Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects-Revised & Updated

It's April, 2009. The country is in the midst of a long and deep recession, Obama ordered trillions of dollars to be borrowed from foreign reserve banks and be spent on bridges to nowhere and other high minded concrete and steel road projects that will be rendered useless after the recession ends and oil tops $200 a barrel thanks to growing demand from India and China once the factories start rumbling again. To the generation now running things, the children of the baby boomers, these problems fall squarely on our shoulders. We are the tax base of the just-now-retiring baby boomers' Medicare and Social Security. These are the problems they created and now we must face them in our prime. Enter Dmitry Orlov's compelling book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. By Mr. Orlov's accounts, the former Soviet Union had a cushy collapse experience in comparison to the hellish ride Americans are in for. Russians had free access to housing and public transportation not to mention the fortitude to grow their own food in kitchen gardens around their homes. Americans? Do we have public transportation? Who owns their home free and clear in America, home of the free? Mr. Orlov contends that because of circumstances of dire economic times before Soviet collapse this set Russians up to better survive collapse when it happened. Because Americans have none of the hearty attitudes developed after years of living through tough times or the public transportation or railroad infrastructure required to survive an economic collapse situation that begins mainly with the disappearance of cheap oil, hyperinflation will render money useless while wiping out savings and the supermarket will not be the place where food is. Americans will fare worse than their post-Soviet Union counterparts. Mr. Orlov examines many useful ideas about facing our fears during uncertain times and even has a sense of humor about it. He is self-consciously lighthearted about a subject as lighthearted as economic collapse. I think reading this book is a more important use of one's time than spending stimulus money at Dillard's to buy women's purse holders that attach to ballroom stall doors for $22 a pop. The evidence is all around us. Who needs half this crap? How many more times can Wal-Mart abandon their locations leaving shell after shell of big boxes in their wake in the same rural community? There must be some limit to the waste and excess that the country has experienced, produced and profited from in the last thirty years. And instead of adding to the general health and overall good of its citizenry Mr. Orlov contends that most of what the economy is doing is creating debt (p.156). Mr. Orlov's other keen insights include personal experiences of witnessing a large country go through the gentle process of hyperinflation. Mr. Orlov goes into stunning detail without terrifying you (too much). Mr. Orlov also dabbles in biting social commentary about industrial

The old normal is that life will go on just like before. The new normal is that nothing will ever be the same Rather than attempting to undertake the Herculean task of mitigating the unmitigatable-attempting to stop the world and point it in a different direction-it seems far better to turn inward and work to transform yourself into someone who might stand a chance, given the world's assumed trajectory. Much of this transformation is psychological and involves letting go of many notions that we have been conditioned to accept unquestioningly. Some if it involves acquiring new skills and a different set of habits. Some of it is even physiological, changing one's body to prepare it for a life that has far fewer creature comforts and conveniences, while requiring far more physical labor. These words from Pages 125 and 126 of Dmitry Orlov's Re-Inventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects leapt out at me as perhaps the most definitive in his marvelous new book in which Dmitry illumines the collapse of the American empire, now well underway, with his insights from living through the collapse of the Soviet Union. By way of background, I will be using his first name throughout this review because although I've only met him once, he feels like an old friend. I first heard of Dmitry several years ago when I became a subscriber to From The Wilderness where I was captivated by his article series "Post-Soviet Lessons For A Post-American Century." Later in 2007, Dmitry wrote an exclusive article for my website entitled "Collapse And Its Discontent." I was then honored and humbled by his request for an endorsement of Re-Inventing Collapse and immediately requested a review copy from his publisher, New Society. In the face of massive housing foreclosures, skyrocketing food prices, bizarre weather patterns, droughts, oil prices off the charts, unprecedented numbers of personal bankrupticies in the U.S., escalating unemployment, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are fiscally sucking the United States dry that any sane person can deny that the empire not only has no clothing but is crumbling before our eyes. Dmitry Orlov calls this what it is: Collapse. Opening the book with a "recipe" for collapse soup and noticing that the United States has combined all of the ingredients, Dmitry states that economic collapse, particularly in the throes of Peak Oil, is an enormous red flag signaling that the collapse of the American empire is underway. Additionally, he emphasizes that "when faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money." Physical resources and assets, as well as relationships and connections are worth their weight in gold and quickly become more valuable than cash. (11) Specifically, he states: I therefore take as my premise that at some point during the coming years, due to an array of factors, with energy scarcity foremost among them, the economic system of the United States will teeter and fa

As an MIT engineer (BSME MIT, 1978) and Author of When Technology Fails, I have read over a hundred books over the past two years, but Dimitri Orlov's "Reinventing Collapse" is the one that haunts me. Like many Americans, I felt quite smug when the Soviet Union collapsed. At the time, it appeared to be proof that the western world's way of running its businesses and governments was indeed superior to communism, and that the "free market" would soon deliver oppressed peoples all over the world from the clutches of the remaining totalitarian regimes. Orlov's analysis, gained through personally experiencing the Soviet collapse, shows us that this collapse was more a factor of economic problems caused by a crash in oil revenues than by the Regan/Breshnev arms race that was credited by so many westerners for fomenting this collapse. When the oil-glut of the 1980's caused the price of oil to fall radically, the Soviet income from their inefficient state run petroleum industries crashed (it basically cost them about as much to pump and refine their oil as the export price per barrel), and the result was a cash flow crunch that could not sustain the rest of their state-run economy. Now that oil prices have shot past the $100 a barrel mark, the tables have turned. Russia has surpassed Saudi Arabia as the world's number one oil producer, and the same oil exports that caused the Soviet regime's cash flow problem when prices were extremely low, is now making the new Russian economy cash-rich. America is seeing the devaluation of our dollar, brought on primarily due to a negative cash flow of billions of dollars a day for petroleum product imports and military ventures to protect our access to the supply of oil in foreign countries (Iraq, etc.), contributing to a large portion of our skyrocketing national debt, bringing the threat of economic collapse ever closer to our shores. Orlov points out a few of the differences between the former Soviet situation and the current US situation that makes our predicament even scarier. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of its state run systems continued to function. For example, most Soviets lived in public housing, fueled by public utilities, and they got around using public transportation. When their economic system went down, even though few people had much or any usable cash, their homes were still heated and not boarded up, the lights stayed on, and they could still get around using buses and trains. Here in America, the free market and privatization makes ours a very different story. When we stop paying our bills, the lights go out and the banks take our homes. If you don't have money for gas, or happen to live where trains and buses don't go where you need to go, your only recourse is to walk or hitch hike. When cash stops flowing, paychecks halt immediately and services screech to a halt (remember Enron and MCI?). When the Soviet Union collapsed, their country still had vast untapped resources to help re

The premise behind Reinventing Collapse is not new to me. With his disarmingly dry humor, Dmitry Orlov has been posting various articles relating his observations on Peak Oil sites, such as Life After the Oil Crash, for several years. Living between America and Russia, Orlov observed the collapse of the Soviet planned economy, as well as the creeping economic and social malaise that currently affects the US. He astutely draws useful comparisons between the rival superpowers, and offers dire predictions for those that blithely thought the US had simply prevailed on merit. I question Orlov's assertion that Americans should emulate the political apathy of the Soviet proletariat as a strategy to survive energy collapse. It is true that the people of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) stoically survived a political and economic collapse, which to some extent was precipitated by a peak of national oil production. But during their rebound, Russia and the other FSU republics have had substantial resources of oil and natural gas remaining. Charts of FSU oil production show a production peaks in the 1980s, then a deep trough, then increasing production to another, though lesser peak forming right now. The FSU's oil exports actually increased after the trough, and in some circles they are considered a swing producer of oil. At present, only certain third world nations have experienced the initial effects of the energy collapse that now confronts the world. It remains to be seen who will survive and whether any will prosper. Update: Reading the article "Drunken Nation: Russia's Depopulation Bomb" in the Spring 2009 issue of World Affairs Journal has caused me to reject Orlov's premise that the Russian people successfully survived collapse. Despite their many millionaires and solid educational system, the average Russian's life expectancy, marriage rate and birth rate has plummeted to the level of a struggling third world nation. I only hope that America's recent spate of violence isn't leading to a similar tragedy.

Dmitry Orlov observed the collapse of the Soviet Union first hand during the early 1990s and based on his experience there believes America will be following down the same, sad path sooner rather than later. In this book, he details the many surprising ways that the current United States mirrors many aspects of Soviet life. Orlov believes that one of the main reasons that the Soviet system eventually collpased was because average people couldn't maintain their standard of living. Sound familiar? Frighteningly, Orlov found the Soviet Union to be much better prepared for collpase than America will be. At least, Russians owned their own homes and had public transportation. They weren't stuck far away in suburbia with no stores or services nearby. Throughout this book Orlov uses scientific precision to knock down one myth after another about American life. He is very funny in mocking many of the silliest and stupidest aspects of American life. This book doesn't lay out a blueprint for how to survive the collpase, because Orlov himself makes plain that he doesn't pretend to know exatly how it will happen, but it does give some useful tips for how to prepare mentally and physically. The book is only 160 pages and I think you'll be so drawn in by it that you'll finish it in one evening just like I did. I guarantee it will be an evening well spent.