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European borders, a long-held dream of the Soviet leadership, for the Soviets’ written pledge to uphold human rights. This trade-off, whose importance the CIA completely missed, led to an international legal and moral ‘full court press’
    that Soviet diplomats and negotiators felt alongside Western military, economic, and cultural might. 13
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    history’s cruel tricks
    Panic, humiliation, defection
    Leonid Brezhnev, meeting with President Richard Nixon at San Clemente, California, in June 1973, had made a desperate attempt to protect Soviet–American détente by urging a new joint initiative for the Middle East. But Henry Kissinger dismissed Brezhnev’s warnings of impending war between Arabs and Israelis as a negotiating ploy; Kissinger remained unmoved even after the Soviets began to ferry diplomatic personnel and their families out of Arab states. Of course, following the outbreak of hostilities and the uptick in oil prices, the Soviet Union reaped benefits far greater than anything détente had delivered. Inside the Kremlin, the earlier anxiety about the negative effects of a Middle East war must have seemed comical.
    But history was playing a cruel trick. Since the 1930s the Soviet Union had rapidly industrialized, captured Hitler’s Berlin, launched Sputnik, banged its shoe on the podium of the UN, and boasted that it would bury capitalism. But by winning the Second World War, and therefore having no necessity, or feeling no desire, to change fundamentally to compete in the transformed post-war international context, the Soviet Union in a way doomed itself.
    Not only did it suffer a crushing turnaround outside the country between the 1930s and the 1960s, but also, right in the midst of its great 1970s oil boom, the socialist revolution entered a decrepit old age.
    Soviet economic growth slowed substantially, and, 25
    history’s cruel tricks
    because quality was notoriously poor, requiring high rates of replacement, a Soviet economy growing at 2 per cent was tantamount to stagnation. Soon, outright recession— by official statistics—set in. Decades of ecological degrad-ation also reached the tipping point. Key demographic trends were reversed: infant mortality began to rise, and life expectancy at birth began to decline. These negative data were covered up or falsified, but, for the huge populations in the Soviet Union’s industrial toxic zones, there was no concealing the fact that respiratory ailments among children had become epidemic, that the incidence of cancer grew phenomenally, and that alcoholism and absenteeism, already high, were rising. Behind this deep domestic funk, lay the fact that the competition with capitalism—not a policy, but something inherent to the system’s identity and survival—was unwinnable.
    The 1973 oil shock initially had seemed to doom capitalism’s remarkable post-war run, but it definitively pushed capitalism further on to a path of deep structural reforms. Those changes would soon cast the USSR’s greatest ostensible achievement—its hyper fossil-fuel economy, upon which its superpower status rested—into a time warp, which its institutional framework could not or would not manage to confront. The 1980s decline in Soviet oil output and in world oil prices made the pain immediate. But it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the full intractability of these profound structural weaknesses would be exposed to the world and the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. What suddenly exposed, 26
    history’s cruel tricks
    and vastly accelerated, the Soviet system’s decline in the mid and late 1980s was an unavoidable generational change at the top, followed by a much-anticipated campaign to reinvigorate the socialist system. That of course was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated perestroika.
    In his 1987 book Perestroika , which sold five million copies in eighty languages, Gorbachev defined his programme as ‘an urgent necessity’. But the Brezhnev leadership had ignored