Robert A. Jones. The Soviet Concept of 'Limited Sovereignty' from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Brezhnev Doctrine. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. 337 pp. $45.00.

http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/wizzm.html

The world is still trying to digest the meaning of the momentous events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union which have reinvented the diplomatic environment since 1989. Robert Jones' analysis of the concept of "limited sovereignty" and its use by the Soviets can help us understand some of the reasons behind the recent collapse of Soviet power.

In general, Jones has demonstrated his main thesis that the idea of limited sovereignty, the heart and soul of the Brezhnev Doctrine proclaimed in 1968, had a long pedigree. In great detail he explains the conflicts between Soviet Marxist theory and the practical difficulties after the Revolution of incorporating the recalcitrant constituent nationalities of the former tsarist empire into the new Soviet Russia. This experience guided Moscow after World War II as it tried to bond the satellite peoples of Eastern Europe to Soviet purposes.

In the dangerous international environment after the war, Moscow sought security by dominating the states of Eastern Europe in a sort of reverse cordon sanitaire. With the exception primarily of the Baltic peoples, the Soviet Union was either unable or unwilling to incorporate the states of Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union. Jones shows why the Muscovite Marxist ideocracy found it necessary, as it had when creating the USSR, to merge the vertical theory of socialist class solidarity transcending borders with the practical reality that the Soviets had to operate in a horizontal state system of sovereign equalities. Failure to do so would delegitimize the entire ideological structure upon which both the satellite system and the Soviet state itself were built. The system created proved to be inherently unstable, because Moscow's control delegitimized the national regimes of Eastern Europe which could find authenticity in the eyes of their citizens only at the expense of that control.

Soviet theorists never solved the conundrum except temporarily through self-defeating military coercion. The failure to work out a theory of limited sovereignty which could both legitimize the Soviet-imposed regimes and ensure the Soviet Union's security in a hostile international environment led directly to its collapse, first in Eastern Europe and then in the USSR itself.

Unfortunately, Jones has not taken his work much beyond July 1988, although there is a reference to events in March 1989; in other words, his book has the misfortune to have been written a bit too soon. Any scholar involved in Soviet studies can empathize with the frustrating, instantaneous obsolescence of much of our work as embodied in Jones' final sentence: "It is still too early to write the obituary of the Brezhnev Doctrine." (p. 261) Even though Soviet rule collapsed onto Lev Trotsky's dustbin of history soon after these words were written, Jones' enterprise is no mere academic exercise.

A strong caveat: the interesting and important arguments that Jones has compiled are seriously marred by his presentation. His torturous and idiosyncratic grammar of jerry-built sentences and paragraphs is unacceptable and imposes upon the reader an undeserved burden. His verbiage, including jargon and undefined acronyms and abbreviations, does not clarify but obfuscates. His organization is weak, and his inconsistently formatted chapter subheadings add to the confusion. His obsession for lists proves no substitute for good writing. Jones too often floats treaties, events, people, and concepts in his text without definitions, first names, or hint as to why they are worthy of being noted. Jones could have taken the chore of proof reading more seriously.

Finally, even while Jones displays a wide range of reading in English and Russian and has compiled an imposing amount of material on what others have written, in giving voice to so many, at critical junctures it appears that he has lost his own.

J. Calvitt Clarke III
Jacksonville University

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