The thing that stuck with me most strongly from Collapse is that the post-1991 order of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine (to say nothing of the caucuses) really has a very thin layer of legitimacy and left many large and obvious unresolved issues. These issues are being worked out in various forms into the present day: they are not the imagination of caprice of one evil dictator.

People who haven't read Collapse could mistake this for an opinion with a political slant rather than a reasonable summary of events which are well documented and not even of factual dispute. No one seriously disputes the facts or says the presidential transcripts were doctored or the news footage from the video archives are deep-fakes, they simply make a great effort to keep them entirely out of public discourse.

Zubok gores everyone's ox here: a close look at the actual decisions and transcripts of the meetings leave no one's 1989-1991 mythology intact (except for the Baltic States). It becomes clear nearly everyone is operating in a dream world about the well-documented events of their own lives. No one around today peddling their version of history comes off as anything other than delusional or mendacious: the soviet apologists, the Russian or Ukrainian nationalists, the intellectuals and elites of central asia, the american "we meant well" neoliberals who washed their hands of the whole thing after crashing life expectancy and shaving off more millions of years of human lives than Stalin's collectivization, the impotent europeans who watched the giants clash, the incompetent CIA using Tom Clancy theories rather than their own eyes and ears, and ultimately unflattering for most of the staff of the Bush and Clinton administrations as well as the men themselves.

Perhaps the most informative aspect of Collapse that is of enduring relevance is how both the average person and those in power can maintain dissonance or disinterest in the details of what the fuck actually happened in events they lived through. It's said that winners write the history books, but it's also true that vengeful losers write a lot of books too; one only needs to look at the deep corpus of southern history revisionism regarding The Lost Cause to see that mythologized history is not the sole purview of winners. Similarly, the amount of soviet apologia/demonization with deliberate indifference to the facts on the ground along with conspiratorial filler (presented without supporting evidence or reference to relevant community of area study anywhere) could fill a stadium. Sadly for the soviet apologists, most of them didn't even get paid, they just needed to believe in something so badly, specifically that, come the revolution, society would be way better and that they personally would be much more important.

But know-nothing apologists and demonizers have this in common: their writing takes on a self-hypnotic, wooden, repetitive quality that returns to the same few emotionally charged claims and linguistic constructions over and over, as recursive as a dog eating its own vomit. Give them 10 pages or give them 10,000 and it is all pretty much the same. They give away the game immediately, they cannot contain their emotions, they swing wildly, they aim not to convince anyone with two brain cells to rub together, but to get the attention and approval of their peers who are just slightly ahead of them in their community's pecking order.

Not so for Zubok, who is always moving forward in time and jumping between dramatis personae and the overall situation inside the Kremlin and Washington D.C., deftly shifting perspectives and using the historical record verbatim to show when one or more of the leaders involved is putting up a facade with nothing behind it, or is blissfully unaware of a landmine directly in their path. Occasionally he throws in a wry remark in the style of forgotten popular historians like A. J. P. Taylor, and it's never excessive.

Thankfully, literacy and civil society is in terminal decline as part of a post-democratic vibes-based era, so now neither winners nor losers bother writing history or reading history. It has created valuable safe space for academics like Professor Zubok to write a dense yet compelling history of the recent past, which resists the urge to render the complexity of politics, philosophy, and psychology as a manichean morality play.

The book has of course been more or less ignored by everyone outside of a few area studies experts and we can expect it to change absolutely nothing about popular and extremist understandings of the events in the West or Russia. The lazy instrumental mythologies have a business model and a mass audience, Zubok is just some history professor with a mortgage.

Still, books and bullets have their own destinies; this one is crafted carefully, exhaustively, and at a times is a real page-turner. It may return as a definitive comparative work if another great power is ever so moribund and reckless that they accidentally empower a leader who sincerely believes their empire should try to sustain itself without evil.