Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union

From 1988 through 1991, Scott Shane, as a correspondent in Moscow for the Baltimore Sun, experienced firsthand the collapse of the Soviet empire. During those tumultuous years, the cracks that hadalways existed in the communist system ofcentralplanningandsingle-party rulewidened until the system itself had tobe dismantled, not merely reformed. Shane provides an insightful account of the fall ofthe Soviet empire; his central thesis is that “information slew the totalitarian giant.” Under communism, the Soviet state had a monopoly on information. It was the duty of the secret police, the KGB, to know everything about everyone and the duty ofbureaucrats to run the economy like a machine. But it was only a matter of time before the inherent contradictions of the Soviet system would clog the wheels of the giant machine and bring it to a halt. That time came with the ascent of Mikhall Gorbachev to power in March 1985. When Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Communist party, he recognized the crisis that confronted the rigid system of centralplanning in a world that was becoming increasingly competitive and in which information technologr was changing economic and social realities. He persuaded the party elite that if socialism were to survive, economic restructuring (perestroika) would be necessary along with greater openness (glasnost) so that informationcould be better utilized. Whathe failed to realize, however, was that once his policyof glasnost tookeffect, there would be no turningback—people could see for themselvesthat the only way toward a normal life and improved living standards was to end communism andlet markets deliver what consumers wanted rather than what the state dictated. Shane shows, withajournalist’s eye fordetail, how the thaw in information control exposed the horrors of Stalinism, the corruption of central planning, and the illusion of “the Soviet family of nations.” He begins his story, however, with a glimpse of just how uncertain any prediction of the demise of the Soviet police state would have been in 1985.