 2013 he has been at the LSE, where he is Professor of International History.
Professor Zubok is an acknowledged specialist in the history of the Cold War and the Soviet Union and in the intellectual history of 20th century Russia. His previously published works include Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, From Stalin to Krushchev (1996), A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007) and Zhivago’s Children: the Last Russian Intelligentsia (2009).
Both Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War and A Failed Empire were prize-winning books. Collapse:The Fall of the Soviet Union was awarded the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in the USA and is on the final short-list for the Cundill History Prize (the winner of which will be announced by McGill University in Canada on 1st December).