by Riazanovsky
Gorbachev showed more originality in gradually promoting the concept of glasnost, or free discussion in speech and print. In its full, or at least rich, development a stunning novelty for Soviet society, it largely won for Gorbachev the initial support of the intellectuals and, even more broadly, of the educated public at home and great acclaim abroad. Foreign praise was powerfully augmented, of course, by the increasingly accommodating and peaceful foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Yet it is worth noting that whereas at the time the deficiencies of the Brezhnev regime were endlessly excoriated and whereas Gorbachev himself resumed de-Stalinization in July 1987 by condemning Stalinist terror, Lenin remained the lodestar of the new course. As of that time perestroika and glasnost, too, were expected to fit neatly into a gloriously reformed, somewhat humanized, and professedly Leninist Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, almost nothing worked during the first years of the Gorbachev regime. The economy would not respond to mere exhortations. Indeed, the government's own economic, especially financial, policies led to budget deficits and inflation and thus made matters worse. Even the anti-alcohol campaign proved to be a disaster, its only incontrovertible result a great increase in the illegal production of spirits, to the extent that sugar disappeared from stores in parts of the U.S.S.R. Before long under the new administration and its vacillating and confusing direction, the economy began to lose what cohesion it had had under Brezhnev without gaining anything to replace it. The war in Afghanistan, exceedingly painful to the population of the Soviet Union, continued to take its toll. On April 28, 1986, a nuclear reactor exploded in Chernobyl; the resulting medical and environmental catastrophe threw a glaring light on multiple Soviet deficiencies, from those in engineering to those in the news media. Indeed, that tragic episode, treated at first in the firm tradition of Stalinist secrecy, eventually became both an opening into glasnost and a strong argument in its favor. But then glasnost itself, a valuable and undeniable achievement of the Gorbachev years, was becoming increasingly dangerous to the Soviet regime and all its plans. Gorbachev's worst miscalculation might well have been his belief that glasnost would strengthen rather than destroy communism. Freedom of speech meant freedom to ask questions, and there were so many questions the Soviet
government would rather not answer. Freedom of speech also meant freedom of different political and other opinions, and consequently the legitimacy of different political and other parties, an obvious conclusion which Gorbachev tried for a time to deny by upholding glasnost but rejecting political pluralism. Glasnost and related measures of liberalization would lead to the appearance of diverse groups - from monarchists to Fascists and from Orthodox clergy to the champions of homosexuals - in the streets and squares of Moscow and other Soviet cities. Perhaps most important, they led to the revival of numerous nationalisms, suppressed but still alive in the Marxist superstate. The new time of troubles, like the original one at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, was to have its national phase.
The Rise of Nationalisms and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Because of the number, richness, variety, and specificity of ensuing developments, it is impossible to present in a brief general account an adequate summary of the rise of nationalism, or rather nationalisms, in the Soviet Union after centralized control was removed or even merely weakened. All fifteen constituent republics were radically affected. Moreover, many ethnic subdivisions within these republics and still other ethnic minorities also entered the fray. In line with the nature of nationalism, the relations of the participants were usually antagonistic, sometimes to the point of physical combat. It was illustrative of the many-sided struggle that Tskhinvali, the main town of the South Ossetian Autonomous Region within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, came to be held one-third by the local Ossetian militia, one-third by Georgian nationalist forces, and one-third by the Soviet army. This treatment of the issue of nationalism in the Soviet Union is limited to mentioning a few highlights and suggesting certain emerging patterns.
In many respects, the three Baltic republics - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - led the way. Independent states between the two world wars (and in the case of Lithuania, of course, in the much longer, richer, and more complex historical past), forced to join the Soviet Union only about fifty years ago, and possessed of their own languages and, on the whole, of a skilled and well-educated citizenry, the three republics, once self-expression became possible, made no doubt of their desire for independence. It was in Estonia that the first large-scale non-communist political coalition, the People's Front, received recognition, in June 1988, and it was Estonia that proclaimed on November 17, 1988, the right to reject Soviet laws when they infringed on its autonomy. On January 18, 1989, Estonian became the official language of the republic; legislation was enacted in an even more rigorous form a week later for the Lithuanian language in Lithuania, and still later, after mass demonstrations, for the Latvian language in Latvia. In May 1989, the Lithuanian legislature adopted a resolution seeking independence, and on August 22, 1989, it declared null and void the Soviet occu-
pation and annexation of Lithuania in 1940. In early December 1989, Lithuania became the first republic to abolish the Communist Party's guaranteed monopoly of power, while later that month the Communist Party in Lithuania voted to break away from Moscow, thus becoming the first local and independent Communist Party in the U.S.S.R., and to endorse political separation. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania, led by its president, Vytautas Landsbergis, proclaimed full independence. Events in Estonia and Latvia followed a similar course. It is worth nothing that whereas Lithuanians constituted at least three-quarters of the total population of their republic, Latvians and Estonians composed only a little more than half of theirs, and that all three new states tended toward rather exclusive policies that mandated a single official language and, for citizenship, a residential or familial connection with the pre-Soviet period to eliminate Russian newcomers. Yet in spite of the resulting built-in opposition, which claimed discrimination, in February 1991, 91 per cent of the voters in Lithuania approved independence; in March, referendums in Estonia and Latvia gave independence a three to one majority - clearly, not only the Baits, but also many Russians and people of still other ethnic backgrounds wanted above all to escape the Soviet system.
Gorbachev drastically underestimated the power of nationalism in the Baltic area, as well as elsewhere, and at first tried to ignore or dismiss the demands for recognition and independence. Once the crisis became obvious, he attempted persuasion, political maneuvering with the many elements involved, including different kinds of communists, and coercion, although never to the extent of mass military repression. Thus on January 11, 1990, he went to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, hoping to convince both leaders and milling crowds to check the nationalist course of development, but his trip was in vain. More successful was the oil blockade, a great reduction in the supply of oil to Lithuania, which began in mid-April 1990 and forced the republic to suspend, although not repeal, its declaration of independence on May 16. More violent coercion consisted of such incidents as army intervention in Vilnius, resulting in the death of fourteen people, and the assault by Black Berets on a Latvian government ministry building in Riga, both in January 1991 - aborted coups d'etat in the opinion of some - as well as repeated attacks on border posts and customs personnel of the nationalist republics, the signs of their new independence. The perpetrators included special army forces, such as the Black Berets, and perhaps some paramilitary groups, as in the case of seven Lithuanian customs and police officers killed on July 31, 1991. Officially, all these violent acts were labeled local incidents or transgressions; Gorbachev, in particular, denied any complicity. In fact, he emphasized that he objected to the manner of procedure of the Baltic republics, not to their goal of independence, which could be legitimately obtained in time, although personally he retained the hope that they would decide to remain in the new Soviet Union.
Whi
le nationalisms developed in a parallel and even co-operative way in the Baltic area, they were from the start on a collision course in Transcaucasia. Of the three Soviet republics beyond the great Caucasian mountain range - Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan - the first two represent two of the oldest yet entirely distinct peoples and cultures of the world. With their histories antedating Christianity by far, the Georgians and the Armenians also built Christian states and cultures centuries before the vaunted conversion of the Rus in a.d. 988. The Georgians are Orthodox; the Armenians are Eastern Christians but not Orthodox. Becoming part of the Russian Empire when it finally reached them in the early nineteenth century may have been important, even essential, for their survival in the face of hostile Moslem Turks and Persians, now Iranians. (Armenians who remained in Turkey did not survive.) Yet if the Baltic republics kept referring to 1940 as the crucial year when Soviet power crushed their independence, the Georgians focused on 1918, when, following the Russian revolutions of 1917, they created an independent Menshevik-led state, only to be overcome after three years by the Red Army. Azerbaijan, not a distinct historical entity, represented the Turkic element so prominent in the past and present life of the area; its inhabitants are historically Moslem and are closely related to other Turkic speakers in the U.S.S.R. from the Volga to the Chinese border, especially in four of the five Soviet Central Asian republics, as well as to Turks abroad.
The Georgian revolution had its central event, a Georgian "Bloody Sunday." On April 9,1989, the particularly brutal suppression of a nationalist demonstration in Tbilisi led to the death of 20 participants and the injury of more than 200. Although authorities in Moscow blamed local officials and started an investigation, communist control could not in effect be restored. The local Party, which, as in Lithuania, tried to play an independent role, lost the crucial ensuing election, and Georgia emerged with a noncommunist government headed by Zviad Gamsakhurdia. On April 1, 1991, Georgians responded to the question of whether they agreed "that the state independence of Georgia should be restored on the basis of the independence act of May 26, 1918," with a turnout, according to official sources, of 90.53 per cent of the 3.4 million Georgian voters and the affirmative reply of 98.93 per cent of them. Whatever their exact political future, Georgians, like the Baltic peoples, definitely wanted to live outside the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1991, there even existed widespread interest in restoring the ancient Georgian monarchy, although in a modern constitutional form, in the person of Georgii II Bagration, presently living in Spain but invited by President Gamsakhurdia and the parliament to visit Georgia. Yet in Georgia, too, nationalism brought no easy solutions. In particular, while asserting their own rights, Georgians did their best to limit and control those of the constituent minority groups in their state - the Adzharians, the Abkhazians, and perhaps especially the Ossetians - sometimes to the point of fighting on a considerable scale.
But the most extensive fighting in Transcaucasia, and indeed in the entire Soviet Union, took place between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis and their respective republics. The historical hostility of the two peoples came to center on Nagorny Karabakh, an Armenian-populated area within the republic of Azerbaijan. The Armenians claimed it for themselves on grounds of nationality and of alleged mistreatment of its inhabitants. The Azerbaijanis responded by attacking Armenians wherever they could be found. During the last four months of 1989, they also blockaded railroads leading into Armenia and carrying supplies vital to that republic. Especially traumatic were assaults in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Armenians and some Russians in January 1990 which resulted in at least twenty-five deaths. On January 20, the Soviet army intervened against the Azerbaijani rioters, in effect recapturing Baku from them. The central government was blamed both for intervening and for intervening late and was even accused by both sides of inflaming hostility among nationalities for its own nefarious purposes. More likely, it was trying to make the best of a very bad situation, breaking the railroad blockade, and attempting to prevent massacres, while rejecting Armenian claims to Nagorny Karabakh. The Armenian-Azerbaijani border was transformed into front lines, with the opponents remarkably well provided with weapons and materiel stolen or otherwise obtained from the Soviet army. Although there is a lull at the front at present, the situation is anything but peaceful. Masses of people migrated between the two republics and even to Moscow and other distant points. Some Armenians have been brutally moved by the Soviet army into the Armenian republic from their native villages in Azerbaijan. Armenia has declared its independence and broken with the Soviet Union, although because of its especially difficult predicament and the volatile nature of events, its decision appears perhaps less definitive than that of the Baltic republics.
More co-operative, it would appear, are the five "Moslem" republics of the U.S.S.R. located in Central Asia: the Turkic Kazakh, Kirghiz, Turkmen, and Uzbek republics and the Iranian Tajik republic. Deeply affected by the present political and nationalist turmoil, affirming in the train of other republics their "rights" and their "sovereignty," and in constant conflict with central authorities, their minorities, and at times one another, they have proved nevertheless to be so far among the less self-assertive major components of the former Soviet Union. The Party and the administration have been relatively successful in maintaining their positions in Soviet Central Asia. The explanation for that success may well lie in the comparative underdevelopment of the area, with its extreme reliance on a single crop (cotton), its poverty, its population explosion, and especially its dependence on huge government subsidies vital to the economy and even to the existence of its peoples. Kazakhstan, by far the largest republic of the five, represents a special case: it is little more than half Kazakh, the southern half, while the north is predominantly Russian and therefore claimed even by such Rus-
sian nationalists as Solzhenitsyn who are eager to separate Russians from alien peoples.
Whereas all the republics discussed thus far can be considered peripheral from the standpoint of Russian geography as well as Russian history and, typically, entered that history relatively recently, this judgment in no sense applies to Ukraine, as readers of this book or of any other book treating Russian history in the large must know. Correspondingly, the historic future of Ukraine will be of immense importance to that of Russia proper. The nationalist tide brought to power in Kiev, after elections, a coalition government led by rather nationalistically minded Ukrainian communists and joined by a noncommunist nationalist movement known as Rukh. In contrast to more exclusive Baltic nationalists, Ukrainian politicians appealed to all the inhabitants of the republic. As to its relation to Soviet and, later, Russian governments, Ukraine gave some indication of willingness to participate in certain kinds of associations but always with reservations and conflicting problems. The problems included Ukrainian sovereignty over the Crimea, the management and disposal of atomic weapons, and the division and control of the armed forces, in particular of the Black Sea fleet. The eastern and the smaller western parts of Ukraine are sharply different from each other. It is especially in the latter, Soviet only since 1939 or 1945, that the many-sided religious revival included the restoration, at times a militant restoration, of the formerly prohibited Uniate Church, a Catholic jurisdiction, while anticommunism and anti-Russian nationalism rode high.
Adjacent and closely related to Ukrainians, as well as involved in the general course of Russian history from its very inception, Belorussians have been slow in developing a nationalism of their own, perhaps a generation or two behind the Ukrainians. Also, the Party proved to be stronger in the Belorussian republic than in some others. Still, the new nationalist wave had its effect. Thus in late July 1990, Belorussia issued a resounding declaration of its "sovereignty." And while it apparently constitutes one of the more cooperative members of the commonwealth, the future is difficult to predict.
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, bordering Ukraine on the southwest, exemplifies well some of the conundrums
and miseries of contemporary nationalisms in the Soviet Union. In a sense a fake nationalism to begin with - for the Moldavian language is really Rumanian and Moldavians are part of the Rumanian people, the postulation and promotion of differences between the two being a deliberate Soviet policy - it has nevertheless gripped the titular ethnic group, to the detriment of numerous minorities, such as the Turkic-speaking Gagauz people, the Ukrainians, and the Russians. In August and September 1989, large demonstrations and counterdemonstrations erupted over the introduction of Moldavian as the only official language of the republic. Tensions exploded sporadically into fighting and led to Soviet army intervention, along the lines of its peacekeeping efforts in Transcaucasia. Moldavian authorities
announced their break with the Soviet Union and their refusal to take part in any new federal or other arrangements. The future of the area is far from clear.
Gorbachev and his government received no support from the Russian republic, the gigantic R.S.F.S.R., as they were trying to control the non-Russian nationalities of the Soviet Union. To the contrary, before long the Russian republic, too, was making declarations and demands aimed at the central authorities and frequently co-operating with other discontented entities - all for good reason. To be sure, Russians enjoyed certain advantages within the Soviet Union, such as the privileged position of their language and a greater acceptance of their cultural and historical past, albeit in a Marxist-Leninist interpretation, but they remained poor, even poorer than the inhabitants of a number of other republics, and, all in all, they bore their full share of the deprivation, suffering, and oppression characteristic of the Soviet system. They were even denied such "local" institutions, granted to other republics, as their own branch of the Communist Party and their own academy of sciences, apparently, at least in part, because of the fear that these organizations might become too powerful and compete with the central Soviet ones.