Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · CHAPTER 9 ·
Collapse of the Soviet Union
Chapter 9 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “The Union Unravels”
In 1989–91 the Soviet republics turned their paper rights into real power. The Baltic Way chain of August 1989 and the opening of the Berlin Wall came before Lithuania declared independence in March 1990, and after the failed coup of August 1991 the Union broke into fifteen states.
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The map above is the world of Russia and the former Soviet Union, December 1991 — The Soviet Union dissolved.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The Soviet Union was a federation on paper, and in 1989–91 its peoples used the paper. Its constitution described fifteen union republics, each with a parliament, a flag and a formal right to leave, much as some federal constitutions list powers that no one ever expects to be used. Glasnost, the new freedom to speak and publish, and competitive elections turned those forms into real institutions. In August 1989 about two million people formed the Baltic Way, a human chain from Tallinn to Vilnius demanding independence, and in November the Berlin Wall, the barrier that had divided the city since 1961, opened. Every communist government in Eastern Europe fell that autumn after Gorbachev declined to send troops. Lithuania declared independence in March 1990, and violence in the Caucasus, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Tbilisi, showed what could happen when national claims collided.
The decisive blow came from the centre itself. In June 1990 Russia’s own parliament declared that its laws took priority over the Union’s, and in June 1991 Boris Yeltsin was elected president of Russia by popular vote, which gave him a legitimacy that Gorbachev, never elected by the public, lacked. When hard-liners attempted a coup, an illegal seizure of power, in August 1991, Yeltsin stood on a tank outside Russia’s parliament building, the White House, and the coup collapsed within three days. Republic after republic declared independence, Ukraine’s voters approved theirs by more than 90% on 1 December, and a week later at Belavezha the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared the Union dissolved. On the map of December 1991 fourteen republics turn tan and only Russia stays red. The Soviet Union was brought down from its centre as much as from its borderlands.
The full story
Eastern Europe went first, because its regimes had always depended on the threat of Soviet tanks. In 1989 Gorbachev made clear that Moscow would no longer intervene to save its allies, a change his spokesman joked was the “Sinatra doctrine”, letting each country do it “my way”. Poland’s communists lost semi-free elections in June to Solidarity, the independent trade union that had become a national movement, and Hungary opened its border with Austria, so thousands of East Germans crossed to the West along the route of the arrow on the map. Mass protests followed in East Germany, and on 9 November the Berlin Wall opened. Within weeks communist rule ended in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, and the bloc states turn tan on the map of December 1989. Germany was reunited in October 1990. Regimes built on the promise of Soviet force fell within months once that promise was withdrawn.
The Union’s own nations followed, and Moscow’s inconsistent use of force radicalised them without stopping them. In February 1988 the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to leave Azerbaijan for Armenia; pogroms against Armenians in Sumgait and later Baku, and the expulsion of Azerbaijanis from Armenia, sent refugees in both directions, as the arrows show. In April 1989 troops killed 21 peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi, and in January 1990 Soviet troops entering Baku killed more than a hundred civilians. In the Baltic states, annexed in 1940 under the Nazi–Soviet Pact, whose secret protocol divided Eastern Europe between Stalin and Hitler, popular fronts, broad movements of reformers and nationalists, won elections, and Lithuania declared independence on 11 March 1990. When troops seized the television tower in Vilnius in January 1991 and killed fourteen people, crowds defended the parliament and the crackdown stopped. Force was used often enough to turn moderates into separatists and too hesitantly to frighten anyone back into the Union.
Russia’s turn against the Union decided the outcome, and the failed coup of August 1991 sealed it. Boris Yeltsin, elected chairman of Russia’s parliament in 1990 and Russian president with 57% of the vote in June 1991, used the institutions of Russia, the largest of the fifteen national republics that formed the Union, to challenge Gorbachev’s. Russia declared its laws supreme, withheld taxes from the centre and negotiated directly with other republics. On 19 August, the day before a new treaty loosening the Union was to be signed, the heads of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, the army and the interior ministry put Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and declared an emergency. Yeltsin climbed onto a tank outside the White House, Russia’s parliament building, crowds built barricades, army units refused to attack, and the coup collapsed by 21 August with three civilians dead. Ukraine declared independence on 24 August and confirmed it by referendum on 1 December, and on 8 December Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus met at Belavezha and dissolved the Union, putting in its place a loose Commonwealth of Independent States with no common government. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December, the president of a country that no longer existed.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Did nationalism break the Union?
Mark Beissinger’s study of thousands of Soviet protests shows how nationalism grew in waves, each successful demonstration making the next seem possible, until events that looked unthinkable in 1987 seemed inevitable by 1991. Ronald Suny and Yuri Slezkine explain why the waves followed republic borders: from the 1920s Soviet policy had given each major nationality its own territory, language schools, party leaders and cultural institutions, building nations even while suppressing nationalism. When central control weakened, these republics already possessed the parliaments, capitals and elites of independent states. Yet nationalism varied greatly from republic to republic. The Baltic peoples, Georgians and Armenians mobilised early and strongly, while in March 1991 most voters in Central Asia, and a large majority across the Union, approved preserving it in a referendum boycotted by six republics. Most historians conclude that nationalism in a few regions started the crisis, and that the collapse of central power turned reluctant republics into independent states almost by default. The Soviet state had built the nations that eventually dismantled it.
Russia against the Union
Serhii Plokhy’s The Last Empire argues that the Union ended because its two largest republics, Russia and Ukraine, chose to leave it. The United States did not seek the breakup: in August 1991 President George Bush warned Ukrainians in Kiev against “suicidal nationalism”, preferring a reformed Union to the risks of fifteen states, several with nuclear weapons. Yeltsin, however, saw that Russia could escape the burden of subsidising other republics and that he could take power only by dismantling Gorbachev’s. Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse adds the economics: by 1991 the republics were withholding revenue, the Union budget was financed by printing money, and Gorbachev could no longer pay for the army or the central ministries. Ukraine’s referendum of 1 December, with more than 90% voting for independence, convinced Yeltsin that no Union without Ukraine was possible. The Union was dissolved by the elected leaders of its core republics, an unusual way for an empire to end.
The August coup: why it failed
The eight men of the State Committee for the State of Emergency controlled the KGB, the army and the police, yet they lost in three days, and historians explain this through will, legitimacy and communication. The plotters expected Gorbachev to give in and the public to stay at home; they did not arrest Yeltsin at the outset and could not agree to storm the White House. Their televised press conference, at which the acting president Gennady Yanayev’s hands visibly shook, persuaded many viewers that they were weak. Tens of thousands of Muscovites surrounded the parliament, some tank crews turned their guns to protect it, and senior commanders, including the air force chief, refused to obey orders to attack. Three young men were killed in a tunnel near the White House on the night of 20–21 August. The interior minister later shot himself. A regime whose enforcers would not shoot their own citizens could not survive a public challenge, and the coup’s failure destroyed the institutions it had meant to save.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Glasnost and elections gave nations a voice. Openness allowed Balts, Georgians, Armenians and others to discuss deportations, annexations and the suppression of their languages, and the elections of 1989–90 gave their movements parliaments to control. Grievances that had been unspeakable became the platforms of elected governments. Gorbachev had expected reform to renew loyalty to the Union, and in several republics it produced demands to leave it.
Moscow renounced force in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev had already announced cuts to Soviet forces in Europe at the United Nations in December 1988, and in 1989 he refused to intervene as communist governments fell from Warsaw to Bucharest. The peaceful collapse of the bloc showed nations inside the Union that Moscow might not use force against them either. Each example of restraint abroad made the threat of repression at home less credible.
The economic crisis destroyed the centre’s case. By 1990–91 shortages, rationing and the collapse of supply chains made the claim that the Union delivered prosperity impossible to sustain. Republics hoarded food and fuel, withheld taxes and printed their own coupons and later currencies. Leaving the Union began to look like a way to escape a sinking economy, and the centre lacked the money to buy loyalty.
Russia’s leaders wanted Moscow’s power for themselves. Yeltsin, expelled from the Politburo in 1987, built his comeback on the Russian republic, whose parliament, presidency and treasury he used against the Union government. Russian nationalists and democrats alike argued that Russia subsidised the other republics. When the central state weakened, Russia’s elected leaders had both the motive and the means to replace it with their own.
THE TURNING POINT
The White House, 19–21 August 1991. The coup’s defeat is the hinge because it destroyed in three days the institutions that held the Union together. The KGB, the army leadership and the Communist Party had compromised themselves, and Yeltsin, the man who had stood against them on a tank, now held the initiative. Republican leaders who had hesitated concluded that a Union run from Moscow could be seized by force again, so staying in it now looked more dangerous than leaving. Within days he suspended the party’s activities in Russia, the Baltic states won recognition, and most remaining republics declared independence. A plot to save the Union ensured that it would not survive the year.
What it changed
Fifteen states with inherited borders. The internal borders drawn by Soviet planners became international frontiers overnight, leaving about 25 million ethnic Russians outside Russia and many minorities inside new states that did not want them. Crimea, transferred to Ukraine in 1954, became part of an independent Ukraine. Questions of citizenship, language and military bases would shape relations among the successor states for decades.
Frozen conflicts on the edges. Wars over Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, hatched on the map, began as the Union weakened and continued after it dissolved. Russian troops and arms played a role in most of them. Ceasefires in 1992–94 left breakaway regions outside the control of the states they legally belonged to, conflicts later called “frozen” because they were halted without being solved.
Russia inherited the Union’s seat, weapons and debts. The Russian Federation took over the Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council, its embassies and most of its foreign debt, and by 1996 all Soviet nuclear warheads had been moved to Russian territory. Russia also inherited the Soviet economic crisis, now concentrated in a single government that had promised its people a rapid transition to a market economy.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Soviet Union destroyed more by the nations on its edges or by Russia at its centre?
The case for the borderlands is clear in the sequence of events: the Baltic popular fronts, the Karabakh crisis and Georgian protests opened the question of secession, Lithuania declared independence first, and Ukraine’s 90% vote made a Union without it impossible. Mark Beissinger shows how these mobilisations built on each other. The case for the centre is equally strong. Russia’s declaration of sovereignty, its withholding of taxes, Yeltsin’s defeat of the coup and his initiative at Belavezha ended the Union, and Central Asian leaders were left with independence they had barely sought. Serhii Plokhy stresses the decisive role of Russia and Ukraine together. A good answer argues that the borderlands made the crisis and the centre decided its outcome, and it explains why Russia’s elite saw more to gain from leaving than from ruling. The transferable insight is that empires often end when their core decides that the costs of holding the periphery are no longer worth paying.
An interesting fact
The end of the Soviet Union reached Washington at least as fast as it reached the Soviet president. After signing the agreement that dissolved the Union in a hunting lodge in the Białowieża forest on 8 December 1991, Boris Yeltsin telephoned the American president, George Bush, while the Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich tried to reach Gorbachev. Yeltsin got through first, and Gorbachev was angered to learn that Washington already knew, although Shushkevich later insisted that the two calls were almost simultaneous. Whatever the exact sequence, the leaders of three Soviet republics had ended the Union and told a foreign president as quickly as the man who still nominally governed it.
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