The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics

By Georgi Arbatov

Book Overview

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812922743
• ISBN13: 9780812922745
• Release Date: October 1993
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 1.3" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Essential Cold War Soviet Memoir

As the subtitle of Georgi Arbatov's memoir states, he was an insider of the Soviet political system from the Khrushchev through Gorbachev eras. Arbatov believes this is perhaps the most important period in Soviet history and dubs the years following the death of Joseph Stalin through the 1980's as a period leading up to the Second Russian Revolution. Arbatov tells us a gap exists in the present scholarship and that historians need to concentrate on this important chapter in Soviet history. Written with a great deal of hindsight and sprinkled with digressions and personal regrets, this work nonetheless offers the insightful recollections of a top political advisor to the pinnacle of Soviet leadership. Born in 1923, Arbatov's mother came from a peasant background, while his father, a Civil War veteran, worked in a factory in Odessa. During the purges of the 1930's, Arbatov's father was jailed for a period, but later released due to lack of concrete evidence that he was an enemy of the people. This incident began what Arbatov believed was a passive disillusionment with the Stalin regime that his father silently harbored. Arbatov regrets not fully communicating to his father about his disenchantment before he died in 1954. At eighteen years of age, Arbatov enrolled at the First Moscow Artillery College one day before the Nazi invasion of 21 June 1941. As a result, the usual two-year tenure period was reduced to a six-month crash course. As a young captain, Arbatov commanded a Katyusha rocket battery before being invalided out with a severe case of tuberculosis. Both his father and he had participated in the two climatic events in Soviet history (the Bolshevik Revolution and the Great Patriotic War) that would leave an indelible legacy upon the collective memory of Soviet society and, most importantly, according to Arbatov, hinder the willingness for that society to enter into the "recovery from Stalinism" (p. 4). After the war Arbatov became a student at Moscow University where he specialized in foreign political affairs. Arbatov and his fellow students were required to read "selected" works of Marx/Engels and Lenin, but academic policy stipulated that Stalin be quoted two-to-three times more than Lenin and five-to-six times more than Marx/Engels. Arbatov's first job upon graduation was translating significant American, British, and German political, economic, and philosophical literature. It was in this capacity that Arbatov became exposed to the more liberal aspects of social democratic ideology. Arbatov admits, however, that he never fell into the category of dissident or western democratic want-to-be. After Stalin's death, Arbatov worked on the staff of the academic journal "Problems of philosophy." This was the beginning of what Arbatov calls oasis of open thinking in the desert of totalitarian dogmatism. Arbatov's most influential work came as a result of his founding the Institute for the Study of USA and Canada in 1968. It was within this "oa