The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

  George Bush went on to pay tribute to the sacrifices made by American soldiers and taxpayers to achieve the victory. He concluded with an emotional reference to a future generation of Americans: “And so, now, for the first time in 35 years, our strategic bombers stand down. No longer are they on round-the-clock alert. Tomorrow our children will go to school and study history and how plants grow. And they won’t have, as my children did, air-raid drills in which they crawl under their desks and cover their heads in case of nuclear war. My grandchildren don’t have to do that, and won’t have the bad dreams children once had in decades past. There are still threats. But the long drawn-out dread is over.” The chamber again rocked with applause.

  Bush did not stop with a declaration of victory in the long struggle of the Cold War. He also presented his vision of the new role that the United States was destined to play in the new era. “A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America,” declared the triumphant Bush. He also outlined the ways in which he was going to use this newly acquired power. “As long as I am President, I will continue to lead in support of freedom everywhere, not out of arrogance, not out of altruism, but for the safety and security of our children. This is a fact: Strength in the pursuit of peace is no vice; isolationism in the pursuit of security is no virtue.” The chamber once again welcomed his words with applause. The message was loud and clear: the United States had vanquished the Soviet Union, emerged victorious in the Cold War, and was now destined to rule the world.2

  This rhetoric was quite different from the carefully calibrated and much more humble statements issued by Bush and his advisers before Gorbachev’s resignation on December 25, 1991. The new tone was a direct outcome of the presidential election campaign that was heating up in the United States. Linking the very recent fall of the USSR, America’s former enemy, with the end of the Cold War, which by the administration’s own account had occurred at least a year or two earlier, became a new electoral strategy. Trying not to make things more difficult for Gorbachev at home, in 1990 President Bush had refrained from what some of his advisers called a “dance on the [[Berlin]] Wall” after the reunification of Germany. At that time there was still the possibility of resistance by hard-liners in the USSR, where the Baltic republics were struggling for their sovereignty, and in Eastern Europe, which was still de facto occupied by the Soviet army. But now those constraints were gone, and the sense of victory was greater than ever. The joint Bush-Gorbachev declarations made in December 1989 on Malta about the end of the Cold War, as well as White House statements to the effect that the July 1991 meeting of the two presidents in Moscow was the first post–Cold War summit, were forgotten. The loud protests of Gorbachev, who felt robbed of his role in bringing the conflict to an end, were ignored, at least in public. Allegedly, Bush told Gorbachev in private “not to pay any attention to what he would say during the presidential campaign.” In October 1992 Gorbachev told the New Yorker, “I suppose these are necessary things in a campaign, but if this idea is serious, then it is a very big delusion.”3

  The “victory in the Cold War” electoral strategy did not work very well. The country was stuck in economic recession, and polls indicated that the president, who had been enormously popular less than a year earlier—immediately after the end of the Gulf War, he enjoyed the support of 89 percent of the public—was rapidly losing support as the presidential election of 1992 drew closer: according to a Washington Post article commenting on Bush’s State of the Union address, more than half of those polled disapproved of his performance. Like another wartime leader, Winston Churchill, Bush failed to capitalize on his foreign-policy success. In both cases, the voters wanted change at home.

  Like Churchill before him, Bush tried to shape public memory of the war he had helped to end. The memoir that he wrote was coauthored with his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. Doubtless they tried to be as objective, as possible about the subject. But the chronological frame of their narrative, defined by the dates of Bush’s presidential term, dictated its own logic. Within that frame, it made perfect sense to conclude their story of the end of the Cold War not with the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but with the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. It was at that point, with Gorbachev’s final phone call to the president on Christmas Day 1991, that they concluded their book of memoirs, A World Transformed.4

  By publishing memoirs and giving interviews throughout the 1990s, members of the Bush administration helped create a narrative of the end of the Cold War that was directly linked to the collapse of the Soviet Union, conflating the two events without taking explicit credit for the latter (given the role that the White House played in the attempts to save the Soviet Union). Some members of the administration felt that they had been all but robbed of a well-deserved sense of victory. “George Bush,” wrote Robert Gates in his memoirs, which also happened to end with the events of late 1991, “who refused ‘to dance on the Wall,’ was not about to declare victory in the Cold War. There was no national celebration such as would follow the Persian Gulf War. . . . We had won the Cold War, but there would be no parade.” According to Gates, one of the reasons for the lack of an all-out victory celebration was the simple fact that “in December 1991 there was no agreement in Washington that the United States had, in fact, helped the USSR into an early grave.”5

  Ambassador Jack F. Matlock, who represented the Bush administration in Moscow between 1987 and 1991 and left Moscow on the eve of the August coup, has argued repeatedly that the end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism, and the fall of the Soviet Union were related but different things. “The U.S. attitude differed greatly in regard to those three events, and our contribution to them differed greatly,” remarked Matlock on one occasion. According to the former ambassador, the United States wrote the score for the end of the Cold War and helped to bring down communism by promoting human rights, but the end of the conflict was also in the interest of the Soviets, and the downfall of communism was largely their achievement, not the Americans’. When it came to the fall of the Soviet Union, the US administration supported independence for the Baltic republics but wanted the rest of the Soviet Union to go on existing indefinitely. “The point is that we did not bring down the Soviet Union,” argued Matlock, “though some people would like to take credit for it now, and some of the chauvinists in Russia would like to accuse us of it. It just isn’t true.”6

  IF THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION was not—or not primarily—the work of the American administration and was not synonymous either with the end of Soviet communism or with American victory in the Cold War, then what led to the sudden collapse of one of the most powerful countries the world had ever seen? “Reviewing the history of international relations in the modern era, which might be considered to extend from the middle of the seventeenth century to the present,” wrote one of the most astute practitioners and scholars of the Cold War, George F. Kennan, in 1995, “I find it hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance more inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance from the international scene, primarily in the years 1987 through 1991, of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.”7

  What seemed inexplicable to Kennan at the time was hardly a puzzle to some of Gorbachev’s former advisers. “What actually happened in the USSR that year was what happened in ‘their day’ to other empires when history exhausted their potential,” wrote Anatolii Cherniaev in retrospect, summing up the outcome of 1991. By that reasoning, the Soviet collapse simply concluded a process that had begun in earnest at the dawn of the century and was accelerated by the two world wars: the disintegration of world empires and their disappearance from the political map. The heirs of the tsars were the last to lose their imperial possessions, following the former masters of the Habsburg, Ottoman, British, French, Portuguese, and a few minor land-based and maritime empires. What seems so
special about the Soviet Union is that very few people considered it an empire during its lifetime or were prepared to treat it as anything but a nation-state. Even Cherniaev’s comments came after the Soviet collapse.8

  Whether the Soviet Union was an empire or not—the debate on this still continues—it died the death of an empire, splitting along lines roughly defined by ethnic and linguistic boundaries. While there are important differences in the ways other world empires disintegrated, there are also striking similarities, especially when it comes to the Soviet and British experiences. In 1945 Stalin demanded and received two additional seats in the United Nations General Assembly for Ukraine and Belarus, republics that were treated by participants in the Yalta Conference on a par with the British dominions. They did not compare with British dominions such as Canada and Australia with regard to autonomy and self-rule, and their ethnic composition, distinct from that of Russia, also differentiated them from typical American states (at Yalta, President Franklin Roosevelt tried to negotiate the accession of two American states to the United Nations—an idea rejected by the American public).

  Like the British dominions, the Soviet republics left their metropolis in 1991 under the leadership of their own “native” leaders and institutions. As was true of other twentieth-century dominions and colonial possessions, some of the Soviet republics left the Union core not against the wishes of the dominant nation but in accordance with them: the leaders of the Russian Federation wanted the Central Asians to go once Ukraine left the Union. Also, as in the case of other European empires, it was the question of extending citizenship rights, particularly voting rights, to residents of the Soviet republics that made the continuation of the empire in its existing form all but impossible.9

  Despite Gorbachev’s best efforts to prove otherwise, electoral democracy turned out to be incompatible with the continuing existence of the Soviet state. It is often overlooked that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was an outcome of electoral politics. The Soviet colossus fell less than three years after the introduction of semi-free elections in the former realm of the Romanovs for the first time since 1917, the year of the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg. The fall of the Soviet Union took place as a direct outcome of the Ukrainian referendum of December 1, 1991, in which more than 90 percent of those taking part voted for independence. That vote overruled the results of the previous referendum, held in March 1991, in which more than 70 percent voted for continuing participation in the Union on condition of far-reaching reform. The Union lived or died depending on the vote of its citizens. Even the secret decision of the three Slavic presidents in December 1991 to dissolve the Soviet Union was approved by large majorities in the democratically elected parliaments of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. By contrast, the attempt to save the Soviet Union in its old form was made not through democratic channels but in the form of a coup that failed on the steps of the Russian parliament building three days after its launch.

  The arrival of electoral democracy dramatically changed the Soviet political landscape and influenced the decisions of the leaders, who now depended on popular support and elite consensus to stay in power. While limiting the choices available to the new leaders, democracy also empowered those of them who had the support of their electorates. Although it was the people who voted, it was their political leaders, both in the center and in the Soviet republics, who formulated questions for the referenda and interpreted their results. As Gorbachev argued more than once, the dissolution of the USSR was never put to a referendum vote. Did the vote for Ukrainian independence mean the dissolution of the Soviet Union? That was a question for the leaders to decide. Democracy shunted aside leaders who failed to obtain a mandate to rule though the electoral process. The outcome of the competition between the popularly elected president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, and the president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, appointed to his position by parliament—a struggle that reached its crescendo in the last months of 1991—shows the decisive power of electoral politics over the main actors of the drama reconstructed in this book.

  Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed a reform that showed the predilection of modern revolutions for eating their own children. If the French Revolution was an inspiration to the Bolsheviks, Western liberalism supplied the ideas and language for Gorbachev’s perestroika. Like many before him in Russia, Gorbachev looked to the West for solutions to his country’s problems, which manifested themselves in an inability to compete with the West in economic, social, and, eventually, military terms. Ever since the rule of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, Russian elites had sought to adopt Western models in order to catch up with the West. Again and again these models would come into conflict with Russia’s society and non-Westernized populace. Some segments of the Russian elite tried repeatedly to change both through military coups, such as the one staged by guards officers in December 1825; liberal reforms, such as those introduced by Tsar Alexander II in the second half of the nineteenth century; or bloody revolutions, such as the one launched by Vladimir Lenin in 1917. Gorbachev’s reforms were the latest attempt to catch up with the West by emulating it.

  Like his immediate predecessors, Gorbachev did not think that he lived in or ruled over an empire. But his attempts to centralize his rule, eliminate widespread corruption in the Central Asian republics, and bring in a new breed of Russian managers including Boris Yeltsin and his onetime mentor, Gennadii Kolbin, only alienated republican elites, setting off the first anti-Moscow riots in decades. Gorbachev pushed the republican bosses and their retinues even further away by unleashing glasnost, opening the party to media criticism, and forcing the communist elites to earn their right to stay in power by facing elections. As the elites in the Russian regions and the non-Russian republics found themselves dealing with nationalist revolts and democratic challenges to their power, they came to depend more on the ballot box than on the supreme boss in the Kremlin. It was only a matter of time before they challenged Moscow’s rule, demanding autonomy and then independence. With the elites turning their backs on him and nationalists and liberal intellectuals demanding more freedoms, Gorbachev soon had no one to rely on but the army. In the last years of the USSR it would be employed more than once, allegedly without the knowledge of the commander in chief, in one Union republic after another. In March 1991 it would be brought onto the streets of Moscow to intimidate Boris Yeltsin and his supporters.

  The fact that until the August coup Gorbachev was not only president of the USSR but also general secretary of the Communist Party made it difficult to distinguish the collapse of communism from the fall of the USSR. It has been argued that after the banning of the party, which allegedly served as a glue binding the republics, there was nothing else to hold the Union together. In fact, by the time of the August coup the party was no longer holding anything together, as its leaders in the republics turned into leaders of republican parliaments and, in many cases, presidents not beholden to Moscow. Party bosses who had already become presidents or would soon do so, such as Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, were now pushing if not for the independence of their republics then for a confederative restructuring of the Union.

  Yeltsin’s ban on the Communist Party did not cut the ties linking Moscow to the republics, which barely mattered any more outside the Soviet army and the KGB, but provoked a revolt of former party elites against what they regarded as a new coup in Moscow aimed at them. Consultations between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, on one hand, and republican leaders, on the other, continued after the ban on the party, following an established trajectory that no longer had anything to do with the party or the decisions of its governing bodies. Gorbachev managed to maneuver the party out of supreme power long before it was banned in Russia—it was an easy target and scapegoat for the coup, which was led largely by the KGB and the army brass.

  In his public pronouncements and, later, in his memoirs, Gorbachev all but monopolized the role of defender of the Soviet Union. He claimed that signing his union treaty was the only
way to save the Union, while his opponents were out not only to get him but also to destroy the Union. That was true in many cases but not all. The real struggle in Moscow was being waged not between proponents and opponents of the existing Union but between two visions of a future union. After the coup, Gorbachev rejected the idea advanced by Boris Yeltsin’s advisers to turn the Union into a confederation. Formally he was obliged to accept the confederation principle put forward by Yeltsin as a basis for any future negotiations on the fate of the Union, but in practice he resisted it until after the Belavezha Agreement, when it was too late even for a confederation.

  The dividing line between proponents of the two visions of the Union passed not only between Gorbachev and Yeltsin but also through Gorbachev’s own camp. Gorbachev’s aides Georgii Shakhnazarov and Anatolii Cherniaev were skeptical about their boss’s efforts to make the republican leaders sign the new union treaty. The Soviet Union’s last minister of defense, Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, considered it a major error on Gorbachev’s part that he did not take the idea of confederation seriously. “If Gorbachev had gone halfway to meet the tendencies that comprised the idea of confederation, with common consent that the center should have a monopoly on communications, transport, defense, a joint foreign policy, and other components of social life and activity common to all the republics, who knows in what state structure we would be living now,” wrote Shaposhnikov later in the decade. Like the other top military commanders, he refused to back Gorbachev when the latter asked for the military’s help to save his model of the Union before and then after the Belavezha Agreement.10