Book Review
Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev
Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998), 609 pp.
Mikhail Gorbachev's acceptance of German unification and of a united Germany's inclusion in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) both symbolized and rendered permanent the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. By conceding these two issues, Gorbachev and his advisers acquiesced in something that had always been portrayed as sheer anathema to the Soviet Union: a renascent, powerful Germany fully ensconced in the Western camp. Although Gorbachev is still lionized in the West for these concessions, he has been sharply criticized at home both because he agreed to German unification and because he "sold" it too cheaply.
Scholars are still wrestling with how to conceptualize and interpret Gorbachev's policies. Was there some grand design behind his "new political thinking," or was it, as some have argued, a pragmatic "diplomacy of decline"? Did Gorbachev have a foreign policy plan, or did he merely react to events that increasingly spun out of control? When it was all over, what was the Soviet Union's East European "empire" really worth if it ultimately brought down the Soviet system itself? Hannes Adomeit sets out to answer both the broader questions of empire and the narrower issue of German unification in his new book, which draws extensively on East German archives and is also based on interviews with some of Gorbachev's advisers and on memoirs by former Soviet officials. The book covers the entire postwar period through the unification of Germany.
The initial discussion of theories of empire raises the perennial debate in Soviet studies--namely, the relevance, if any, of political science theories, which were largely derived by Western academics from the Western experience, for the Soviet system. Was the Soviet Union a sui generis case that should be studied for its own sake (since it explicitly claimed to be an anti-imperial country), or was its East European empire--in many ways perceived as an extension of the Soviet Union itself--similar to previous territorially contiguous empires? Adomeit's review of the literature explores a variety of theories--metrocentric, pericentric, systemic, structural, and transnational--and concludes that one must integrate several different theories to derive a useful explanatory framework. He briefly returns to these conceptual issues in the last pages of the book.
The richness of Adomeit's book lies in the complex tapestry it weaves as it delves into the minutiae of Soviet views of Germany and the Soviet Union's ties with its [End Page 117] "fictional" East German ally. The archives may not radically change our understanding of how the Soviet empire functioned; but, as Adomeit shows, they reveal how difficult it was for the Soviet Communist authorities to deal with their comrades in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in spite of Walter Ulbricht's and Erich Honecker's dependence on Moscow's political and economic largesse. Adomeit also highlights the Soviet Union's key dilemma regarding the stability of the East German state. On the one hand, from the very inception of the GDR, "the Soviet leaders were perfectly well aware of the main problems of imperial control in Germany. The GDR lacked legitimacy. There was a tremendous outflow of people. Politically, the regime was unstable. It could be kept in power only by the presence of Soviet forces" (p. 99). Adomeit cites a variety of communications between Soviet leaders (Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev) and East German leaders (Ulbricht and Honecker) that illustrate this point.
On the other hand, after the Berlin Wall was built, the Soviet leadership acted as if the GDR did enjoy a certain degree of legitimacy. Moreover, under Gorbachev it became clear that despite Moscow's realization that the GDR was unstable, the Soviet Union never made any plans to deal with a situation in which the authority of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) might be seriously challenged. As Adomeit shows, the GDR leadership was not always subordinate to Moscow. Despite East Germany's crucial geographic and ideological position as the western outpost of the Soviet empire, its leaders at times acted more independently than most observers in the West once thought. The Soviet Union's approach to empire was a strange mixture of sober understanding and wishful thinking.
This raises another fundamental point about the Soviet empire: How much did the Soviet leadership know about what was happening in the GDR? Adomeit has some fascinating nuggets from the archives about Soviet activities in East Germany. He examines various theories about the role of the Soviet Committee on State Security (KGB) in events in Germany and its links to the East German State Security Ministry (Stasi), but he acknowledges that he is "impressed less by the KGB's foresight, efficient organization, and effective operations than with its parochialism and preposterous pretensions, and the many instances of bungling and blundering" (p. 365).
Under Gorbachev, a variety of institutes and research centers were responsible for providing assessments of Germany and should have understood the real situation there, but as Adomeit points out, Gorbachev's chief advisers on Germany, the Germanisty, were so hidebound in their traditional dialectical views that they were an obstacle to a more flexible policy toward both the GDR and West Germany.
Adomeit concludes, "Gorbachev was not much of a conceptual thinker" (p. 195). In his earlier writings on Gorbachev, Adomeit portrayed the Soviet leader as a man with a certain vision and strategy. Yet in this book, after combing through the archives and interviewing participants, Adomeit appears to have modified his view of Gorbachev. In a detailed examination of the events leading to German unification, Adomeit shows how Gorbachev was receiving contradictory advice from a variety of "experts." In the end, the Soviet leader bypassed most of the normal decision-making channels, concentrating instead on a small ad hoc group of advisers who had to respond to rapidly changing events over which the Soviet Union increasingly lost control. [End Page 118]
Gorbachev finally assented to German unification because he had no alternative other than using massive force to keep the SED regime in power. By choosing not to use force, he essentially predetermined the outcome. Even though he tried to fight the inclusion of a united Germany in NATO, he had little choice in the end, given the fall of Communism in other parts of the Soviet empire and the imminent demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). Gorbachev did receive some economic compensation for his concessions, but even on this issue he had no coherent strategy, as his critics have subsequently argued.
Despite Gorbachev's evident lack of both strategy and tactics, Adomeit evaluates the final Soviet leader with appreciation: "A prominent place for him in European and world history is well deserved . . . not because of his keen analytical sense and political foresight, but because of his willingness to adapt to ever changing realities and his unwillingness to use force in order to arrest or deflect fundamental change" (p. 574). Without Gorbachev's ability to accept the unthinkable, disruption and bloodshed might well have ensued, and the Cold War might still be under way.
Angela E. Stent
Georgetown University