The current conventional wisdom about the failed coup in the Soviet Union twenty years ago -- great expectations, followed by disappointment -- neglects the more subtle and important aspects. The anniversary this week is a good opportunity to savor some insightful and complex assessments. Among the best, in my view:

Jonathan Steele's interview with the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev is unusually introspective, and laments his failure to separate himself from the Communist party. Many people have long thought it was his greatest error, and it is refreshing to see him acknowledge it now.

A series by Der Spiegel including an interview with Gorbachev. In discussing the coup, Gorbachev admits he should not have left Moscow for vacation in the days before the hardliners moved against him. "I had become exhausted after all those years," he said. "I was tired and at my limits. But I shouldn't have gone away. It was a mistake."

Masha Lipman's terrific essay in The Washington Post. Lipman points to the bargain that Russians have made with the Kremlin, what she has called a non-participation pact. Russians have won personal freedom, and enjoy it, while apathetic and passive about public politics, in which competition has ceased to exist. This nuanced description of today's Russia points out that not all was lost. The public space may be closed, but the private space is free. That's not the Soviet Union any longer.

Leon Aron's piece in The Post is based on extensive discussions with people involved in building civil society, and he concludes there's still hope, that there's a solid foundation being built in social movements that will prove a counter-point to the efforts from above to suck all the air out of civil society.

Neil Buckley has an enlightening survey in The Financial Times [behind paywall] that looks at what happened to all the former Soviet republics, chiefly focusing on economics and political freedom. This wider lens is very useful. Estonia and Uzbekistan were once in the same country, and although differences existed then, too, look at the distance between them now.

I've already had my say on this topic, in FP, here.

First the revolution, then the reality.

It has been exhilarating to watch the Arab spring, spreading from Tunis to Cairo, to Manama, Benghazi and elsewhere. These images of people demanding simple freedoms and fresh air after decades of autocracy are reminiscent of the collapse of Communism two decades ago. Then, too, there was a sense of liberation from arbitrary, suffocating rulers. There was a sense of enormous possibility if individual initiative could be set free, if democracy and markets could take hold.

But for those feeling liberated in the Arab world today, a caution: to realize your dreams is going to be a lot harder than it has been so far. It is going to be painfully, maddeningly, frustratingly difficult. One of the useful lessons you can draw from the collapse of Communism is that
tearing down the old order is really just the first step of revolution. What follows has to be built brick-by-brick, may take a generation and is not guaranteed to succeed.

Read on

Lots to read this fall. Here are three new books:

The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (PublicAffairs)
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
The authors bring hard-digging, fact-based journalism to an aspect of Russia that has been hard to document and understand. The New Nobility shows how Vladimir Putin expanded the reach and resources of the successors to the Soviet KGB, and examines their performance as a new elite. The book raises plenty of questions about why the services have not been more successful at security in an age of terrorism, given their favored status, with revealing chapters on the Nord Ost theatre siege, and the Beslan school massacre. They also document the use of the security services to pursue scientists and opposition political figures. A surprising chapter is the story of the hidden underground subway system, which has its own security service. Borogan recalls going down through a ventilator shaft -- a good metaphor for their deep dive into this murky world. They come back to the surface with a book that is sober and probing. (Full disclosure: I gave the authors some editing advice.)

The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons (Knopf)
By Richard Rhodes
Rhodes set the gold standard for nuclear history with The Making of the Atomic Bomb almost 25 years ago. In his latest volume, he examines what happened to nuclear weapons after the Cold War by looking not so much at Russia, but elsewhere around the globe. There is a strong focus on Iraq, where Rhodes chronicles the efforts to dismantle Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program in the 1990s, and then explains how the intelligence about WMD was so badly exaggerated leading up to the war in 2003. It is an important story that's been told before, but Rhodes injects a fresh sense of outrage. He also offers intriguing and contrasting accounts of nuclear decision-making in South Africa and North Korea, chapters relevant to today's proliferation conundrums. At the start of the book, Rhodes says he set out to understand "how the dangerous post-Cold War nuclear transition was managed, who its heroes were, what we learned from it, and where it carried us." While the title suggests dusk of the atomic age, the book is actually a reminder that we have not come close to the twilight of the bombs.

Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of The Cold War in Europe (Central European University Press; another in the Cold War reader series of The National Security Archive.)
Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok, eds.
This book is the kind that you can open at any page for an instant immersion in one of the most critical years of the last century, 1989, when the Cold War ended in Europe. The "masterpieces" of the title are 122 original documents which tell the story in words as they were actually spoken and written. The documents make great reading, especially the transcripts of Mikhail Gorbachev's conversations with European leaders. The volume also contains key diplomatic cables, including Ambassador Jack Matlock's perceptive three-part cable from Moscow on the future of the Soviet Union in February; Soviet Politburo transcripts; CIA estimates; and diary entries. All are accompanied by explanatory introductions. The book offers astute and enlightening essays by the editors, and the transcript of the 1998 Musgrove conference, a retrospective on the end of the Cold War. On any reference shelf, this one will be pulled down often, again and again.

Donald A. Henderson at the Center for Biosecurity in Baltimore

Thirty years ago, on May 8, 1980, a special session of the World Health Assembly in Geneva declared that smallpox had been eradicated. A disease that killed hundreds of millions of people, and haunted humans for more than 3,000 years, had been wiped out. It was the result of a global campaign that took more than a decade. Biological weapons expert Jonathan B. Tucker noted in his 2002 book, Scourge, that "the conquest of smallpox, the first-and so far, only-infectious disease to have been eradicated from nature by human effort, was among the greatest medical achievements of the twentieth century."

The man who spearheaded the smallpox eradication is Donald A. Henderson, now a distinguished fellow with the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburg Medical Center. Known to most as simply "D. A.," he ran the World Health Organization's campaign against smallpox for a decade, defying predictions it could not be done, and building an organization and methods that overcame many obstacles to eradication.

The smallpox campaign raised hopes about fighting disease, and helped launch a greatly expanded vaccination effort around the world against other illnesses.  But in an interview at his office in Baltimore last week, Henderson said, "I really have my doubts about a disease being eradicated" today. The reason: the smallpox campaign brought together many factors that are absent in other efforts.

Read on

It was a cold autumn in Russia in 1998. The country had recently defaulted on its debts and devalued the ruble, millions of bank depositors lost their savings, and the banks closed their doors. The economic crisis had also created a sense of uncertainty about nuclear security. Erik Engling, who had been working on the problem of loose fissile material for several years for the U.S. Energy Department in Washington, was attempting to visit as many of the Russian institutes with uranium as he possibly could that fall.

One day in early November, he arrived at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, spread over 89 acres on a beautiful old estate in Moscow. The institute was one of the oldest in the Soviet Union's archipelago of nuclear research facilities. A large amount of weapons-grade uranium, enriched to 90 percent, was stored there inside in aluminum-clad canisters 6 inches long, which had been used for a heavy-water research reactor and physics experiments.

Read the rest.