by Tony Judt
So long as the overarching structures of Soviet power remained secure, Communist rulers from Ukraine to Kazakhstan had confined their ‘reforms’ to cautious mimicry of Gorbachev himself. But following the débâcle in the Baltics the same well-honed antennae that attuned them to perestroika now signaled that the Union itself might well be doomed; in any case they could see for themselves that in certain ruling circles the Soviet President was a marked man. Thus whereas the new politics of the Baltic republics reflected a genuine and widespread national renaissance, moves towards ‘sovereignty’ in many of the other republics were typically a more variable mixture of national feeling and nomenklatura self-preservation. There was also a growing element of fear: a sense that if security and authority were crumbling at the apex—or, worse, might soon be forcibly and unilaterally reasserted by Gorbachev’s foes—then it would be prudent to gather the essential reins of power into local hands. Finally, there was a dawning awareness among Soviet managers that should the center fall apart an awful lot of valuable public assets would be up for grabs: party property, mineral rights, farms, factories, tax revenues and so forth.
By far the most important of the would-be ‘sovereign’ republics now asserting their distinctive claims was Ukraine.312 Like the Baltic republics, Ukraine had a history of independence (albeit chequered), last asserted and promptly lost in the aftermath of World War One. It was also intimately associated with Russia’s own history: in the eyes of many Russian nationalists, Kievan ‘Rus’—the thirteenth-century kingdom based on the Ukrainian capital and reaching from the Carpathians to the Volga—was as integral to the core identity of the empire as Russia itself. But of more immediate and practical consideration were the material resources of the region.
Sitting squarely athwart Russia’s access routes to the Black Sea (and the Mediterranean) as well as to central Europe, Ukraine was a mainstay of the Soviet economy. With just 2.7 percent of the land area of the USSR it was home to 18 percent of its population and generated nearly 17 percent of the country’s Gross National Product, second only to Russia itself. In the last years of the Soviet Union Ukraine contained 60 percent of the country’s coal reserves and a majority share of the country’s titanium (vital for modern steel production); its unusually rich soil was responsible for over 40 percent of Soviet agricultural output by value.
The disproportionate importance of Ukraine in Russian and Soviet history was reflected in the Soviet leadership itself. Both Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were Russians who hailed from eastern Ukraine—Khrushchev returning there in the 1930s as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Party. Konstantin Chernenko was the son of Ukrainian ‘kulaks’ deported to Siberia, while Yuri Andropov had risen to the top as a consequence of occupying the strategically central post of KGB head in Ukraine. But this close association between the Ukrainian republic and the Soviet leadership did not imply any special regard for its inhabitants.
Quite the contrary. For much of its history as a Soviet republic, Ukraine was treated as an internal colony: its natural resources exploited, its people kept under close surveillance (and, in the 1930s, exposed to a program of punitive repression that amounted to near-genocide). Ukrainian products—notably food and ferrous metals—were shipped to the rest of the Union at heavily subsidized prices, a practice that continued almost to the end. Following World War Two, the Ukrainian Socialist Republic was considerably enlarged by the annexation from Poland of eastern Galicia and western Volhynia: the local Polish population, as we have seen, was expelled westwards in exchange for ethnic Ukrainians forced out of Poland itself.
These population exchanges—and the wartime extermination of much of the local Jewish community—resulted in a region that was by Soviet standards quite homogenous: thus whereas the Russian Republic in 1990 contained over one hundred minorities, thirty one of them living in autonomous regions, Ukraine was 84 percent Ukrainian. Most of the rest of the population were Russians (11 percent), with the remainder comprising small numbers of Moldovans, Poles, Magyars, Bulgarians and the country’s surviving Jews. Perhaps more to the point the only significant minority—the Russians—was concentrated in the industrial east of the country and in the capital Kiev.
Central and Western Ukraine, notably around Lviv, the second city, was predominantly Ukrainian in language and Eastern Orthodox or else Uniate (Greek-rite Catholic) in religion. Thanks to the relative tolerance of the Habsburgs, Ukrainians in Galicia had been allowed to preserve their native tongue. Depending upon district, anything from 78 percent to 91 percent of the local inhabitants used it as their first language in 1994, whereas in the territories once ruled by the Czar even those who identified themselves as Ukrainians often spoke Russian more readily.
The Soviet constitution, as we have seen, ascribed national identities to the residents of its separate republics and indeed defined all its citizens by ethnic-national categories. As elsewhere, so in Ukraine—particularly the recently-annexed Western Ukraine—this had self-fulfilling consequences. In earlier times, when the local language was mostly confined to the remote countryside, and the cities were Russian-speaking and Soviet-dominated, the theoretically decentralized and federal character of this union of national republics was of interest only to scholars and Soviet apologists. But with the growing number of urban-dwelling Ukrainian-speakers, Ukrainian-language media, and a political élite now identifying itself with self-consciously ‘Ukrainian’ interests, Ukrainian nationalism was the predictable accompaniment to Soviet fragmentation.313
A non-Party movement—RUKH (the ‘People’s Movement for Perestroika’)—was founded in Kiev in November 1988, the first autonomous Ukrainian political organization for many decades. It gathered considerable support, notably in the major cities and from ‘60s-era reform Communists; but in marked contrast to independence movements in the Baltic it could not automatically count on mass backing and did not reflect any groundswell of national sentiment. In elections to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in March 1990 the Communists secured a clear majority; RUKH won less than a quarter of the seats.
Thus it was not Ukrainian nationalists who were to seize the initiative but rather the Communists themselves. The Communists in the Ukrainian Soviet voted, on July 16th 1990, to declare Ukrainian ‘sovereignty’ and asserted the republic’s right to possess its own military and the primacy of its own laws. And it was under the direction of Leonid Kravchuk—a Communist apparatchik and former ‘Secretary for ideological questions’ of the Ukrainian Party—that Ukrainians took part in a March 1991 all-Union referendum and indicated their continuing support for a federal system, albeit ‘renewed’ (in Gorbachev’s term). Only in Western Ukraine, where voters were asked whether they favored outright independence over intra-federal sovereignty, were the Ukrainian Communists outflanked by those seeking a complete break with Moscow: 88 percent voted yes. Kravchuk and his fellow Party leaders duly took note, while cautiously awaiting the outcome of developments elsewhere.
This pattern was repeated in the smaller western Soviet republics as well, varying according to local circumstances. Byelorussia (or ‘Belarus’), to the north of Ukraine, had no comparable national identity or traditions. The ephemeral independent ‘Belarusan (sic) National Republic’ of 1918 never secured external recognition and many of its own citizens felt closer allegiance to Russia, or else Poland or Lithuania. After World War Two, with the annexation of parts of eastern Poland, the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic contained a significant minority of Russians, Poles and Ukrainians. Belarussians themselves—though by far the largest linguistic community in the republic—showed no sign of wanting or expecting sovereignty of any kind; nor could their country, heavily dependent on Russia, hope to sustain genuine independence.
A poor, marshy region better suited to livestock-rearing than large scale agriculture, Belarus had been devastated by the war. Its most significant contribution to the post-war Soviet economy was in chemicals and flax—and in its strategic position athwart major gas lines and commun
ication links from Moscow to the Baltic Sea. The nearest thing to an independence movement was Adradzhenne (‘Rebirth’), an organization based in the capital Minsk that emerged in 1989 and closely echoed the Ukrainian RUKH. In Belarus as in Ukraine, the Soviet elections of 1990 saw the Communists returned in a clear majority; and when the Ukrainian Soviet declared itself ‘sovereign’ in July 1990 its northern neighbour duly followed suit two weeks later. In Minsk as in Kiev, the local nomenklatura was moving prudently, waiting upon events in Moscow.
Soviet Moldavia, squeezed between Ukraine and Romania, was a different and rather more interesting case.314 The territory in question—‘Bessarabia’ as it was better-known under the Czars—had see-sawed back and forth between Russia and Romania over the course of the century and the fortunes of war. Its four and a half million residents were predominantly Moldavian, but with large Russian and Ukrainian minorities and quite a significant number of Bulgarians, Jews, gypsies and Gagauz (a Turkic-speaking Orthodox people living near the Black Sea). In this characteristically imperial mix of peoples the majority were Romanian-speakers; but under Soviet rule—the better to separate them from neighbouring Romanians—the citizens of Moldavia had been constrained to write their language in Cyrillic and describe themselves not as Romanians but as ‘Moldovans’.
National identity here was thus more than a little uncertain. On the one hand many of its people, especially in the capital Chisinau (Kishinev), spoke Russian well and thought of themselves as Soviet citizens; on the other hand the Romanian connection (in history and in language) provided a bridge to Europe and a basis for burgeoning demands for increased autonomy. When a ‘Popular Front’ movement emerged in 1989 its primary objective was the demand that Romanian become the official language of the republic, a concession that the local Communist authorities granted that same year. There was also some incendiary talk, mostly speculative and actively discouraged from Bucharest, of Moldova ‘rejoining’ Romania itself.
Following the 1990 elections, in which the Popular Front won a majority, the new government proceeded first to change the name of the republic from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic to the ‘Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova’ (later plain ‘Republic of Moldova’) and then, in June, to declare itself sovereign. These largely symbolic moves caused rising anxiety and talk of pre-emptive separatism among Russian-speakers as well as the tiny Gagauz community. Following a referendum on autonomy in the autumn of 1990 the Communist leadership in Tiraspol—the main town in eastern Moldova, across the Dniester river, where Russians and Ukrainians formed a local majority—declared a Transnistrian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, echoing a similarly ‘autonomous’ Gagauz Soviet Socialist Republic in the southeast.
Given that there are at most 160,000 Gagauz, and that ‘Transnistria’ is a banana-shaped sliver of land, just 4,000 square kilometers in area with a population of fewer than 500,000, the emergence of such ‘autonomous republics’ might seem absurd, the reductio ad absurdum of ‘invented traditions’ and ‘imagined nations’. But whereas the Gagauz republic never got beyond proclaiming its existence (the future Moldovan state would re-incorporate it peacefully, against a right to secede should Moldova ever ‘rejoin’ Romania), Transnistrian ‘independence’ was underwritten by the presence of the Soviet (later Russian) XIVth Army, which helped its clients fight off initial Moldovan attempts to recover the territory.
In the increasingly uncertain mood of the times, Soviet (and later Russian) authorities were not at all reluctant to offer patronage to a micro-state that was of necessity loyal to Moscow, wholly dependent on Russian goodwill and whose rulers were local Communist satraps who had seized control of the territory and would convert it in short order into a haven for smugglers and money-launderers. Transnistria being the source of 90 percent of Moldova’s electricity, the new rulers even had a legitimate economic resource of sorts, one that they could threaten to withhold should Chisinau refuse to cooperate.
Transnistrian independence was not recognized by Moldova or anyone else: even Moscow never went so far as to accord the breakaway region official legitimacy. But the scission in tiny Moldova offered a foretaste of more serious troubles to come a few hundred kilometers further east, in the Caucasus. There the longstanding antagonisms between Armenians and Azeris, complicated in particular by the presence in Azerbaijan of a substantial Armenian minority in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, had already resulted in violent clashes both with each other and with Soviet troops in 1988, with hundreds of casualties.315 In the Azerbaijan capital of Baku there were further clashes in January of the following year.
In neighbouring Georgia, twenty demonstrators were shot during clashes in the capital Tbilisi between nationalists and soldiers in April 1989, as tensions rose between crowds demanding secession from the Union and authorities still committed to preserving it. But Soviet Georgia, like the neighbouring Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, was too geographically vulnerable and ethnically complex to be able to contemplate with equanimity the insecurity that must accompany Soviet collapse. Accordingly the local authorities decided to anticipate that eventuality by precipitating it, the ruling Communist parties re-defining themselves as national independence movements and regional Party leaders—of whom by far the best known was Edvard Shevardnadze in Georgia—positioning themselves to seize power as soon as it fell into the street.
By the spring of 1991, then, everyone at the peripheries was waiting to see what would happen at the centre. The key, of course, was Russia itself—by far the dominant republic of the Union, with half the country’s population, three-fifths of its Gross National Product and three-quarters of its land mass. In a certain sense the country of ‘Russia’ as such did not exist: it had for centuries been an empire, whether in fact or in aspiration. Spread across eleven time zones and encompassing dozens of different peoples, ‘Russia’ had always been too big to be reduced to a single identity or common sense of purpose.316
During and after the Great Patriotic War the Soviet authorities had indeed played the Russian card, appealing to national pride and exalting the ‘victory of the Russian people’. But the Russian people had never been assigned ‘nationhood’ in the way that Kazakhs or Ukrainians or Armenians were officially ‘nations’ in Soviet parlance. There was not even a separate ‘Russian’ Communist Party. To be Russian was to be Soviet. There was a natural complementarity between the two: in a post-imperial age the Soviet Union provided cover for the Russian imperial state, while ‘Russia’ furnished the Soviet Union with historical and territorial legitimacy. The boundaries between ‘Russia’ and ‘the Soviet Union’ were thus kept (deliberately) blurred.317
By the time of Gorbachev there was a marked increase in the emphasis on ‘Russianness’, for some of the same reasons that the East German state had begun to take a very public pride in Frederick the Great and to exalt the properly German qualities of the German Democratic Republic. In the declining years of the peoples’ republics, patriotism re-emerged as a serviceable substitute for socialism. For just this reason it was also the easiest and least threatening form of political opposition. In Russia or the GDR, as in Hungary, intellectual critics might suffer persecution but muted expressions of nationalism were not necessarily repressed or even discouraged—they could be channeled to the authorities’ advantage. The revival of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ in Soviet publications and the media should be understood in this light. It was also, of course, an additional source of anxiety for vulnerable national minorities.
This was the setting for the unexpected emergence of Boris Yeltsin. A conventional Brezhnev-era apparatchik, specializing in industrial construction before becoming a Central Committee Secretary, Yeltsin rose steadily through the ranks of the Party—until he was summarily demoted in 1987 for over-reaching himself in his criticisms of senior colleagues. At this crucial juncture Yeltsin, who had had ample opportunity to observe just how effectively the Party and state bureaucracy could prevent any real change, had the politica
l instinct to re-programme himself as a distinctively Russian politician: emerging first as a deputy for the Russian Federation after the March 1990 elections and then as Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet—i.e. the Russian Parliament.
It was from this influential and visible perch that Boris Yeltsin became the country’s leading reformist, ostentatiously quitting the Communist Party in July 1990 and using his power-base in Russian Moscow, as it were, to take aim at erstwhile comrades across the way in Soviet Moscow. His primary target was now Gorbachev himself (despite the fact that Yeltsin had initially been a firm backer of the Soviet President, in whose native Sverdlovsk region he had worked for over a decade). The Soviet leader’s failings were becoming ever more painfully evident—and his popularity was sinking fast, as Yeltsin could not fail to observe.
Gorbachev’s major tactical mistake in domestic affairs had been to encourage the emergence of a national legislature with national visibility, real powers and considerable independence. Yeltsin and his Russian supporters were much quicker than Gorbachev himself to appreciate that this new, openly-elected Soviet would be a natural forum for the expression of discontents of all sorts; and Yeltsin became particularly adept at aligning Russia’s own interests with those of the various nations and republics. Gorbachev was alert to the threat that such alliances posed to the very Union itself: but by now it was too late for him to do anything except align himself uneasily and unconvincingly with Soviet functionaries nostalgic for the old Party monopoly—the same monopoly that he had done so much to break.