Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  “The ill-considered collectivization of the 30s inflicted great losses not only on the peasantry but also on the whole Russian people,” asserted the Russian “village prose” writer Vasilii Belov, who ran for a seat in the Soviet parliament in 1989. “According to my information,” he continued, “Russians now constitute less than half the country’s [population].” In 1989, ethnic Russians accounted for 145 million of the 286 million Soviet citizens. Their share of the Soviet population was indeed in decline—a rapidly modernizing nation could not compete in terms of birth rate with traditionally Islamic Central Asian republics. In Tadzhikistan, for example, the population almost doubled between 1970 and 1989, attaining a total of 4.2 million. The low Russian birth rate was regarded not as a characteristic of modernity and an outcome of urbanization but as a dire warning—indeed, a Russian tragedy.

  While the Russian intellectual response to the challenges of the crumbling empire was formulated in Moscow, the popular mobilization of Russians and their Russian-speaking allies began in the imperial provinces. If Moscow intellectuals such as Belov represented a sovereign nation in the making, their counterparts in the republics mobilized Russians and Russian-speakers as agents, representatives, and defenders of the Soviet Empire in the non-Russian provinces. In that regard, they relied for support not on Russian political leaders, but on the all-Union leadership, which was trying to keep the Soviet Union alive by mobilizing Russian nationalism in the peripheries.

  In the course of 1989, after declaring the sovereign status of their republics, the Balts (Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians) went into the streets en masse to protest Moscow’s planned changes to the Soviet constitution. Those changes would have allowed the center to override republican legislation with all-Union laws and unilaterally decide the issue of secession from the Union. In an overwhelming rejection of Soviet sovereignty over their republics, the activists of the Baltic national movements, called national fronts, organized a Baltic Way in August 1989—a human chain linking their capitals, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. The demonstration was organized on the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had led to the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in World War II.

  With the support of local communist party committees, which had everything to lose from the Baltic revolt, Moscow struck back, mobilizing ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in support of the Union. Feeling threatened by the revival of local languages and cultures, the Russian-speaking population of the region generally supported the International Front in Latvia and the International Movement in Estonia, Moscow-backed political organizations whose task it was to counteract the popular fronts created by the titular nationalities.

  Estonia and Latvia were more vulnerable to pressure from the center than Lithuania. Latvia, with a population of 2.6 million, was in the most precarious position: Latvians constituted only 52 percent of the population, followed by Russians with 36 percent, Ukrainians with 4.5 percent, and Belarusians with 3.5 percent. In Estonia, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians made up 35 percent of the population. Most of the Russian and East Slavic inhabitants of the Baltic republics were recent migrants working in industrial enterprises established and run by Moscow after World War II. If the popular fronts were pushing for the sovereignty and eventual independence of the Baltic republics, the international fronts were pushing back.

  In Russia, the first wave of political mobilization came with semi-free elections to the Soviet super-parliament in the spring of 1989 and continued through the elections to the Russian parliament in 1990. Like the dissident movement of the previous decade, this one had two main ideological poles—liberalism and nationalism. The proponents of the latter were conservative in their economic and social agenda, stressing the wrongs done to the Russians by the communist regime, while at the same time demonstrating loyalty to communism and solidarity with movements of the International Front type in the Baltics.

  The merger of communism and nationalism in Russia received its institutional embodiment in the creation of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation—a process long opposed and disrupted by Gorbachev, who feared that a separate Russian party would spell the end of Soviet communist unity, and thus of the Union as such. Maintaining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a de facto Russian party had been a consistent policy since the times of Lenin, who wanted a union of republics but was quite content with Russian dominance over the party. But the Russian communists now demanded a party of their own so as to be on a par with the communists of Ukraine, Belarus, and other republics. They finally got their way in the summer of 1990. The Russian conservatives were now on a collision course with the Union.

  Another aspect of Russian mobilization came into existence not in opposition to the non-Russians but in alliance with them. The leaders of the Russian liberal intelligentsia shared their vision of democratic transformation of their societies with the leaders of the popular fronts and national movements in the Baltics, Ukraine, and some other Soviet republics. In the summer of 1989, they joined forces in the Interregional Group of Deputies at the first semi-democratically elected Soviet super-parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. The Interregional Group found support in Moscow, Leningrad, and other large industrial cities of Russia and the Soviet Union. The democratically minded deputies all rebelled against the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, but their ability to define a positive political agenda was limited, with members from the non-Russian republics putting their ethnonational demands first. Gorbachev and the center, for their part, found support among conservative deputies from the non-Russian republics, especially those of Central Asia.

  Democratic Russia, a coalition of liberal deputies of the Interregional Group, contested the Russian parliamentary elections of March 1990 and won 190 seats, or roughly one-fifth of the total. This made the Russian liberals switch the focus of their activities from the all-Union to the Russian parliament. In May 1989, they were able to elect their leader, the fifty-eight-year-old Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss who had parted ways with Gorbachev over the pace of democratic reforms, to the all-important post of chairman. A party official by background, a maverick by nature, and an autocrat by inclination, Yeltsin embraced the program of the democratic transformation of society. The Russian reformers then decided to press ahead with democratic and market reforms by using their power in the Russian parliament. In June 1990, with two-thirds of the deputies in favor, a resolution was adopted on the sovereignty of the Russian Federation, officially still titled the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

  The idea appealed to liberals and conservatives alike. Yeltsin told the deputies: “For Russia today, the center is both a cruel exploiter and a miserly benefactor, as well as a favorite with no concern for the future. We must put an end to the injustice of these relations.” Yeltsin gave voice to the emerging liberal Russian nationalism movement. The object of its loyalty was not the idea of a “small” ethnically based Russian nation, or of the big Russian nation of imperial times, but a nation to be formed out of the inhabitants of the Russian Federation. Although the Russian Federation was overwhelmingly Russian (82 percent) in ethnic composition, it included numerous autonomous republics and regions that had not become Union republics for a variety of demographic, geographic, or historical reasons. With the sole exception of the former East Prussia, now constituted as the Kaliningrad region of Russia, the Russian Federation was territorially continuous from Leningrad (soon to be renamed St. Petersburg) on the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok on the Pacific. It was a good candidate to form a nation, but in 1990 there were numerous odds against that proposition.

  In June 1991, Yeltsin won the race for the newly created office of president of the Russian Federation in competition with candidates supported by his onetime protector and then nemesis, the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike Gorbachev, who had been installed in office in the spring of 1990 by the Soviet parliament, Yeltsin was elected by the voters of Russia. As
he took office, Yeltsin pledged his loyalty to the citizens of the Russian Federation, promising to defend the interests of the republic and its peoples.

  Yeltsin and his liberal supporters regarded the Russian Federation as an engine for the political and economic reform of the entire Union. But the nationalists who voted for Yeltsin saw Russian institutions as an instrument for enhancing Russian identity, providing support for Russian culture, and cutting financial support for the Union republics, which they claimed were bleeding the Russian economy white. But no one advocated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1991, by creating an alliance with leaders of other republics, Yeltsin forced the embattled Gorbachev to agree to a reform of the Union that would benefit Russia and other well-to-do republics. The new Union treaty negotiated by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan in July 1991 gave the preponderance of economic and political power to the republican leaders, first and foremost to the leader of Russia.

  The deal was supposed to become the law of the land on August 20, 1991. But on the previous day, some of Gorbachev’s aides, including the heads of the KGB, police, and army, who knew they would lose their positions in the reshuffle, launched a coup to preserve the Soviet Union in its old form. Gorbachev, who refused to go along, was detained by the plotters at his summer resort in the Crimea. Yeltsin and his advisers were taken by surprise as they relaxed in a government compound outside Moscow after a trip to Kazakhstan. They decided to fight back and mobilize the support of the Muscovites. Naina Yeltsin tried to convince her husband not to go: “Listen, there are tanks there: What is the point of your going? The tanks won’t let you through.” But Yeltsin would not budge. “I had to say something,” he remembered later, “so I gave her my best shot: ‘We have a little Russian flag on our car. They won’t stop us when they see that.’” Yeltsin made it unharmed to the White House, the Russian parliament building in downtown Moscow. The flag was not an issue for the KGB special forces—they simply had not been ordered to arrest Yeltsin. But the flag was an issue for Yeltsin’s supporters.

  A few hours after reaching Moscow, when Yeltsin first addressed the people from atop a tank in front of the White House, his aides placed a Russian banner behind him. The plotters’ banner was the red flag of the Soviet Union. Those who resisted the plot hoisted the white, blue, and red flag of the Russian republic of 1917. Russia rebelled against its communist empire and won. The coup was defeated a few days later, and the old tricolor flag became the official banner of Russian democracy and the Russian Federation. Yeltsin’s victory launched Russia on a new trajectory that would prove to be quite different from the one followed by the other Soviet republics.

  The attempted coup of August 1991 threatened to undo all the achievements of Yeltsin and his supporters, but they fought back successfully, raising the Russian banner against that of the Union. Yeltsin’s victory changed the situation fundamentally, but at the outset it almost killed the project of a new Russian nation. With Gorbachev betrayed by his own aides and shocked by the ordeal, Yeltsin felt himself to be the real power in Moscow. He began the takeover of the Union center by appointing his own prime minister as head of the all-Union government and forcing Gorbachev to revoke his own decrees appointing new heads of the military, police, and security service: people suggested by Yeltsin were appointed instead. Yeltsin and his supporters no longer needed the vehicle of the Russian Federation and its institutions to promote their liberal reforms, which had been envisioned from the very beginning as an all-Union project.

  Yegor Gaidar, an ambitious young economist and future author of Russia’s economic reforms who, like many liberally minded Muscovites, had rallied around Yeltsin during the coup, wanted the Russian president to save the Union, now as an extension of Russia. “As it seemed to me at the time, that political basis was the only remaining possibility of saving the USSR,” wrote Gaidar later. “Gorbachev immediately resigns his post, transferring it to Yeltsin as president of the Union’s largest republic. Yeltsin legitimately subordinates the Union structures to himself and, wielding the then unconditional authority of leader of all the people of Russia, brings about the merger of the two centers of power, whose mutual struggle had been one of the basic causes of the collapse.”

  It was too late. The other republics, most notably Ukraine, were already going their own ways, fearing a Russian takeover of the center as much as or even more than they feared a successful coup. On August 24, 1991, Ukraine, the Union’s second-largest republic, declared its independence from the Union, which, first and foremost, under the circumstances, meant independence from Russia. By the end of the week, almost every Union republic that had not declared its independence earlier followed suit. Yeltsin panicked, threatening Ukraine and Kazakhstan with revision of borders and Russian claims on parts of their territory if they insisted on independence. He also dispatched a high-profile delegation to Ukraine to talk sense to the leaders of the de jure independent state. The attempt failed. Yeltsin’s ally Anatolii Sobchak, a member of the delegation, was booed by protesters in Kyiv when he tried to talk about Russo-Ukrainian unity. The Ukrainians did not want to stay with Russia. They did not want the Union. They wanted out.

  With the collapse of his plan for a Russian takeover of the Union, Yegor Gaidar no longer thought of saving the USSR. His task became that of saving Russia from an all-Union political and economic collapse by means of rapid economic reform. The Russian Federation once again became the focal point of the Russian liberals’ reformist aspirations. By declaring the start of radical economic reform in November 1991 without waiting for the other republics, Yeltsin and Gaidar effectively broke up the previously integral Soviet economic space. As Russia went its own economic way, however, it still hoped to maintain some form of economic union. Yeltsin and his advisers recognized the independence of their former allies in the Baltics against the wishes of the Russians and Russian-speakers in that part of the former Soviet Union. As for the rest of the USSR, they tried to put together a confederation in which Russia would play the key role without picking up the all-Union bill. This proved a fiasco. Gorbachev would not settle for the role of a figurehead in a confederation actually run by Yeltsin, and the other republics, led by Ukraine, had already opted for independence.

  ON DECEMBER 1, 1991, MORE THAN 90 PERCENT OF UKRAINIAN voters supported independence for their republic. Yeltsin bowed to the inevitable. A week later, at the Belavezha hunting lodge on the Belarusian-Polish border, he met with President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and the speaker of the Belarusian parliament, Stanislaŭ Shushkevich, to dissolve the Gorbachev-led Soviet Union and create what he believed would be the Yeltsin-led Commonwealth of Independent States. The Soviet Union was gone, dissolved by the leaders of the three republics that had once constituted a big Russian nation.

  No one could have predicted such an outcome even a few months earlier. Without ever declaring—or, indeed, dreaming of—its own independence, Russia became de facto independent. When the Union music stopped playing, Yeltsin and the Russian liberals were stuck with the skeleton of the Russian Federation, which had yet to be filled with economic, institutional, and ideological content. Then there was the new Commonwealth, which many in Russia regarded as a continuation of the USSR. Caught between the Russian Federation and the Commonwealth, the Russian political and intellectual elites had to figure out their new political identity.

  In the 1990s, Yeltsin called on his advisers more than once to come up with a new definition of Russian statehood. It was no easy task. At his first inauguration ceremony as president of the Russian Federation in June 1991, Yeltsin had addressed himself to the citizens of the Russian Federation and promised to defend the rights of its peoples. This was the formula that Gorbachev had used in his inauguration address the previous year: Yeltsin simply replaced the USSR with the Russian Federation. There was no mention of the Russian people or nation in his brief speech. At his second inauguration in 1996, Yeltsin promised faithfully to serve “the people”
without elaboration. Not only Yeltsin but also other Russian officials were reluctant to define the population of Russia in national terms. In official pronouncements, the inhabitants of the Russian Federation were rarely referred to as the Russian nation.

  Few people were more disappointed by the word “nation” falling into disuse than Valerii Tishkov, the director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Soviet and then Russian Academy of Sciences. In the early 1990s, Tishkov was at the forefront of promoting the idea of a Russian civic nation consisting of citizens of the Russian Federation of all ethnic and cultural groups. He called that nation rossiiskaia, the adjectival form of the name of the Russian Empire, as opposed to russkaia, the term usually used to define the Russian ethnic group, either in its narrow Great Russian incarnation or its extended East Slavic one.

  Tishkov had begun to develop his ideas in 1989, the year of the first semi-free elections to the Soviet super-parliament and the creation of a liberal opposition to the regime in the form of the Interregional Group of Deputies. He saw the rossiiskaia nation as united across ethnic and cultural lines by a commitment to common values and institutions, with symbols originating not in the imperial Russian past but in the liberal revolution. Tishkov protested against the use of the term “multiethnic Russian people,” considering it not only self-contradictory but also politically dangerous, because it denied political legitimacy to the Russian civic nation, investing it instead in ethnic groups that could claim statehood for themselves as discrete nationalities, as happened in the disintegration of the USSR. Some of Tishkov’s views, such as his opposition to ethnically based federalism and his preference for territorial autonomy, harked back to the ideas of the Constitutional Democrats of 1917.

  The Russian leadership actively promoted the civic model of Russian identity for the first two years of Russia’s independent existence. Tishkov was appointed minister of nationalities, and his ideas served as the basis for the Russian law on citizenship adopted by the parliament in November 1991. In the text of the law, citizens were called rossiiane rather than russkie, and the acquisition of Russian citizenship did not depend on the ethnicity or language of the applicant. But Tishkov’s model of the new Russian identity soon began to encounter serious difficulties. The idea of defining Russian nationhood by civic loyalty to the new political institutions became tarnished in the fall of 1993, when Yeltsin used force to crush nationalist and communist opposition to his rule. On Yeltsin’s orders, Russian tanks bombarded the headquarters of the conservative opposition to the president, the Russian White House, which Yeltsin and his supporters had heroically defended against the attempted coup two years earlier, and which Tishkov proposed to treat as one of the symbols of the new Russia. Having defeated his opponents, Yeltsin rewrote the constitution, taking powers away from parliament and moving them to the presidential office. Not only was the symbol of the new Russia compromised, but the idea of democracy had suffered a blow from which it would not fully recover.