Boris Yeltsin (left) and Mikhail Gorbachev (right) / Wikimedia Commons
By Dr. Lewis Siegelbaum / 09.24.2015
Professor of Russian and European History
Michigan State University
The Afghans
Tanks retreat through the mountains of Afghanistan (1985) / Wikimedia Commons
The analogy between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the undeclared American war in Vietnam was impossible to ignore by the mid 1980s. Fighting against a hostile cold war ideology, the Soviets found themselves resented by their allies no less than their friends, and defending a rotting regime that had almost no internal support. Karmal dared not send his troops outside urban fortresses, which meant that the countryside was under the effective control of disparate Islamic resistance groups funded by the West and other foreign sources. Squabbles between these groups, which would throw Afghanistan into permanent chaos after the Soviet withdrawal, did not impede their ability to fight the Soviet army.
Don’t Forget Your Place (1986) / Wikimedia Commons
Planners of the initial stages of the campaign had sent soldiers from Turkic-speaker peoples with Islamic traditions, such as Uzbeks, Tadziks and Turkmen, but they were dismayed to find them refusing to fire on their brethren. Soon Slavic troops with little sympathy for the Afghans were sent, who were more willing to prosecute the brutal campaign, but were alienated from the local population. The situation grew intolerable when the Soviet army took over rural pacification program originally intended Afghan troops. Soviet soldiers were being asked to die for people who clearly did not want them, and the bloody fighting left them shattered on their return home.
Medal from the “Grateful Afghan People” / Russian Antiquity
In an era of open press debate, the Afghan War was one of the first targets of journalists. Superb reporting from the front brought the horrors of the campaign to Soviet readers, and TV soon presented them with unforgettable images. At the onset of the war, the only vocal dissent had come from dissidents, who were isolated from society and easily contained by the KGB (link). Later dissent spread to many sectors of society, including the mothers of soldiers and the veterans themselves, who were traditionally the most loyal of Soviet citizens. No regime claiming to be patriotic could ignore these people or their needs. As the “Afghans” (the Afghan veterans) became a cohesive social group, the lessons of the war became undeniable, and the question of whether Soviet troops should participate became pressing. By 1989 the Soviet leadership had negotiated a withdrawal from Afghanistan, and had now to cope with the domestic effects of the war.
Anti-Alcohol Campaign
NO!, by Viktor Govorkov (1954) / Wikimedia Commons
The consumption of alcohol has deep cultural roots in Russia where it typically accompanied celebrations, signified hospitality, and enhanced bonding among acquaintances and friends. It also was a tremendous sources of revenue for the Soviet state which exercised a monopoly on its production and distribution. In 1979, for example, the state derived some 25.4 billion rubles in indirect taxes from the sale of alcoholic beverages which was more than were paid in income tax. Alcoholism, however, was a major scourge in Soviet society, linked to high rates of child-abuse, suicide, divorce (link), absenteeism, and accidents on the job, and contributing to a rise in mortality rates particularly among Soviet males that was detected in the 1970s.
In May 1985, less than two months after becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev launched a campaign against alcohol abuse, backing it up with a series of measures to reduce alcohol production and sales. These included limiting the kinds of shops permitted to sell alcohol, closing many vodka distilleries and destroying vineyards in the wine-producing republics of Moldavia, Armenia and Georgia, and banning the sale of alcohol in restaurants before two o’clock in the afternoon. To set a good example, official Soviet receptions both at home and abroad became alcohol-free. Exhorting Soviet citizens to abide by these measures, Gorbachev became known as the mineral’nyi sekretar’ (mineral-water-drinking secretary) rather than general’nyi sekretar’ (General Secretary).
While the anti-alcohol campaign may well have resulted in a decline in alcohol consumption, it also precipitated a sharp rise in the production of moonshine (samogon) and, like Prohibition in the United States, an increase in organized crime. Instances of alcohol poisoning also rose, as hard drinkers turned to other, more dangerous, substances. No less serious was the decline in state revenues, which created a budgetary imbalance. This was overcome by resort to printing more money, which fueled inflation. For all these reasons, the campaign was abandoned after 1987.
Cooperatives
Statue to a Warehouse Manager, by V. Skrylev (1989) / From Soviet Humor: The Best of Krokodil
In 1985, the cooperative sector of the Soviet economy was comprised of some 26,000 collective farms with 12.7 million workers, housing cooperatives that accounted for about eight percent of all housing construction, and assorted garden, dacha-construction, consumer, and handicraft cooperatives. The expansion of the cooperative sector to include retail outlets, commercial enterprises and those providing services of various kinds had been mooted by economists for several years before Gorbachev assumed office. They argued that since the state was incapable of doing it all, it was better to legalize these semi-private institutions rather than to concede the functions they performed to the underground or “gray” economy.
Law on Cooperatives in the USSR (1986) / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Gorbachev initially took a hard line on this question. On May 28, 1986 the Council of Ministers issued decrees that tightened restrictions on individuals who used their access to state supplies of fuel, transport, and the like for private gain, who derived income from private renting of housing space, or who engaged in embezzlement, speculation, and bribery. But these prohibitions turned out to be preliminary to the Law on Individual Labor Activity, issued on November 19, 1986, which sought to encourage private entrepreneurship “based exclusively on the personal labor of citizens and members of their families.” This law was followed in early 1987 by a series of decrees (consolidated eventually in the Law on Cooperatives of May 26, 1988) that put self-financing, self-managed, and profit-and-market oriented cooperatives on the same basis as state enterprises with their members enjoying the same social rights as state employees. By the end of 1987, approximately 150,000 people worked in some 13,921 cooperatives of the new type. As reported by Izvestiia, their productivity was several times higher than in equivalent state enterprises and the resulting earnings were impressive too. Particularly in the larger cities, cooperative restaurants, hairdresser salons, fruit and vegetable stands, shoe repair booths and the like were flourishing and providing a quality of service superior to state enterprises.
But the success of the cooperatives engendered a good deal of resentment. Soviet citizens deluged the press with letters complaining about the generally higher prices charged by cooperatives, their siphoning off of the best workers from state enterprises, and their reliance on state supplies which exacerbated shortage in the state sector. Many cooperatives were vulnerable to exorbitant taxation by local officials, high interest rates on loans, and protection rackets run by criminals, the cost of which inevitably were passed onto consumers in the form of mark-ups. “Kooperativshchiki” (cooperative owners) thus became a term of abuse in ordinary Soviet speech.
Desiccation of the Aral Sea
Yurts and Boats, Aral Sea, photo by Anatolii Rahimbaev (1990) / Anahita Gallery
The demise of the Aral Sea, described by Science magazine in 1999 as “perhaps the most notorious ecological catastrophe of human making,” was a long term process. From 1939 with the opening of the Great Fergana Canal (link) through the early 1960s when the Karakum Canal was completed, massive quantities of water were diverted from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, the two rivers running into the Aral Sea, to irrigate the ever-expanding cotton fields of Soviet Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The mentality behind these projects was exemplified in a speech to the Uzbek Communist Party’s central committee by its first secretary, Usman Iusupov, in 1939. Iusupov stated, “We cannot be content with the fact that the Amu Darya, abounding in water, deposits it without benefit into the Aral Sea while our Samarkand and Bukhara oblast lands are insufficiently irrigated. Our task is to bridle the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, firmly grasp them in our hands, and make their water serve the interests of socialism, the growth of the material level of the population, and the development of the country.”
Dry bed of the Aral Sea, photo by David C. Turnley (1990) / From The Aral: A Soviet Sea Lies Dying, by William S. Ellis
Soviet scientists first noticed signs of aridization in the eastern part of the Amu Darya delta in the late 1950s. By 1970, the coast of the Aral Sea had retreated ten kilometers from the former seaport of Muynak. By 1980, it was 40 kilometers away, and by 1995, 70 kilometers across what had become a saline wasteland. Between 1960 and 1995 the surface area of the Aral had declined from 64,500 square kilometers to less than 30,000, and the sea had become three separate highly saline lakes. Commercial fishing which had employed 3,000 people in the late 1960s, ceased in 1982.
Space map of the Aral Sea (1985) / UCSD
In the 1970s, Soviet scientists worked on a plan to divert Siberian rivers southwards to help irrigate Central Asian lands, but this project was shelved after it had provoked intense opposition from Russian intellectuals and party officials. The catastrophic effects of the Aral Sea’s desiccation became apparent under Gorbachev. Dust storms carried soil from the dried out seabed that contained sulfates, phosphates, chlorinated hydrocarbons and other toxic substances found in fertilizers and pesticides across a wide swathe of territory. Soaring rates of cancer, liver ailments, and other diseases were recorded in Uzbekistan’s Karakalpak Autonomous Republic. The rate of infant mortality in Karakalpak — 60/1000 live births in the late 1980s — was the highest in the Soviet Union.
Female Sexuality
There’s No Sex Here! (1985) / Wikimedia Commons
Revolutions often write themselves on the bodies of their citizens, their female citizens in particular. If public pornography was an invention of the French Revolution, and the agitation that gripped western youth in the 1960s yielded a sexual revolution, the timid revolution taking place in the Soviet Union in 1985 in the name of glasnost, or openness, eventually led to a new openness about the female body. First by peeling away the veils concealing matters long obvious to any Soviet woman, and then unveiling her body, glasnost made women the object, and sometimes of the agent of a public debate whose ultimate goal was liberation. Although the ways that women appeared and talked in public had altered radically by the end of the 1980s, the final verdict on liberation was still out.
Intergirl (1985) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
Changes in the discourse on sexuality could be registered year by year. Female sexuality first made its way into the press as criminality with the recently taboo subject of prostitution. The runaway best-seller and then film Intergirl (1987) dealt with foreign-currency prostitution, doubly taboo. Yet when American talk show host Phil Donahue created the ground-breaking TELEMOST, uniting audiences Soviet Russia and America to discuss weighty issues such as arms control and human rights, only one issue rendered Russians inarticulate. When the issue of sex arose, they could only sputter “We have no sex here,” using the foreign word “sex” for a concept totally absent in their own language.
When the first beauty pageant since the 1930s was sponsored in Moscow in 1989, commentators touted it as a victory over Soviet sanctimony. Yet for many people, even those who greeted the destruction of old taboos, revealing the female body spoke also of degradation, and degraded female body served many as an allegory for a degraded Russia. The fall of Russian women and of Russia with them, was a leitmotif of Intergirl; and it was a bitter theme of the 1989 movie Little Vera, who sad heroine, a resident of the urban blight of Mariupol, found no liberation or happy fate when she revealed her body for the first time in a feature film.
Gorbachev and Nationalism
100,000 demonstrators, photo by Andrei Solov’ev (1989) / Russian Union of Art Photographers
The national question was the Achilles heel of Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to radically transform the Soviet Union into a democratic polity. If democratic self-government was one of Gorbachev’s objectives, and there is plenty of evidence to support such a proposition, it would have had to include the right of the nations comprising the Soviet Union to govern themselves independently of Moscow. This right, however, conflicted with Gorbachev’s unswerving commitment to preserve the integrity of the Union, which in many quarters increasingly came to be regarded as an outdated empire. Clearly, Gorbachev counted on the reforms he introduced as being sufficiently attractive to inspire a desire to remain within the Union. But just as clearly, his dismantling of the central controls put in place by his predecessors and the ensuing economic and political chaos encouraged Soviet-generated ethnic intelligentsias to emerge as credible claimants to national leadership, initially under the Soviet umbrella but eventually without it.
Bravo!, by Svetlana Faldina (1988) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
The first serious national-based conflict during the Gorbachev era occurred in the Kazakh capital of Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in December 1986. Its precipitant was Gorbachev’s replacement of the Politbiuro member and long-standing first secretary of the Kazakh party, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, with an ethnic Russian, Gennadii Kolbin. This break with the traditional practice of reserving the position of first secretary for members of union republics’ titular nationality provoked demonstrations that were severely repressed with some loss of life. Prominent among the demonstrators were students, but the anxiety among Kunaev’s large and corrupt network of appointees that their privileges were about to end also allegedly fueled the protest.
The People and the Party are One, by Miron Luk’ianov (1984) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
Over the next two years, national rights were asserted with ever greater forcefulness. In July 1987, Crimean Tatars who had been expelled from their homeland in 1944 peaceably demonstrated in Red Square to win the right of return. In February 1988 Armenians in the mountainous enclave of Karabakh in Azerbaijan began to demonstrate for a merger with the neighboring republic of Armenia. The demonstrations touched off even larger gatherings in the Armenian capital of Erevan, which in turn provoked angry Azerbaijanis to rampage through the industrial town of Sumgait and butcher Armenians. Similar conflicts between dominant and minority nationalities were to erupt in Moldavia, Georgia and Kirghizia. In April 1988 activists in the Baltic republics began forming popular fronts initially to press for the expansion of linguistic and cultural rights but soon for national sovereignty within and then independence from the Soviet Union.
The Guys from Liubertsy
Left: Pins that were robbed by the Liubery / Wikimedia Commons
Right: A Punk (left) and a ‘Liuber’ (right) in a Moscow photo studio (1988) / Wikimedia Commons
The seemingly endless expansion of Moscow created a periphery of soulless, identical apartment boxes, many of them housing alienated young people who no longer understood how they fit into Soviet society. Different corners of the metropolis developed different identities. If the southwest quadrant, built around Moscow State University and housing members of the Academy of Sciences, became the tonier side of town, the southeast quadrant housed large parts of the working class population. The suburb of Liubertsy had boomed in the 1930s when rural dwellers flooded into Moscow to work on the great construction projects; and it was here that the young toughs called Liubers, the grandsons of the migrants, developed their stance of defiance and resentment. Their pumped-up bodies fought in the age-old battle over the Russian soul between western cultural imports and native traditions, and they deemed themselves warriors against alien ways. Yet they used a symbolic idiom no less imported, this one from western films starring their hero, Sylvester Stallone.
Liubers Bodybuilder (1987) / Wikimedia Commons
“We don’t just beat up anyone, as some people say, only those who we don’t like … break dancers, soccer fans, heavy metal fans, new wave, and so on … We’re just lads from Liubertsy.” This brief excerpt from a letter sent to Komsomol Pravda in 1986 sums up a way of life and the cultural wars taking place in Gorbachev’s Russia. The streets of central Moscow saw frequent clashes between the Liubertsy and young people fascinated with western pop culture, whose fantastic costumes – chains and studs, punk hairstyles, heavy metal leathers – intrigued and mortified tradition-minded Russians. Liubers saw themselves as defenders of the Russian public body against the invasion of alien ways. Their solution was to cruise the streets of central Moscow in packs, beating up the invaders and driving them away from the center. They trained themselves for the task in home gyms built in the basements of their apartment buildings, which served both as places to pump iron and to nurse their wounded souls. Easy to dismiss, the Liubers did in fact understand very well the battle going on over the cultural soul of their nation. The young people they despised were using seemingly innocuous modes of expression – clothing, hair, body art – to attack the cultural edifice erected by the Soviet state. The Liubers’ only miscalculation perhaps was the thought that they could forcibly repel ideas that by 1986 had penetrated every last corner of Soviet Russia, not just the center of the capital. They misunderstood as well the cultural geography of their land. If they thought that they defended the center, the core of Russian cultural identity, it was they who traveled to Moscow on the long train from the suburbs; and the youths they beat up, many of whom were the children of the Soviet elite, were on home territory in the center.
The Leningrad Rock Scene
Left: Leningrad Rock Club / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Viktor Tsoi and Kino in the early days / Wikimedia Commons
Nourished by decades in the underground, featured in the Leningrad Rock Club since 1981, the flourishing rock scene of Leningrad burst onto the open stage of stadiums and concert halls once glasnost had undermined the Party’s cultural hegemony. The city of Leningrad, distance from the ministries and minions of Moscow, had long featured a more vital musical life. By now the group Aquarium had become the grand old men of Russian rock, fostering a spirit that less rejected than it simply ignored official Soviet values. Aquarium and its lead singer Boris Grebenshchikov sang of opting out entirely from Soviet life. In pursuit of time for their art, rockers had taken low-end jobs that paid little, demanded little work and allowed them to develop their musical and spiritual lives. Aquarium called on their peers as well to become a “generation of janitors and nightwatchmen.”
Left: Sergei Kurekhin, leader of Pop-Mechanics / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Viktor Tsoi and Kino at the Leningrad Rock Club / Wikimedia Commons
Tusovka, the slang word that characterized the informal, crash-anywhere play-everywhere spirit of the scene, was the byword of Leningrad rock. The music could be played in an apartment, a basement, an abandoned store front, or a park. Official resistance to rock only reinforced its ethos, heightening the anxiety of elders in the world of culture. All this was swept aside in the busy year of change, even in stodgy Moscow, always a rock-n-roll backwater. Now the Moscow City Council and the Komsomol sponsored concerts, and rockers were even invited to play at the Victory Day celebration, the most traditional Soviet holiday. Giddy with delight, rockers embraced these opportunities; but they would soon find that official acceptance and the cash payments that came with it would forever undermine the counterculture spirit they loved.
Left: Rock group Aquarium (1984) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Kostya Kinchev and Alisa (1985) / Leningrad Rock Club Festival
Aquarium attracted huge audiences to their concerts, but they shared the stage with a new generation of rockers whose music carried new inflections, and whose vocalists enjoyed a stardom rivaling Grebenshchikov. Viktor Tsoi, lead singer of KINO whose powerful stage presence would make him a cult idol, and whose starring role in the film Needle would make him an icon, enjoyed a status that was only enlarged by his premature death in a 1990 motorcycle accident; Kostya Kinchev, front for the band ALISA, who would also achieve film stardom in The Burglar; or Zhanna Aguzarova of BRAVO, a provincial girl from Siberia who became the first female star of Russian rock: these were some of the new names on the scene. Accepted by the official record company Melody, given concert dates in large stadiums, and allowed to tour the whole of the Soviet Union, the comfortable world of the tusovka was changing forever.
The Lost Movies
Left: The Theme, by Leonid Bogdanov (1986) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
Right: Repentance, by Leonid Bogdanov (1986) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
Awakened by Mikhail Gorbachev’s call for more openness (glasnost), in the wake of Chernobyl, workers in the arts stormed the bastion of censorship in the spring of 1986, led by the cinema. In May the Cinema Workers Union elected filmmaker Elem Klimov its new first secretary. Klimov, director of Agony (1975), a controversial film about Rasputin), and the recently released COME AND SEE, replaced Central Committee member Kudzhanov, marking the first turnover in union leadership for twenty years, and a displacement in the relationship of art to state power. In January 1987 Fillip Ermash, the politically conservative chairman of Goskino, was replaced by Aleksandr Kudzhanov. Goskino was the state agency supervising the financing, production and censorship of all films, and help responsibility for script approval. Using this tremendous power, and working with the union, Goskino set about revamping Soviet cinema. Innovative script and production plans that had recently been subject to rejection were given rapid approval; and censorship was lightened or eliminated for issues ranging from the political to the sexual. Artists shared equal power with the bureaucrats, a shift signaled by the creation of a new Conflict Commission, charged with compiling a list of movies that had been shelved for banned in the difficult years between 1966 to 1980, the so-called Stagnation Period.Ermash as chairman had patronized films that appealed to mass taste, avoiding political controversy and the complexity of everyday life. What this meant was that the censor’s shelves held many films distinguished by taste, intelligence and integrity, including Kira Muratova’s 1971 THE LONG GOODBYE, Gleb Panfilov’s 1979 THEME. Three of the recovered films released in 1986 caused a particular surge of interest, and illustrated the taboos overturned. Two of the films, Aleksandr Askoldov’s Commissar (filmed 1967), and Aleksei German’s Trial on the Road (filmed 1971), looked at seminal moments in Soviet history with gritty realism and moral ambiguity. Commissar chronicles the story of a Red Army commissar during the Civil War. Pregnant from a now-dead fellow officer, and unable to continue the hard life of the campaign she is billeted with a Jewish family until the child is born. She finds the life of shtetl Jews as alien as they find her, finds common humanity with them only as the wife and mother of the family initiates her into the mysteries of motherhood. The film closes with her facing a choice: retreat with the Reds, abandoning the child she loves, or stay with the child and her adopted family, endangering herself. Illuminating a foundation event in Soviet with amorality of war and political struggle, and the ambivalence of personal allegiance, was suspect enough to warrant shelving the film for twenty years. Even more challenging to Soviet mores was German’s Trial on the Road, which raised similar questions about the Great Patriotic War (World War II), an event allowing for no ambiguities. Based on a story written by his father, German’s film tells of a captured German soldier who tries to prove he was originally a Russian captured and forced into serving the Nazis. After a sympathetic officer prevents his being shot on the spot, the protagonist proves himself a hero on the battlefield, despite the constant attempts of another officer to undermine him. Filmed in black and white, as was Commissar, the movie proved the stereotypes of classic Soviet war films untenable.In many ways, the stringent censorship forced on directors an indirect honesty that had positive aesthetic results. Long after the surge of publicity that greeted the release of their films, Askoldov and German satisfy demanding viewers. Askoldov never made another film; German has since proven himself one of the great directors of the last thirty years. The final film discussed here, Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance, took a very different strategy. Although it was the most celebrated on its release, Repentance suffered most in the years since. In allegorical terms, the film faces the legacy of Stalin through a small Georgian village, where the dictatorial mayor has just died. The aftermath is seen through the eyes of the mayor’s son, played by the same actor as the mayor. The deceased is eulogized at his funeral as a great man, and buried with due honor; but the next morning finds the body unearthed. Returned to its grave, the body reappears the next morning. The comic absurdity of the situation is compounded when the innocent corpse is arrested, released only when the real culprit, and middle-aged local woman, is arrested. Her trial allows her to indict the mayor and his underlings for destroying the life of her father and mother, and for his many other brutal repressions. Her accusations stand as well as an indictment of a whole period of Soviet history.
Left: Trial on the Road, by Irina Vol’nova (1986) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
Right: Commissar, by Igor Maistrovksii (1988) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
The release of lost films signaled the opening of a new era of artistic expression, and the shuttering of state censorship forever. Other artists responded; the Eight USSR Writers’ Union Congress that took place in October featured a similar attack on censorship. As a consequence, long suppressed works of literature were published, including Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Evgenii Zamiatin distopian novel WE, and Vasilii Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE.
Meltdown in Chernobyl
Left: Ukraine, photo by Igor Kostin (1989) / Russian Union of Art Photographers
Right: Quixote vs. Atomic Power, by G. Magomaev (1989) / From Soviet Humor: The Best of Krokodil
On April 26, 1986, a surge of power at the Chernobyl nuclear power station’s no. 4 reactor in northern Ukraine triggered a massive explosion that became the world’s worst nuclear accident. Radioactive dust spewed into the air and was carried by prevailing winds over nearby Belorussia. Even while the Kremlin maintained a cautious silence, refusing to release any information about the blast, monitoring devices in Sweden were picking up significant traces of radioactivity. In the meantime, wild rumors were circulating throughout the region of the blast producing panic. Authorities evacuated some forty thousand people from the town of Pripyat closest to the accident. Thirty-eight people were killed instantly as a result of the accident, and it has been claimed — though not confirmed — that as many as 100,000 subsequently died or suffered severe harms to their health from radiation. Among them were workers — many of them volunteers — who were rushed to the scene to shut down the reactor and build a concrete sarcophagus around it. By the time Gorbachev went on television almost three weeks later to report on the accident, his credibility had suffered a severe blow.
Chernobyl blast zone (1986) / Wikimedia Commons
One of the consequences of the accident was economic. The cost of the clean-up, including the provision of housing and other resources for evacuees, eventually ran into billions of rubles, burdening an already shaky economy. Another consequence was the Gorbachev administration’s reassessment of its information policy. The Chernobyl disaster marked a watershed in the government’s commitment to glasnost ‘, which until then had been little more than a slogan. Not only did the government welcome international assistance in treating victims of the accident, but the media was unleashed and began to engage in investigative reports about environmental degradation and accidents elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
Nuclear Plant in Armenia, by E.P. Kharberdian (1980) / Moscow: Soveitskii khudozhnik
Finally, and notwithstanding changes in official policy, the accident fueled resentment in both Ukraine and Belorussia against the central authorities. In Ukraine in particular, it added to an already acute sense of victimization derived from the famine of 1932-33 and brutal repression of Ukrainian nationalists after the Second World War.
Perestroika and Glasnost
Comrades! Perestroika needs your work! (1985) / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
“Perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness) were Mikhail Gorbachev’s watchwords for the renovation of the Soviet body politic and society that he pursued as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 until 1991. Neither term was new to Soviet rhetoric. Stalin occasionally had used them as had his successors. The word glasnost actually appeared in Article 9 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution although without any practical application. Both terms can be found in Gorbachev’s speeches and writings as early as the mid-1970s. But it was in a speech of December 1984, four months before his elevation to the general secretaryship, where Gorbachev first identified them — and a third term, “uskorenie” (acceleration) — as key themes. Uskorenie, with its unfortunate connotations of working faster, fell by the wayside, but perestroika and glasnost gained in importance and substance after 1986.
Password – Glasnost, by V. Tilman (1989) / From Soviet Humor: The Best of Krokodil
By 1987, Gorbachev was acknowledging that perestroika was a word with many meanings, but “the one which expresses its essence most accurately … is revolution,” since the “qualitatively new” and radical changes which the Soviet Union required constituted a “revolutionary task.” Substantively, it was to mean in the political sphere the introduction of genuinely contested elections for new political institutions (e.g., the Congress of People’s Deputies), enhancement of the governing role of the soviets, and other measures to promote democratization of the Communist Party and the entire political system. Economically, it referred to the legalization of cooperatives and other semi-private business ventures, the demonopolization and liberalization of price controls, and the election of enterprise managers by the labor collective.
Left: Glasnost!, by G.M. Komo’tsev (1988) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
Right: We Learn from Lenin (1985) / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Glasnost was what the British political scientist, Archie Brown, called “a facilitating concept” that enabled writers and journalists to push beyond limits that even Gorbachev and his most liberal-minded deputies, Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze, anticipated or approved. Rather than a gift from above, it came to mean in practice a right asserted from below, analogous to freedom of speech and publication. This radical expansion of meaning eventually proved disastrous to Gorbachev and his agenda for change. In promoting glasnost, Gorbachev assumed that it would enhance perestroika. But as the country became overwhelmed by the avalanche of reports about burgeoning criminality as well as revelations of state crimes of the past (“retrospective glasnost”), glasnost effectively undermined public confidence in the ability of the state to lead society to the promised land of prosperity or even arrest its descent into poverty and chaos.
Turbulent Youth
Youth in the Gun Sight of Psychological Warfare (1986) / Soviet Military Awards
In a society long subject to declining authority within families, where the pillars of authority were under question, and where expectations for success were declining rapidly, young people aroused great unease in their elders. The anxiety was not misplaced. Traditional Soviet policies toward youth were focused on the school and the Komsomol, which controlled most avenues of advancement and after-school recreation. Both of these institutions were becoming discredited, the Komsomol because of its subordination to the Communist Party, schools because they taught an outdated curriculum developed in the 1970s, and based on principles in disrepute. Befuddled authorities had no answers to the questions agitating young people, and in fact ignored issues such as sexuality and the legitimacy of authority. Young people responded in a variety of ways, ranging from apathy to rock music to ever more frequent incidents of civil disorder.
In 1986, the Latvian director Juris Podnieks chronicled a outburst of looting following a rock concert in film, Is it Easy to be Young? Rejecting the official explanation focused on bad apples and hooligans, Podnieks interviewed the young people and found a profound disenchantment with Soviet mores. Why should we follow the rules of a corrupt society, they asked; and for Latvian youth, whose elders would soon question the very foundations of the Soviet Union, doubts were compounded by a sense of alien rule. Soon even the order-conscious documentaries of the military were noting that Baltic youth saw no reason to serve in the military, the traditional introduction to Soviet society for youths of all the ethnic republics.
Russian youth seemed no less liable to question authority. Whether it was Aquarium, the first stars of the burgeoning Russian rock scene, or the fictional students of Dear Elena Sergeevna (1987), who hold their teacher hostage for the offense of low test grades, they all seemed to be asking the same question: What next? When even Surgut, a new city built for the Siberian oil fields in the 1970s, host to an anxious Komsomol conference in 1988, was subject to all the pathologies of Soviet society, what could young people expect for the future.
Warsaw Pact Dissolves
Soviet of Ministers Chairman Nikolai Bulganin signs the Warsaw Treaty (1955) / Wikimedia Commons
On February 25, 1991, the foreign and defense ministers of the countries of the Warsaw Treaty Organization met to close down the pact. If this momentous event passed with relatively little comment in the world, it was because events of the last year had made dissolution of the Warsaw Pact inevitable. Founded in May 1955, ostensibly in response to the inclusion of the Federal Republic of Germany in the NATO Alliance, the pact’s original signers had been USSR, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania (Albania withdrew in 1968). The forces of the Warsaw Pact would eventually combine tremendous offensive and defensive capabilities embodied most powerfully by massive tank and artillery formations. Positioned north to south along the border of the imaginary Iron Curtain, Warsaw Pact troops stared across at their NATO counterparts, concentrated along the ugly scar that divided Germany into East and West. Yet ironically, the only invasions ever launched by the Warsaw Pact were directed against its own members, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Atop the Berlin Wall (1989) / Wikimedia Commons
The Warsaw Pact crumbled for a number of reasons. Serving as a prop for the unpopular Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, and enjoying little to no popular support in those countries, the treaties became increasingly obsolete once non-Communists came to power. Although Soviet authorities showed some tenacity in insisting on maintaining the treaty, it was clear that the greatest hostilities animating the organization were internal. Certainly the countries of Eastern Europe feared attack from the Soviet Union above all. Eventually even the Soviet leadership abandon the pact, prompted by economic difficulties brought on by the inability of a tottering economy to carry the burden of excessive military expenditures. Furthermore, a new brand of strategic international thinking pioneered by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze came to the conclusion that Eastern Europe had become a liability. There was no longer any socialism to defend.
Leaders of the Warsaw Pact Member-States / Wikimedia Commons
For seventy years, the Soviet state had built a complex web of alliances and relationships that protected it from hostile neighbors and foreign powers. Shattered by the German invasion of 1941, the defense web was consolidated by the signing of the Warsaw Pact, giving the Soviet state thirty-five years of tense security. Weakened first by the Solidarity Movement and eventual free elections in Poland; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the deposition of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and of Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov; and the bloody fall of Nicolae Ceaucescu in Rumania; the web of international relations simply no longer existed. Ringed by so many Soviet republics demanding the right to secede and appearing increasingly hostile, Russia stood alone.
Baltic Independence
A Sajudis Rally in 1989 / Wikimedia Commons
The Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were the last to enter the Soviet Union as union republics and the first to leave. Out of the turmoil of war and revolution, they emerged as independent nation-states, formally recognized as such by the Soviet government in 1920. Twenty years later, they lost their independence when they were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. In the wake of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the three republics were placed under German rule, but the return of the Red Army in 1944 led to the re-imposition of Soviet power. Sovietization entailed the collectivization of agriculture, industrialization, and cultural and educational development within strictures laid down by Moscow. In Latvia and Estonia, it also meant the absorption of substantial numbers of ethnic Russians who comprised the majority of industrial workers. Yet, in other respects these most geographically and culturally western republics remained the least Soviet, and in 1991 their popularly elected governments declared independence from the USSR with overwhelming support.
Baltic Way in Estonia (1989) / Wikimedia Commons
Political independence, the dream of many in the Baltic region who long chafed under Soviet rule, was made possible thanks to Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. The issue that first galvanized popular protest was the environment, with major demonstrations against the expansion of polluting industries occurring in Riga in November 1986 and Tallinn in the spring of 1987. In the course of 1988, as glasnost took root, the monolithic unity of the Communist parties in all three republics crumbled and those in the reform wing gained key positions in the state and party leaderships. Also in 1988, reformist and populist forces, including Communists outside and within the republican establishments coalesced into so-called popular fronts: Sajudis in Lithuania, the Popular Front for the Support of Perestroika in Estonia, and the Latvian Popular Front. These organizations agitated for restoration of pre-Soviet national emblems, more republican control over economic affairs, the publication of the “secret protocols” of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, limitations on immigration from the other Soviet republics, and a vaguely defined political “autonomy.” The popular fronts proved extremely effective in heightening national sentiment by sponsoring mass song festivals and, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1989, a human chain linking hands across the three republics.
Left: The Baltic Way (1989) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Baltic Way Memorial Wall in Vilnius / Wikimedia Commons
Already by late 1988 in Estonia and mid-1989 in Lithuania and Latvia respective republican Supreme Soviets declared the “sovereignty” of their laws. In November 1989, they issued declarations condemning the “military occupation” of their countries and renouncing their incorporation into the USSR. The next, fateful step was taken by the newly elected parliament (Sejm) in Lithuania, which on March 11, 1990 declared the republic an independent state. The declaration provoked Moscow to impose economic sanctions and was suspended in June, but tensions remained high. Spurred on by their nationalist president, Vytautus Landsbergis, Lithuanians engaged in numerous acts of civil disobedience, and on January 11, 1991 Soviet MVD troops opened fire on a crowd in Vilnius, killing fourteen. Five days later, similar violence occurred in Riga, leaving five dead. The emergence of National Salvation Committees, consisting primarily of ethnic Russians and pro-Moscow Communists, signaled a last-ditch attempt to reverse the tide of independence. But beleaguered by economic and political breakdown throughout the USSR, Gorbachev had neither the will nor the means to prevent the Baltic republics from breaking away. In the aftermath of the failed coup of August 1991, the Estonian and Latvian parliaments joined Lithuania in declaring their country independent.
Eltsin and Russian Sovereignty
Boris Nikolaevich Elsin (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
Bound together by the collapse of political order, and seemingly by fate, Boris Eltsin and the sovereign Russian state rose and fell during the final twenty months of Soviet power. Eltsin was party boss of Sverdlovsk when Gorbachev plucked him from provincial obscurity to join his team of reformers. His popularity soon forged ahead of his patron’s, and Eltsin was eventually stripped of his post as Moscow party chief in 1987. Two years away from Gorbachev’s floundering rule brought Eltsin credibility. When the Congress of People’s Deputies was elected by popular vote in 1989, he won a seat, quickly emerging as leader of the reform factions. When elections were held in March 1990 for the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, he won a seat there too. By May, members of the Supreme Soviet had elected him President of the Russian Republic, a newly-created post; a year later his status was confirmed by popular vote.
The Ball’s in Your Court, Mr. President, by A.A. Rezaev (1993) / Wikimedia Commons
The private, often personal struggle between Russian President Eltsin and Soviet President Gorbachev reflected the shift of political power from central Soviet institutions to organs of the Russian Republic. Political posts in the RSFSR had, in Soviet times, been relatively unimportant; in fact, Russia had been the only republic without its own Communist Party. By force of will, Eltsin gave tremendous power to the Russian presidency. One of the first acts of the Russian Supreme Soviet under Eltsin was to dismantle state censorship; although Soviet censorship was still legal, it could no longer take place on Russian soil. The confluence of the Twenty-Eighth Congress of the CPSU, and sessions of the Congress of Peoples Deputies of the RSFSR and the RSFSR Supreme Soviet in Moscow in early June afforded opportunity for dramatic decisions. Most significant was the decision by Eltsin to resign from the Party, calling it a party of “power thirsty bureaucrats.” He was followed by Gavril Popov (Mayor of Moscow), Anatolii Sobchak (Mayor of Leningrad) and other members of the Democratic Platform. With the resignation of Aleksandr Iakovlev from the Politbiuro, the Communist Party ceased to be an institution capable of pursuing a reform program. Initiative shifted to the Russian legislature, and on June 12 the Congress of People’s Deputies of the RSFSR issued a Declaration of State Sovereignty of Russia, declaring that its authority took precedence over Soviet rule within the boundaries of the Russian Federation. As a result, Russia found itself under a dual power system eerily similar to 1917. In Moscow, there was Gorbachev as the head of the Soviet Union and Eltsin as the head of Russia. The act was a de facto declaration of independence from the Soviet Union, now celebrated on June 12 as Russian Independence Day. The bold move was followed in subsequent months by similar declarations from other republics, including Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine.
Left: Home of the Russian Parliament (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Eltsin in Tatarstan (1990) / Yeltsin’s Presidential Archive
Possessing tremendous powers of political improvisation, and backed by an indisputable popular mandate that Gorbachev would never be able to claim, Eltsin was at the peak of his game in June 1990. The Soviet leadership was continually flummoxed by his unpredictable decisions, and over the next eighteen months he would succeed in breaking up the union. Improvisational master that he was, Eltsin was less the master of long-term planning, and seemed unaware of potential consequences of his actions, several of which he would later rue. Close observers in late 1990 would have noted that declarations of sovereignty came not only from Soviet republics, which were in theory federal subjects possessing the right to secede; they also came from “republics” and regions within the RSFSR, including Tatarstan and Chechnya (November 27, 1990). Using the legislative techniques pioneered by Eltsin, these territorial entities would begin the campaign for independence that would lead to bloody civil war during the post-Soviet Eltsin presidency.
500 Days
Stanislav Shatalin / Wikimedia Commons
The crisis of the Soviet planned economy was beyond dispute by 1991. Centralized planning no longer functioned, leading the economy into permanent stagnation. Gorbachev had half-heartedly pursued reforms from 1985-89, but bureaucratic resistance, crumbling infrastructure, and Soviet popular psychology condemned reform to failure. Gorbachev’s own penchant for contradictions did not help. Attempts at decentralization ran afoul of his own desire for control; bureaucratic interference and confiscatory taxes undermined his gestures towards the market economy. The budget deficits caused by reforms, and hesitation to withdraw subsidies that had made life tolerable under the Soviet economy, undermined and eventually discredited the ruble. Thus, having dismantled the cornerstones of central planning, Gorbachev aborted the birth of a market. Much commerce inside the Soviet economy devolved into barter system between individual enterprises, cities and regions. A modern economy cannot run on such a basis, and citizens soon found such items as tea, soap and meat rationed. Long lines formed for bread and cigarettes, which most Russians considered essentials.
The visible collapse of the economy inspired a timid party leadership to recruit a team of sophisticated economists familiar with western market practices. Led by Stanislav Shatalin, over the summer of 1990 the team developed a plan of radical conversion that acquired the name of “500 Days,” for the period in which the measures were to be introduced. Cornerstones of the plan, which solicited the support of the western bankers whose loans were needed to keep the economy solvent, included price liberalization accompanied by severe wage restraints; drastic cuts in subsidies to industry and agriculture; privatization of state-owned assets, including farm land; overhaul of the tax and banking systems; and liberalization of foreign trade, implying a convertible ruble. The enthusiasm of western economists was matched by the anxiety of Soviet leaders and citizens, which eventually led Gorbachev to reject the plan for a more timid version designed by Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov. Fearing social unrest in the wake of withdrawn subsidies, and refusing to consider the privatization of land, Gorbachev was perhaps most alarmed by the political and economic autonomy given the fifteen Soviet republics. The decentralization sketched in the plan would have rendered the Soviet Union a commonwealth, making Russian President Boris Eltsin the leader of the country, and Soviet leader Gorbachev something along the lines of a foreign minister coordinating the policies of the constituent republics.
Radical though he seemed, events of the next two years rendered Shatalin a rather conservative economist. Though advocating modern tools such as the computer, Shatalin was deeply indebted to such Soviet reform economists as Leonid Abalkin; and he held as his ultimate goal, as did Gorbachev, the revitalization of the Soviet entity. The shadow of the 500 Days was clearly visible in the December 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, which represented the most radical, but perhaps most inevitable outcome of the plan.
Shevarnadze Resigns
As the fourth session of the Congress of People’s Deputies convened on December 17, 1990, the ruin of the reform program seemed imminent. Vacillating reformer Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to have thrown his hand in with the forces of reaction. Although conservative forces at the congress were thin and divided, delegates led by Colonel Viktor Alksnis, a black-leather jacket supporter of state order whose Latvian surname belied his Russian nationalism, made aggressive demands for a military coup to restore order in the Soviet state. The immediate cause of crisis was the looming collapse of the Union. The Baltic republics had declared themselves independent in the spring, and were working towards making that a legal reality. Armenia declared independence in August. On November 14 the Georgian parliament elected its first non-communist president in seventy years, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who immediately promised full independence and began the process of desovietization – restoring the old Georgian national flag, and removing words like soviet, communist, revolutionary from the constitution. Most ironic, and most threatening, was the election of Boris Eltsin to the Russian presidency in May, when he had declared the Russian Federal Republic a sovereign state. By September, the Russian parliament was drafting a new constitution based on western models, and including Russian independence and the rejection of socialism. Gorbachev’s response to the crisis in November was to demand and receive from the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union sweeping powers to rule by decree for eighteen months. He dismissed the objections of liberal deputies that the law was unconstitutional as “legal nitpicking.”
Alksnis and his comrades seemed ascendant. Delegates from the Baltic states, Moldova and Georgia were boycotting the Congress as a sign of independence, and the radical deputies of the Inter-Regional Group had been demoralized by Gorbachev’s turn to the right. Proponents of traditional order, most prominently the Soiuz (Union) faction, were able to grant Gorbachev’s emergency powers for revamping the state power structure and deal with food shortages with a mere two hours debate. A Council of the Federation was established with up to fifty-two members, including all Presidents of the fifteen republics and Gorbachev. The Presidential Council, which Gorbachev himself had created to help institute his reforms, was replaced by a Security Council with charge over defense and civil order, to be appointed by Gorbachev. With his new powers, Gorbachev was able to threaten break-away regions and republics with a state of emergency, singling out the Baltic region, Moldova, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia. His ultimate intention was to force approval of the new Union Treaty.
This was the background of a stunning speech given on December 21 by Eduard Shevardnadze, Foreign Minister and Gorbachev’s long time right hand man, in which he resigned without warning. He castigated reformers for having dispersed in frustration, leaving the initiative to conservatives. He warned of imminent dictatorship of a sort nobody could foresee, and of the ‘boys with colonels’ shoulder stripes” who thirsted to reimpose order at the point of a bayonet. Panic and dismay were unforgivable at such an important moment. The consequences of his speech were immediate and profound, although not long lasting. Gorbachev, who took his resignation as a political and personal blow, gave up on the possibility of working with reformers. Within a month internal riot police were attacking strategic points in the Baltic states, and paramilitary force became the instrument of choice for preserving the union.
Miners’ Strike of 1991
Donetsk Metallurgical Factory (DMZ), photo by Lewis Siegelbaum (1991) / Creative Commons
The second and last all-Union strike of coal miners was declared in early March 1991 and suspended two months later. Not only in duration but in many other respects it differed from the strike of July 1989. Thanks to prodigious organizational activity in the interim, a multitude of institutions — city and regional strike/workers’ committees, the Independent Union of Miners (NPG), the Union of Kuzbass Workers, the Confederation of Labor — were involved in generating and pursuing demands. During the first strike, the miners had rejected assistance from outside; now their leaders worked closely, if surreptitiously, with the so-called “democrats” ranged around Gorbachev’s rival, Boris Eltsin, and solicited and received funds from other independent trade unions, political movements, and the general public. Whereas in 1989 the miners were wary of provoking repression, in 1991 they boldly called for Gorbachev’s resignation, the dismantling of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, and the transfer of mines and their assets to respective republican governments. But also in contrast to 1989, participation by individual mines was spotty, and there were few mass meetings of miners on public squares.
A meeting of the Kuibyshev Mine’s strike committee, photo by Lewis Siegelbaum (1991) / Creative Commons
The strike, precipitated by inflation that had all but wiped out previous wage increases, was both a reflection of and a further impetus to the decline of the Soviet “center.” Gorbachev’s announcement in early April of a doubling of miners’ wages (albeit in stages and with certain provisos concerning productivity) and other concessions was dismissed by strike leaders as inadequate and, in view of their political demands, irrelevant. Only after they had concluded agreements with the republican governments did they terminate the strike.
In retrospect, the strike of 1991 proved to be the high-water mark of working-class militancy and political effectiveness. In Russia, the leaders of the NPG and regional councils of workers’ committees threw their weight behind Boris Eltsin in the presidential election of June 1991 and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in his clashes with the Russian Supreme Soviet, but had little to show for their support. In Ukraine, miners voted overwhelmingly for independence in the referendum of December 1, 1991 but soon discovered that, as one activist put it, “The Center has just moved from Moscow to Kiev.” Despite repeated strikes, sit-ins, and other forms of protest, the miners’ movement in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine failed to arrest the decline of their industry, the living standards of miners, and itself.
March Referendum
The Idols Fall (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
“Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?” This was the question put to voters in the Soviet Union on March 17, 1991. By this time, voters in the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania overwhelmingly had declared themselves in favor of independence from the Soviet Union and their respective parliaments had issued decrees to that effect. Many other republics, including the Russian Federation, had declared in 1990 the supremacy of their laws over those of the All-Union government, creating what came to be referred to as the “war of laws.” The March referendum thus represented a calculated risk on the part of Gorbachev that a majority of Soviet citizens would support a reconstituted union of republics based on democratic freedoms.
Over 80 percent of the Soviet adult population (148.5 million people) took part in the referendum, and of them 76.4 percent voted “yes.” Six republics — Armenia, Georgia, Moldavia, and the Baltic republics — did not participate. In Russia, the question of whether the president of the republic should be elected by popular vote was also included on the ballot (and approved by 70 percent of voters). Several other republics also added questions. Even so, in all nine republics the question of retaining the Union was approved by at least 70 percent of voters. The greatest support came from rural areas and the republics of Central Asia, the least from the largest cities — Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.
Gorbachev therefore received a strong mandate to proceed with a new Union treaty. On April 23, he met at Novo-Ogarevo with the nine leaders of the republics that had participated in the referendum to discuss the revision of an earlier draft. These discussions resulted in a new draft issued in June. But at the same time, the Union continued to disintegrate. In early April, Georgia declared independence thus joining the three secessionist Baltic republics. In May, the Russian government established a foreign ministry and an internal security organization, and the Russian parliament granted Eltsin emergency powers. Eltsin’s election as President of the RSFSR in June was widely interpreted as giving him greater legitimacy than Gorbachev who had been elevated to the presidency of the USSR not by popular vote but by the Congress of People’s Deputies. Whether the new Union treaty scheduled to come into effect on August 20 would have rescued at least a rump Soviet Union from extinction — which seemed to be what the majority of voters in the March referendum wanted — is unlikely. In any event, the attempted coup prevented the signing of the treaty and with it, any chance of the Soviet Union’s survival.
Nine Plus One Agreement
Ukrainian Independence Day (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
As in the revolutionary year of 1917, so in 1991 April was a month of political crisis. The declaration by the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian parliaments of independence in March was the culmination of three years of nationalist agitation and represented a major threat to the Soviet Union’s territorial integrity. It would not be the last. To be sure, in the March 17 referendum on “the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of sovereign republics,” an overwhelming majority of voters declared their approval, but six republics (the three Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldavia) did not participate, and in April Georgia followed the Baltic republics’ example by declaring itself independent. Also in April, the Warsaw Pact which had bound eastern Europe militarily to the Soviet Union for thirty-five years was formally liquidated, the coal miners’ strike entered its second month, and workers in other industries organized shorter-lived strikes against price increases that had been mandated on April 2 by Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov.
Down with Gorbachev (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
Gorbachev conceivably could have decided to meet these challenges with force as had been the case earlier in the year in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, and in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in April 1989. Instead, he abandoned his “turn to the right” — that is, his reliance on the conservative forces in his leadership team — in favor of reviving the process of developing a new Union treaty which already had gone through two drafts. Returning from a state visit to Japan, on April 23 he convened a meeting of as many of the political heads of the union republics as were prepared to attend. The leaders of the six republics that had boycotted the March referendum declined the offer, leaving nine republic leaders (including Boris Eltsin representing the Russian Federation) plus Gorbachev. They agreed to work out a new draft to reconfigure the relationship between the Union and its constituent republics. This and subsequent gatherings over the next two months have been referred to as the “Novo-Ogarevo process” after the village not far from Moscow where the leaders met.
We’re for Eltsin (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
The treaty that eventually was published on August 14 and was to be signed on August 20 ceded to the republics ownership of virtually all natural resources including mineral deposits on their territories. It also stipulated that supremacy of republic laws over Union legislation, as symbolized in the replacement of Socialist by Sovereign in the official title of the USSR. Finally, it called for the popular election of the President of the Union, something that Gorbachev had resisted as recently as March 1990. The new Union Treaty never came into effect because on August 18, 1991 die-hard proponents of restoring the old order launched their abortive putsch. The failure of the putschists swung the political initiative towards Eltsin, who reverted to non-cooperation with Gorbachev. Less than four months later, with his Belorussian and Ukrainian counterparts, he moved to replace the Union with a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
The August Coup
Left: GKCHP Members Announce the State of Emergency (August 18, 1991) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Gorbachev returns to Moscow (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
As in 1917 when General Lavr Kornilov attempted to roll back the tide of revolution by launching what proved to be an abortive coup, so in 1991 August was the month when a group of eight highly-placed Soviet officials declared themselves a State Committee for the State of Emergency and attempted to seize the reins of political power. In both instances, failure to unseat the existing government redounded not to its benefit, but to forces that were more persuasive in claiming responsibility for putting down the coup. In 1917 these were the Red Guards mobilized by the Bolsheviks; in 1991, it was Boris Eltsin, President of the Russian Federation, whose demonstrative resistance to the coup enhanced his popular support.
Left: August 18, 1991, by Igor Maistrovskii (1991) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
Right: Barricades on the streets of Moscow (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
The coup of August 1991 was timed to prevent the signing of the new Union Treaty which would have fundamentally recast the relationship between the center and the republics in favor of the latter, and was scheduled for August 20. On August 18, a group of five military and state officials arrived at Gorbachev’s presidential holiday home at Foros on the Crimean coast to attempt to persuade him to endorse a declaration of a state of emergency. Gorbachev’s angry refusal to do so was the first indication that the coup plotters had miscalculated. The leaders of the coup, the eight members of the State Committee that issued the declaration were Oleg Baklanov, Gorbachev’s deputy head of the Security Council and the most important representative of the military-industrial complex in the leadership, Vladimir Kriuchkov (head of the KGB), Dmitrii Iazov (Minister of Defense), Valentin Pavlov (Prime Minister), Boris Pugo (Minister of Interior), Gennadii Ianaev (Vice President), Vasilii Starodubtsev (head of the Peasants’ Union, a political pressure group opposed to the dismantling of collective farms), and Aleksandr Tiziakov, a leading representative of state industry. They thus included several people whom Gorbachev had appointed and on whom he had relied for advice and counsel especially during his “turn to the right” in the winter of 1990-91.
Left: Eltsin addresses the people from a tank (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Eltsin confronts Gorbachev in the Duma (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
While Gorbachev was held virtual prisoner, the State Committee ordered tanks and other military vehicles into the streets of the capital and announced on television that they had to take action because Gorbachev was ill and incapacitated. Some of the republics’ leaders went along with the coup; others adopted a wait-and-see approach. A few declared the coup unconstitutional. Among them was Eltsin who made his way to the White House, the Russian parliament building, and, with CNN’s cameras rolling, mounted a disabled tank to rally supporters of democracy. The soldiers and elite KGB units ordered into the streets by the State Committee refused to fire on or disperse the demonstrators. By August 21 the leaders of the coup had given up. An exhausted Gorbachev returned to Moscow to find it totally transformed. When he visited the Russian parliament, Eltsin’s stronghold, he was humiliated by Eltsin and taunted by the deputies. Reluctantly, he agreed to Eltsin’s dissolution of the Communist Party which was held responsible for the coup and resigned as the party’s General Secretary. Eltsin thereupon proceeded to abolish or take over the institutions of the now moribund Soviet Union.
The End of the Soviet Union
Belovezhsakaia puschcha (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
The August 1991 coup, designed to halt the weakening of the centralized USSR, ironically hastened the Union’s dissolution. Declarations of independence by the constituent republics, the abolition of all-Union institutions and the transfer of their assets to the republics, and increasing international acceptance of these developments sapped what little strength there had been in the Union. While Gorbachev tried desperately to find a formula to halt the centrifugal process, his former political allies, reading the signs, abandoned him one after the other. And yet, there was no inevitability about the decision to replace the Soviet Union with a Commonwealth of Independent States. That decision, adopted by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia, seems to have been made hastily if not whimsically.
No to Ukrainian Independence, by the Donbass Movement (1991) / Wikimedia Commons
On August 23, 1991 Boris Eltsin, as President of the RSFSR, decreed the suspension of the Russian Communist Party on the grounds that it had lent its support to the coup attempt and had otherwise violated Soviet and Russian laws. Gorbachev, who upon returning to Moscow after the coup had tried to absolve the party of any blame and announced his intention of continuing his efforts to reform the party, was left with little choice but to resign as General Secretary of the entire (All-Union) party, which he did two days later. Seeking to counter the further erosion of central authority, Gorbachev persuaded a majority in the Congress of People’s Deputies in early September to dissolve that body in favor of a State Council which would consist of republic leaders and Gorbachev and act in a temporary capacity until a new bicameral legislature could be elected. Aside from approving independence for the three Baltic republics, the State Council accomplished nothing and was largely ignored by republic governments. Eltsin, swelled with new powers granted by the Russian parliament, meanwhile accelerated the transfer of central institutions to Russian authority.
December turned out to be the month in which the fatal blows to the Soviet Union were delivered. On December 1, voters in Ukraine overwhelmingly approved a referendum on independence and by a smaller margin elected Leonid Kravchuk, a former Communist Party boss turned nationalist, as their first president. A week later, at a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaia Pushcha, not far from the Belorussian capital of Minsk, Eltsin, Kravchuk and the Belorussian leader, Stanislav Shushkevich, signed a declaration terminating the Soviet Union and replacing it with the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev, who had not been consulted or informed beforehand, publicly responded by declaring his “amazement” and urging republic parliaments to discuss the draft Treaty on the Union of Sovereign States on which he had worked tirelessly over the previous months. On December 21, the presidents of all the other republics with the exception of Georgia (already embroiled in civil war) and the three Baltic states, declared their willingness to enter the Commonwealth. Finally, on December 25, Gorbachev announced his acceptance of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and his resignation as its president.