by Tony Judt
Thus while Gorbachev was still ‘triangulating’ between the desirable and the possible, arguing for a ‘controlled federalism’ (a characteristically Gorbachevian compromise), Yeltsin was passionately and very publicly defending the struggles for Baltic independence. In April 1991 Gorbachev reluctantly conceded to republics the right of secession in a new Union constitution; but this bow to reality merely weakened him further, convincing his conservative foes that Gorbachev would have to be removed if order was to be restored. Meanwhile, on June 12th 1991, Yeltsin, who had long since overtaken Gorbachev in national popularity polls, was elected President of the Russian Soviet Republic—the first ever democratically chosen leader of Russia.318
The following month, on July 12th, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR voted in favor of a new Union: de-centralized and allowing considerable latitude for dissenting member-states. Together with the popular election of the now openly anti-Communist Yeltsin, this finally tipped the scales. Party conservatives were becoming desperate and a group of highly-placed officials—including the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, the Interior Minister and Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB—began to prepare for a coup. That something of the sort was brewing was by now an open secret in Moscow—as early as June 20th the American ambassador had actually warned Gorbachev of a conspiracy, to no avail.
The putsch itself was timed to coincide with Gorbachev’s annual vacation in the Crimea; the last Party leader to be forcibly deposed, Nikita Khrushchev, had also been relaxing in the Soviet south when his colleagues in Moscow staged his surprise removal. The 1991 plotters were thus unabashedly reverting to earlier Soviet practices. Accordingly, on August 17th Gorbachev was asked to agree to hand his Presidential powers to an ‘Emergency Committee’. When he refused, the Emergency Committee announced on August 19th that the President was unable to exercise his authority ‘for health reasons’ and that the Committee would thus assume full powers. The Soviet Vice-President Gennady Yanaev signed a decree stripping Gorbachev of his authority and a six-month ‘state of emergency’ was declared.
But although Gorbachev was helpless, for all practical purposes a prisoner in his Black Sea villa at the southern promontory of the Crimea, the plotters were not much better off. In the first place, the mere fact that they had had to declare an emergency and announce virtual martial law merely in order to replace one Communist leader with another demonstrated how far the traditional structures of the Soviet Union had unraveled. The plotters did not have the unanimous support of their own agencies—crucially a majority of senior KGB officers refused to back Kryuchkov. And while there was no doubt about what the plotters were against, they were never able to offer any clear indication of what it was they were for.
In addition, the plotters were an unintentional caricature of everything that was wrong with the Soviet past: old, grey men from the Brezhnev era, slow and wooden in speech, out of touch with changes in a country whose clock they were clumsily trying to turn back thirty years. In times past when such men as these schemed in the Kremlin they were hidden from public view, their only appearances confined to distant viewing stands at public ceremonies. Now, however, they were constrained to appear on television and to the press to explain and defend their actions—and the public was given ample opportunity to observe close-up the physiognomy of official Socialism in its dotage.
Meanwhile Boris Yeltsin seized the moment. His standing had been further elevated by a personal meeting with George Bush, during the American President’s visit to the USSR just three weeks before. Now, on August 19th, he publicly denounced the Kremlin takeover as an illegal coup d’état and placed himself at the head of the resistance to it, directing operations from his headquarters in the Russian Parliament and mobilizing the crowds surrounding it to defend democracy against the tanks. At the same time, in the full glare of the assembled international media, Yeltsin engaged in lengthy conversations and negotiations with world leaders—all but one of whom offered him their full public support and studiously withheld any recognition from the increasingly isolated conspirators.319
The resistance was no mere formality: on the night of August 20th-21st three demonstrators died in clashes with the army. But the leaders of the coup—having lost the public initiative—now began to lose their nerve. They did not have the broad support of the armed forces that they would have needed to secure the country, and with every hour of the stand-off in the streets of Moscow (and Leningrad) they were losing their crucial asset: fear. Instead of being intimidated by developments in the Kremlin, democrats and nationalists were emboldened by them: in the midst of the uncertainty, on August 20th, Estonia declared itself independent, with Latvia following suit the next day. On August 21st one of the coup leaders, Boris Pugo (the Interior Minister and former head of the KGB in Latvia), committed suicide; at Yeltsin’s behest his colleagues were arrested. That same day an exhausted and anxious Gorbachev was flown back to Moscow.
Formally speaking, Gorbachev resumed his powers; but in reality everything had changed for ever. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was terminally discredited—it was not until August 21st that Party spokesmen publicly condemned their colleagues’ coup, by which time the plotters were already in prison and Yeltsin had taken advantage of the Party’s fatal hesitations to ban it from operating within the Russian federation. Gorbachev, who seemed dazed and uncertain when seen in public, was understandably slow to grasp the import of these developments. Rather than praise Yeltsin, the Russian Parliament or the Russian people for their success, he spoke to the cameras about perestroika and the indispensable role the Party would continue to have in renewing itself, promoting reforms, etc.
This approach still played well in the West, where it was widely assumed (and hoped) that after the abortive coup things would carry on much as before. But in the Soviet Union itself Gorbachev’s anachronistic reiterations of failed goals, and his apparent ingratitude to his rescuers, were a revelation. Here was a man who had been overtaken by History and didn’t know it. For many Russians the events of August had been a true revolution, a genuinely popular uprising not for the reformers and their Party but against them: the CPSU, as the demonstrators shouted at Gorbachev on his belated arrival at the Russian Parliament, was ‘a criminal enterprise’ whose own government ministers had tried to overthrow the constitution. By the time a chastened Gorbachev got the point, suspended the CPSU and (on August 24th) resigned as its General Secretary, it was too late. Communism was now irrelevant, and so too was Mikhail Gorbachev.
Of course, the former General Secretary was still President of the Soviet Union. But the relevance of the Union itself was now directly in question. The failed putsch had been the last and greatest impulse to secession. Between August 24th and September 21st Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Tajikistan and Armenia followed the Baltic republics and declared themselves independent of the Soviet Union—most of them making the announcement in the confused and uncertain days that followed Gorbachev’s return.320 Following Kravchuk’s lead in Ukraine, regional First Secretaries like Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan, Askar Akaev in Kyrgyzstan, Gaidar Aliev in Azerbaijan, Stanislav Shushkevich in Belarus and others cannily distanced themselves from their longstanding Party affiliation and re-situated themselves at the head of their new states, taking care to nationalize as quickly as possible all the local Party’s assets.
Gorbachev and the Supreme Soviet in Moscow could do little more than acknowledge reality, recognize the new states and lamely propose yet another ‘new’ constitution that would embrace the independent republics in some sort of con-federal arrangement. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards away, Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament were establishing an independent Russia. By November Yeltsin had taken under Russian control virtually all financial and economic activity on Russian territory. The Soviet Union was now a shell state, emptied of power and resources.
By this time the core institutions of the USSR were either in th
e hands of independent states or else had ceased to exist: on October 24th the KGB itself was formally abolished. When Gorbachev proposed a new ‘Treaty on the Economic Community of Sovereign States’ most of the independent republics simply refused to sign. At the October sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR the western republics were absent. Finally, on December 8th, the presidents and prime ministers of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus—the core Slav states of the Soviet empire—took it upon themselves to meet near Minsk and denounce the Union Treaty of 1922, in effect abolishing the Soviet Union. In its place they proposed establishing a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Upon hearing of this, Gorbachev in Moscow angrily denounced the move as ‘illegal and dangerous’. But the opinions of the President of the Soviet Union were no longer a matter of concern to anyone: as Gorbachev at last was coming to appreciate, he was effectively in charge of nothing. Nine days later, on December 17th, Gorbachev met with Yeltsin and they agreed (or, rather, Gorbachev conceded) that the Soviet Union must be formally abolished: its ministries, embassies and armies were to pass under Russian control, its place under international law to be inherited by the Russian Republic.
Twenty-four hours later Gorbachev announced his intention to resign as Soviet President. On Christmas Day 1991 the Russian flag replaced the Soviet insignia atop the Kremlin: Mikhail Gorbachev ceded his prerogatives as Commander-in-Chief to President Yeltsin of Russia and stepped down from his post. Within forty-eight hours Gorbachev had vacated his office and Yeltsin moved in. At midnight on December 31st 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist.
The disappearance of the Soviet Union was a remarkable affair, unparalleled in modern history. There was no foreign war, no bloody revolution, no natural catastrophe. A large industrial state—a military superpower—simply collapsed: its authority drained away, its institutions evaporated. The unraveling of the USSR was not altogether free of violence, as we have seen in Lithuania and the Caucasus; and there would be more fighting in some of the independent republics in the coming years. But for the most part the world’s largest country departed the stage almost without protest. To describe this as a bloodless retreat from Empire is surely accurate; but it hardly begins to capture the unanticipated ease of the whole process.
Why, then, was it all so apparently painless? Why, after decades of internal violence and foreign aggression, did the world’s first Socialist society implode without even trying to defend itself? One answer, of course, is that it never really existed in the first place: that, in the words of the historian Martin Malia, ‘there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.’ But if this accounts for the futility of Communist authority in the satellite states, held in place by nothing more than the shadow of the Red Army, it does not quite suffice to explain what happened in the imperial homeland itself. Even if the society that Communism claimed to have built was essentially fraudulent, the Leninist state, after all, was decidedly real. And it was a home-grown product.
Part of the answer is Mikhail Gorbachev’s unintended success in eviscerating the administrative and repressive apparatus on which the Soviet state depended. Once the Party lost its grip, once it was clear that the army or the KGB would not be deployed without mercy to break the regime’s critics and punish dissent—and this did not become clear until 1991—then the naturally centrifugal tendencies of a huge land empire came to the fore. Only then did it become evident—seventy years of energetic claims to the contrary notwithstanding—that there was indeed no Communist society as such: only a wilting state and its anxious citizens.
But—and this is the second aspect of the explanation—the Soviet state did not in fact disappear. The USSR shattered, rather, into a multiplicity of little successor states, most of them ruled by experienced Communist autocrats whose first instinct was to reproduce and impose the systems and the authority they had hitherto wielded as Soviet managers. There was no ‘transition to democracy’ in most of the successor republics; that transition came—if it came at all—somewhat later. Autocratic state power, the only kind that most denizens of the domestic Soviet empire had ever known, was not so much dethroned as downsized. From the outside this was a dramatic change; but experienced from within its implications were decidedly less radical.
Moreover, whereas the local Communist secretaries who metamorphosed so smoothly into national state presidents had every reason to act decisively to secure their fiefdom, the Soviet authorities at the center had no territorial fiefdom of their own to protect. All they could offer was a return to the decrepit structures that Gorbachev had so enthusiastically cut down; unsurprisingly, they lacked the will to battle on.321 The only former Communist leader with a power base in Moscow itself was Boris Yeltsin; he, as we have seen, did indeed act decisively—but on behalf of a renascent ‘Russia’.
Thus the efflorescence of successor states should not be interpreted as evidence that the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of a hitherto quiescent, newly reawakened nationalism in its constituent republics. With the exception of the Baltic countries, whose trajectory more closely resembled that of their western neighbours,the Soviet republics were themselves a product of Soviet planning and—as we have seen—were typically quite ethnically complex. Even in the newly-independent states there were many vulnerable minorities (especially the omnipresent Russians)—erstwhile Soviet citizens with good reason to regret the loss of ‘imperial’ protection and who would prove distinctly ambivalent about their new circumstances.
They were not alone. When President George Bush visited Kiev on August 1st 1991 he made a point of publicly recommending to Ukrainians that they remain in the Soviet Union. ‘Some people’ he declared, ‘have urged the United States to choose between supporting President Gorbachev and supporting independence-minded leaders throughout the USSR. I consider this a false choice. President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things . . . We will maintain the strongest possible relationship with the Soviet Government of President Gorbachev.’ This rather hamfisted attempt to shore up the increasingly vulnerable Soviet President was not quite tantamount to an endorsement of the Soviet Union . . . but it came perilously close.
The American President’s publicly-aired caution is a further salutary reminder of the limited part played by the USA in these developments. Pace the self-congratulatory narrative that has entered the American public record, Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism—Communism imploded of its own accord. Meanwhile, if his Ukrainian audience ignored Bush’s advice and voted overwhelmingly a few months later to quit the Union for good, it was not out of a sudden access of patriotic enthusiasm. Independence in Ukraine, or Moldova, or even Georgia, was not so much about self-determination as self-preservation—a sound basis for state-making, as it turned out, but a poor foundation for democracy.
Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it. Much the same was true of the break-up of Czechoslovakia, the ‘velvet divorce’ between Slovaks and Czechs that was peaceably and amicably consummated on January 1st 1993. At first glance this would appear a textbook instance of the natural onrush of ethnic sentiments into the vacuum left by Communism: the ‘return of history’ in the form of national revival. And that, of course, is how it was advertised by many of the local protagonists. But on closer inspection the division of Czechoslovakia into two separate states—Slovakia and the Czech Republic—illustrates once again, on a provincial scale and at the heart of Europe, the limitations of such an interpretation.
There was certainly no shortage of ‘history’ on which to call. Czechs and Slovaks, however indistinguishable they might appear to perplexed outsiders, had markedly different pasts. Bohemia and Moravia—the historical territories comprising the Czech lands—could boast not merely a remarkable medieval and Renaissance past at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire but also a pre-eminent share in the industrialization of central Europe. Within the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire Czechs enjoyed growing autonomy and a m
arked prosperity. Their major city, Prague—one of the aesthetic glories of the continent—was by 1914 a significant center of modernism in the visual arts and literature.
Slovaks, by contrast, had little to boast about. Ruled for centuries from Budapest they lacked any distinctive national story—within the Hungarian half of the Empire they were regarded not as ‘Slovaks’ but as slav-language-speaking peasants of rural northern Hungary. The urban inhabitants of the Slovak region were predominantly Germans, Hungarians or Jews: it was not by chance that the largest town in the area, an unprepossessing conurbation on the Danube a few kilometres east of Vienna, was variously known as Pressburg (to German-speaking Austrians) or Pozsony (to Hungarians). Only with the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and the Slovaks’ somewhat reluctant incorporation therein, did it become the second city of the new state under the name Bratislava.
The inter-war Republic of Czechoslovakia was democratic and liberal by prevailing regional standards, but its centralized institutions strongly favored the Czechs, who occupied almost all positions of power and influence. Slovakia was a mere province and a poor and rather disfavored one at that. The same impulse that led many of the country’s three million German-speaking citizens to listen to pro-Nazi separatists thus also drove a certain number of Czechoslovakia’s two and a half million Slovaks to look with sympathy upon Slovak populists demanding autonomy and even independence. In March 1939, when Hitler absorbed the Czech regions into the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’, an authoritarian, clericalist Slovak puppet state was established under Father Józef Tiso. The first ever independent state of Slovakia thus emerged at Hitler’s behest and over the corpse of the Czechoslovak Republic.
Just how popular Slovakia’s wartime ‘independence’ ever was is hard to know after the fact. In the post-war years it was discredited both by its own record (Slovakia deported to death camps virtually all of its 140,000 pre-war Jewish population) and by its intimate dependence upon its Nazi patron. After its liberation, Czechoslovakia was re-established as a single state and expressions of Slovak nationalism were frowned upon. Indeed in the early Stalinist years, ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalism’ was one of the accusations levied at putative defendants in the show trials then being prepared—Gustav Husák spent six years in prison on the charge.