Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  When Gorbachev first appeared, no one in Estonia, or in the other Soviet republics, had been thinking about national independence. The new general secretary had not been shaped by the Stalinist era, but all the talk concerned the reform of the Soviet system, not its replacement. In any case Gorbachev was slow to show his hand. When he did, his main concerns centred on foreign policy, not on the internal structures of the Soviet State. In 1987, the eightieth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution were staged with all the usual Soviet bombast, and everyone assumed that similar anniversaries would continue into the foreseeable future. Even when glasnost and perestroika got under way, they were presented as the twin pillars of a controlled experiment, aiming for a degree of welcome relaxation, not for radical change.

  Yet Estonians by then could receive Finnish television, so they knew that their Finnish cousins across the water enjoyed a far higher standard of living, and much greater freedoms. But they were not inclined to raise their hopes. Twice in the twentieth century they had escaped from the Soviet grasp, only to be twice recaptured. In the early 1980s they had watched the Solidarity episode in Poland intensely, and had seen the movement crushed.

  Nineteen eighty-seven was the year when Soviet-watchers noticed that Moscow’s grip on the Soviet republics was slipping. When a local war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the remote enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Gorbachev took no active steps to stifle it. Communist leaders in each of the republics, including Estonia, realized that their room for manoeuvre was widening. Glasnost, too, was getting out of hand. Contrary to Western belief, the Russian word means ‘publicity’,75 and was initially used by Gorbachev to encourage Party activists to stand up for his policies against hostile criticism. Yet once unleashed the slogan soon spread into areas of previously taboo subjects. In Estonia, it gave rise to uninhibited historical discussions and to an unparalleled tide of national reawakening.

  The first buds of the coming ‘Baltic spring’ had appeared in October 1986 with the foundation of the harmless-sounding Estonian Heritage Society. This was soon followed by public protests, apparently unconnected, against phosphorite mining. But history and ecology were joining hands. What they had in common was a determination to resist Moscow’s dictatorial habits.

  Mass demonstrations began in 1987. They were entirely peaceful, but unauthorized. One, on 23 August, was held in the Hirvepark in Tallinn to mark the anniversary of the Nazi–Soviet Pact – hitherto an unmentionable event. Another, in October, gathered in Võru to remember the War of Independence. This was the first occasion for forty-seven years when the Estonian flag flew freely in public. A third meeting, in February 1988, was called to mark the Tartu Treaty of 1920 and faced police with dogs and riot shields. From then on the ferment gathered pace in the guise of the ‘Singing Revolution’. Ever-greater crowds would assemble spontaneously to sing forbidden patriotic songs and to wave flags. Emotions rose inexorably. Finally, on 11 September 1988 at the Tallinn Song Festival, the leader of the Heritage Society demanded the restoration of Estonia’s independence.

  Defiance of Soviet authority was now out in the open. Gorbachev’s reaction was to replace the ruling Party’s first secretary in Estonia, while promoting constitutional reform and the creation of a National (Soviet) Delegates Congress. His position weakened, however, when people across the USSR sensed that he was unwilling to sanction the use of force. As a result, the Supreme Council of the ESSR decided of its own accord on 16 November 1988 to issue a declaration of Estonian sovereignty. Soviet laws were only to be regarded as valid when ratified in Tallinn. Moscow protested, but no one was disciplined. The outside world was still largely oblivious to the implications.76

  In 1989 Estonian politics followed two paths. One group, headed by Estonian Communists, participated in Gorbachev’s Moscow-centred reform movement. The other, based in Tallinn, pressed for autonomy and, increasingly, for independence. The climate was changing rapidly. In June the world outcry against the Tiananmen Square massacre in China lessened the chances of Soviet hardliners regaining control, and the triumph of the Solidarity movement in the partial elections in Poland showed that the monolith was cracking. On 23 August 1989, 2 million people linked hands in the ‘Baltic Chain’, which stretched all the way across the Baltic States from Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. It showed that Estonians were not isolated.77 The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, regarded in the West as a world-historical event, did not make the same impact on Soviet citizens, who had still to break the bars of their cage.

  In 1990 and 1991 the Estonian national movement adopted the strategy of pursuing its own programme while ignoring whatever Moscow did. In February 1990 elections to a Congress of Estonia turned into a de facto referendum on national statehood. The Congress then announced ‘a period of transition awaiting developments’. Pro-Moscow elements staged impotent counter-demonstrations. Violent events occurred in Lithuania and Latvia, where in January 1991 Soviet special forces attempted and failed to suppress the ‘separatists’. Gorbachev’s one and only resort to force produced, from his viewpoint, far too little and was much too late. Even so, an Estonian referendum on 3 March produced a 77 per cent majority in favour of independence. The three Baltic republics then seceded, regardless of the consequences. On 17 September 1991 the flags of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were flown at the UN building in New York. They had been recognized by Iceland, by the UN and by Yeltsin’s Russia even while the USSR was theoretically still intact.78 Estonia soared into free flight as the Soviet Union slumped onto its deathbed. On 31 December 1991 ‘Lenin’s only child’ finally succumbed.

  III

  The Soviet Union was a major player on the world stage for most of the twentieth century. From the day of its creation to the day of its dissolution it was bigger than any other territorial entity on the globe, and its sheer size gave it enormous geopolitical significance. But it made still greater impact for both ideological and military reasons. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the ‘world’s first socialist state’, it delivered the single most serious challenge to a reigning international order dominated by the Western Powers. Thanks to its stunning victory in the Second World War, it passed four decades as one of only two world superpowers, vying with the United States for influence, and (prior to the Sino-Soviet split) commanding a bloc of states containing almost one-third of mankind.

  According to their own propaganda, Soviet leaders had discovered the secrets of the ‘scientific system of the future’; they were looking forward to a continuing existence where defeats and disasters would be unknown. Their utopian ideology produced a scenario which described the road to the end of the world. They would resist all attempts to divert their mission until a perfect, classless and ‘Communist’ society was achieved. Foreign states would gradually be won over. When a critical mass of progressive nations had joined the Soviet camp, the remaining fortresses of reaction would surrender, and all conflict would cease. States would then become redundant. Frontiers, governments and armies would wither away, and mankind would prosper for ever in a condition of bliss, as promised by the socialist prophets. ‘Day by day, hour by hour,’ every schoolchild was taught, ‘the Soviet people are building the radiant edifice of Communism with joy and pride.’79 As many observers have remarked, Soviet Communism was less of a political creed, and more like a pseudo-religion;80 it rested on belief, not on experience or knowledge.

  Many factors contributed to the Soviet Union’s downfall. They include defeat in Afghanistan, an unsustainable arms race, financial bankruptcy, laggardly technology, sclerotic political structures, a discredited ideology, a generation gap between rulers and ruled, and much else besides; discussion of them fills any number of weighty tomes,81 but none in itself gives a sufficient explanation. The essence lies deeper, and is not complicated. The Soviet system was built on extreme force and extreme fraud. Practically everything that Lenin and the Leninists did was accompanied by killing; practically everything they said was based on half-baked theories,
a total lack of integrity and huge, barefaced lies – what the Russians would call naglaya lozh′. The Soviet economy had been assembled over decades by eliminating all market mechanisms, by suppressing the flow of economic information and by terrorizing the population into subservience. When a general secretary finally came along who was no longer prepared to perpetuate the fantasies and the coercion, all the circuits fused, and total paralysis rapidly ensued. Gorbachev, the well-intentioned reformer, was as shocked by this as anyone. His predicament was likened in Russia to an apocryphal story about an old man who flushed his toilet at the exact moment of the Tashkent earthquake. ‘If I’d known what was going to happen,’ the old man exclaimed as he climbed from the rubble, ‘I would never have pulled the chain.’82

  This gulf between the idealized scenario and the reality may well explain why Soviet leaders behaved like frightened rabbits, mesmerized by the headlights of history, as the juggernaut of unexpected events was about to run them over. Gorbachev and his comrades, trained from childhood in the Soviet fictions, simply could not respond appropriately; they tried to grapple with accumulating problems, but found them insoluble. No one could have guessed at the magnitude of their incompetence or self-deception. No one could have predicted that the Soviet Union, which possessed the most elaborate security apparatus ever assembled, would prove incapable of self-defence, or would have expired without a spirited rearguard action. The August coup of 1991, mounted by Gorbachev’s closest colleagues, proved a total fiasco; it discredited Gorbachev as well as those who had arrested him, and it triggered the very collapse that its authors had wanted to avoid. One can only conclude that the dinosaur was already brain-dead before it died from the political equivalent of a paralytic stroke.

  The departure of the Soviet Union left a political void in large expanses of Eurasia, and an accompanying vacuum in the international arena. Fifteen dependent Soviet republics were transformed into fifteen independent states, the largest of them the giant Russian Federation,83 the smallest tiny Estonia. The other thirteen ranged from Estonia’s Baltic neighbours Latvia and Lithuania to Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan and Turkmenistan in Central Asia. Some of them joined the so-called Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a supposedly voluntary association of Russian-led ex-Soviet republics. Others, including Estonia, declined, and within a short time were heading eagerly towards membership both of NATO and of the European Union.

  The vacuum in international politics took at least a decade to fill. Some American analysts, preoccupied for the whole of their adult lives by rivalry with the Soviet Union, assumed that US-led capitalist democracy would henceforth have no more major competitors, that they had reached the ‘End of History’.84 Others concluded that the twenty-first century would be the ‘American Century’. All of this was questionable. It was just as possible to argue, as one prescient historian did in 1988, that American power had passed its peak,85 that the US lead had been squandered by a neo-conservative administration, or that the new century heralded the rise of new powers like China, India and Brazil.86 The geopolitics of the world were changing from ‘bipolar’ to polygonal.

  At all events, the reconfigured map of the globe threw up a number of unforeseen patterns. The European Union, for example, which had been formalized by the Maastricht Treaty on the same day in December 1991 on which the leaders of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine put the Soviet Union out of its misery, expanded exponentially into the post-Soviet void. By 2007 it had a membership of twenty-seven states with more than 500 million inhabitants; ten of the twenty-seven, including Estonia, had only recently escaped from Communist tyranny. In terms both of GDP and of population, it far outstripped anything that the former Soviet Union could boast.

  At the same time, since the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia were found to be rich in oil, they were drawn into a new version of the Great Game.87 The United States now vied with Russia over the control of new oil reserves, the politics of the Middle East gained a new northern flank and the future of countries like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan became the object of intensified international concern.

  Estonia’s restoration in the midst of the turbulence was especially remarkable, and by no means preordained. Estonian leaders had set a skilful course around the obstacles blocking their progress, but the odds for success were not favourable. They possessed guile and popular support, but no serious instruments of power. One forgets just how hostile and touchy official Soviet opinion was; it had been looking forward to the demise of the separate personalities of the USSR’s constituent republics and to their assimilation into ‘universal Soviet Man’. According to another apocryphal story, a visiting Oxford academic had ventured to say in the 1980s that he rather liked Estonia. ‘In that case,’ his host had retorted, ‘you must obviously be anti-Soviet.’ And yet the daunting chasm of transition was safely crossed. As one prime minister reported with satisfaction, Estonia had performed a miracle that was psychological no less than political and economic.88

  A pertinent remark in this context was voiced by Vladimir Putin, the second president of the Russian Federation. In 2005, looking back, he said that ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union had been the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the century’.89 He was referring in particular to the fate of ethnic Russians stranded outside Russia’s borders. But he had been a career officer of the KGB, which, despite its ruthless reputation, had signally failed in its prime duty of protecting the Soviet state. His regret was tinged by pangs of corporate guilt.90

  Putin’s sense of humiliation was shared by millions of Russians for whom the loss of superpower status had been accompanied by the loss of a large part of their colonial empire. His determination to recover lost prestige, by fighting the Chechen war or by appearing to ‘stand up to the Americans’, was more important to them than his half-measures in establishing a ‘managed democracy’. These attitudes, macho and defiant, underpinned his undoubted popularity.91 One must presume that Putin shared with his compatriots a strong sense of bafflement about how the great calamity had actually happened. There had been no time to reflect. The Soviet Union had been there one day, and had gone the next. Contrary to the wishes of its supporters, and the efforts of its guardians, it had performed world history’s ultimate vanishing act.

  * The first cyber war was fought in 1998 between NATO and Serbia, the second in 2006 by Israel and Hisbollah.

  * Owing to tsarist Russia’s use of the Julian Calendar, the ‘October Revolution’ actually took place on 7 November 1917 (New Style). To bring Russia into line with the rest of Europe, a Bolshevik decree abolished the Julian Calendar one month later; 17 December 1917 (Old Style) was inmediately followed the next day by 1 January 1918 (New Style).

  * The Bolsheviks described themselves by the formula of Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (Bolsheviks), usually reduced to RSDRP(b). Like most of the contorted acronyms of the revolutionary period, this name was repeatedly altered.

  † The official name was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Many Westerners, who grew accustomed to the name of Soviet Russia in this initial period, continued to apply it inappropriately after 1924 to the wider Soviet Union, of which the RSFSR was only one part.

  How States Die

  The strange death of the Soviet Union – which played no small part in the trains of thought behind the present studies – suggests that a typology of ‘vanished kingdoms’ is worth attempting. Bodies politic clearly expire for a variety of reasons, and it is perhaps important to ask whether their disappearances follow discernible patterns. Historians are not comfortable with the idea of random causation, and some sort of analysis, however tentative, is desirable.

  Political pathologies can be observed in endless guises. But the theme here is neither ‘revolution’ nor ‘regime-change’ nor ‘system-failure’. Revolution and regime-change refer to events where the social order or the government is overthrown, but where the territory and population of the state remain intact. ‘System-failure’
is concerned with political organisms which lose the capacity to function effectively, but do not necessarily collapse completely; they may be compared to a motor car that has broken down but has not yet been scrapped. This brief enquiry is limited to the more drastic phenomenon of states that cease to exist.

  Political philosophers, whose known ruminations began in ancient Greece, have been thinking about statehood for millennia, though state demise has seldom been at the forefront of their preoccupations. By describing the state as a ‘creation of nature’, and man as a ‘political animal’, Aristotle can be read as implying, among other things, that states, like other natural life forms, might be subject to cycles of birth and death.1 Thomas Hobbes, though mainly interested in the foundation and perpetuation of states, was more explicit about their demise. In Leviathan, he expounded on the ‘internall diseases’ that tend to ‘the dissolution of the Commonwealth’. The ultimate factor is war: ‘When in a warre (forraign, or intestine,) the enemies get a final Victory; so as… there is no farther protection of Subjects in their loyalty; then is the Commonwealth DISSOLVED.’ At the last, ‘Nothing can be immortall, which mortals make.’2 Rousseau in his Social Contract reached the same conclusion. ‘If Sparta and Rome perished,’ he asked rhetorically, ‘what state can hope to last for ever?’ ‘The body politic, no less then the body of a man, begins to die as soon as it is born, and bears within itself the causes of its own destruction… the best constitution will come to an end.’3

  Christian theologians and biblical scholars, whose traditions are almost as long as those of the philosophers, have constantly been exercised by the rise and fall of states, though less by related questions of causation; they have usually been satisfied by explanations based on divine providence or the Wrath of God. The Fall of Babylon of 539 BC, which was a major historical event in the Old Testament, is presented in the Book of Revelation as a metaphor for the end of the existing world order and the advent of Christ-ruled ‘New Jerusalem’. Every good Christian had heard the story of Belshazzar’s Feast, where the prophet Daniel deciphered the writing on the wall: ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN… God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it;… thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting’;4 and few would be unaware of the words of the angel from heaven who ‘cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit.’5St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the senior Father of the Church, expounded these matters in his City of God; all human history, he writes, consists of a confrontation between the civitas hominis, the World of Man, and the civitas Dei, the divine World of the Spirit. The passing of the former is a necessary prelude to the triumph of the latter.6 St Thomas Aquinas OP (c. 1225–74), Christian theologian par excellence, dominated Catholic thought into modern times. In his Summa Theologica, he consigned political questions like the birth and dissolution of states to the realm of universal or natural law, disentangling them from divine law and opening them up to the general, non-theological, discussions, in which all could participate.7 The Protestant reformers developed their own schools of politico-theological scholarship. In England, Thomas Cromwell, in his preamble to the Henrician Act of Supremacy, was at pains to deny the link between royal authority and traditional Catholic teaching, inventing a new scheme of English history to match.8 In Germany, Martin Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms was a new take on St Augustine’s old theme of the City of God.9