The Role of Nationalism in the Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The fall of the Soviet Union is one of the watershed moments in the history of the Twentieth Century. It is an event of the same magnitude as 1917, with many interesting parallels. The slogan of “All Power to the Soviets” was revived by supporters of Mikhail Gorbachev upon him becoming the General Secretary of the Politburo in March 1985. Yet, the dissolution of the Soviet Union from the outset was not a “Revolution from Below”, but a “Revolution from Above” largely peacefully emplaced upon the Soviet populace.
There were four main processes which took place during the fall of the Soviet Union; the ideological rejection of Communism, economic collapse which followed until 1998, the geopolitical disintegration of the Soviet Union in the foreign policy sphere and finally, rising nationalism from the other fourteen Soviet Socialist Republics through the success of the policy of korenizatsia (indigenisation, from the term korennoi narod meaning indigenous people). These four processes were taking place due to Gorbachev’s three main policies of glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring) and uskorenie (acceleration).
The fall of the USSR was not just a sudden collapse or a shift of political systems like 1917, but a longer-term process of failure and disintegration. Once the disparate non-Russian nationalities — 50% of the population — decided against the continuing of the Union, the end of the Soviet system as a whole was inevitable.
Before analysing the four processes causing the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s personality and his policy points must first be examined. Gorbachev was only 54 as he ascended to become General Secretary, a young man in Soviet terms (his two successors, Konstantin Chernenko and Yuri Andropov were 72 and 68 respectively when they became General Secretary). The old guard of the Politburo under Andropov were weary of his radical nature, and two cadres even older than Andropov himself, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nikolai Tikhonov and Defence Minister Dmitrii Ustinov, removed six paragraphs from an addendum sent by Andropov to a plenary session of the Central Committee which had named Gorbachev as his successor as early as December 1983. This radicalism the old guard feared was shown true through perestroika and glasnost. Although the traditional translation for glasnost is often “openness”, Gorbachev preferred ‘transparency’. He aimed for the need for ‘self-government and a democratisation of society’. In effect, this would allow a new revival of freedoms; of religion, speech and press.
On the other hand, perestroika is a larger, more cultural process. The aim would be to reconstruct Soviet society along new lines but did not take place until well into 1987 with economic reform and the anti-alcoholism push. Gorbachev announced these policy points during the 27th Party Congress in February-March 1986 and claimed they were met with accord as delegated ‘stood up and applauded’ at the end of his speech.
The first process triggering the dissolution of the Soviet Union is the fundamental rejection of Communism and ideology and collapse of the party itself. This does not necessarily constitute the overthrow of the rule of the Communist party, but long-term stagnation during Brezhnev era caused an intransigence to politics and ideology by the Soviet populace and the short-term restructuring of the internal political system which allowed a new wave of free thinking and Gorbachev’s own position to become compromised. First, the long-term stagnation of the Brezhnev era caused many frustrations over Soviet restrictions to come to the fore, despite the obvious technical innovation taking place. In 1978, M.L. Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya, two musicians living in the west, were removed of their citizenship as they;
‘…engaged in unpatriotic activities and have besmirched the Soviet social system…and besmirched the title ‘Citizen of the USSR’. They have systematically rendered material assistance to subversive anti-Soviet centres…to benefit White émigré organisations…and become ideological degenerates’.
The key part of this official memorandum is the phrase ‘ideological degenerates’. The pillar of the Brezhnev era was chronic paranoia, as the Cold War, the death of Stalin and ‘loosening-up’ by Khrushchev caused many in the party to feel what they fought for in the ‘Great and Patriotic War’ was being lost. In truth, the couple were ideological degenerates. Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya were made into ideological degenerates by the paranoid state which had stagnated since the loss of the Space Race, and when they wrote to Brezhnev directly for the fourth time, they asked that ‘we be trialled anywhere in the Soviet Union — as long as the trial is open’. Their plea typifies the paranoia of the party under Brezhnev and underlines why so much of the ‘last Soviet generation’ lost their ideological motivation to support the Soviet state.
Yet, any rebel movement was crushed by Brezhnev due to these over-paranoid measures, and all outright internal dissidence had generally shifted into popular cynicism — still, even by 1985, there was very little pressure from below for any form of change. Archie Brown eloquently conveys the notion that ‘it was not so much a case of a crisis forcing radical reform, as of radical reform generating crisis’. Much of this stagnated, decaying generation did not fully realise their want for change until well after the ascension of Gorbachev.
The idea of freedom was introduced into Soviet politics for the first time, genuine freedom of thought, not the freedom of Marxist-Leninist thought. Newspapers were transformed, with weeklies such as Ogonek (Little Light) and Moskovskie novosti (Moscow News) given true editorial powers, and a whole new journal Argumenty i fakty (Arguments and Facts) reached a Europe-high circulation of 33 million copies per week. The first ever truly independent Russian newspaper was created, entitled Nezavisimaya gazeta (Independent Newspaper) in 1990, and is still in circulation (in a somewhat less independent state). More than just the press was transformed under glasnost, as both film and literature were transformed with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s works The Gulag Archipelago and Nivyi mir (New World) were both published in Soviet publications for the first time. These freedoms were commended, especially by foreign emigres who lauded the new found human rights. Writer, actor and journalist Peter Ustinov, in an interview with Vladimir Kuznetsov, claimed;
‘I wish them a happy smile [the Soviet people] and we can all extend a hand to each other and live as good neighbours, the keyhole will serve only the key and no longer be used as a peephole, for division, suspicion and hostility’.
Ustinov’s comments are somewhat optimistic and were broadcast on state-owned television, but they match the mood of much of the ‘middle-class’ in Soviet society. His thoughts were echoed by writer Yevgeni Yevtushenko, who explicitly praised Gorbachev’s policies;
‘The key word of our day — perestroika — is powerful, revolutionary and complex…why fear perestroika and glasnost? Because both imply open competition because both promote freedom’.
Yevtushenko applies the same optimism to the policies as Gorbachev promoted them with, in an almost utopian-like commentary of the new-created freedoms. Although on the surface these freedoms were widely accepted, such freedom of speech can only be a double-edged sword. On the other hand, some party members resented change outright and were abhorred by the breakneck speed of Gorbachev’s reforms. Party member Nina Andreeva famously spoke out against him, in a neo-Stalinist rant she accuses Gorbachev of ‘breaking principles [Marxism-Leninism] not given to us, but that was hard fought at great turning-points of our Fatherland’s history’.
Gorbachev, in the process of providing the wider Soviet society with new freedoms unknowingly destroyed his own power base. He was not ‘elected’ by the people, but the party. Partly democratic elections were provided as part of the restructuring, with Boris Yeltsin elected to a Moscow constituency in the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies in March 1989, then elected as leader of the Supreme Soviet a year later. Meanwhile, Gorbachev more or less decapitated his own party by converting the Politburo into an elected body, a Council of Union Republic Chiefs. In response, Yeltsin was voted as the President of the Russian Federation in June 1991. This election jostling between the two created a “dual power” dichotomy similar to 1917, and the pair on a direct collision course.
Yeltsin banned the Communist party from any activity within the RSFSR, and Gorbachev’s conservative ministers placed him under house arrest on 19 August and transferred all emergency power to the hands of an eight-man committee led by Gennady Yanaev. Yeltsin, the elected politician, crippled any support for the committee through an address as the official President of the RSFSR. Gorbachev resigned in December after Yeltsin was allowed to announce the dissolution of the Union. He destroyed his own power base, before allowing Yeltsin and his supporters to not just remove Soviet power, but the whole system too. The rejection and removal of ideology and the party were vital in the dissolution of the Union, both in the long-term and short.
The economy of the Soviet Union collapsed — none of the other process buckled but was more a gradual break. Even though the process was the longest and lasted all the way up until 1998 and beyond, it is by far the most simple yet atemporal. Gorbachev rejected the ‘command economy’, in favour of a more decentralised, free-market socialism. Gorbachev aimed to ‘accelerate socio-economic development and improve all aspects of life’, he relaxed prices and wage controls, legalised small enterprise, allowed state enterprises to finance themselves and introduced trade similar to the NEP era.
This is the basic facet of his uskorenie policy, an acceleration of the economy to stop the stagnation and restore parity to the west. However, the system could not keep up with supply as shortages mounted, supply was outpaced by demand, the budget fell sharply into decline and inflation rose. From 1971–75, National income growth rates were at 5.7%, yet these dropped from 2.5% in 1989 to -4.0% by the end of 1990 (according to the State Statistical Committee figures — economist G.I. Khanin projected this as low as -9.0%) and labour productivity growth rates fell from 4.6% to 2.2% and -3.0% in the same years. The state of the economy was fatal to Gorbachev’s popularity — many Russian’s questioned their new freedoms and their use under such dire economic circumstance. The collapse of the economy thwarted many of Gorbachev’s free-thinking reforms, many ordinary citizens could not trust him in charge of the economy. Although swift and relatively straightforward, the collapse lasted until 1998 and even crippled Yeltsin’s leadership after the dissolution of the Union.
The third main process which caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the destruction of the Soviet Union’s reputation on the international scale. The country suffered a geopolitical breakdown similar to that of the Russian Empire in 1917. The Marxist-Leninist class struggle called for Communism to spread across the world, yet Gorbachev rejected this, preferring to reduce the international tensions instead of either retreating and focusing domestically or expansionism, as many western diplomats feared. Gorbachev focused on removing these international problems by immediately withdrawing from Afghanistan. At the 27th Party Congress, Gorbachev referred to the war as a ‘bleeding wound’ and pulled out 8,000 troops in July 1986, and the last troops departed in February 1989. Over 600,000 troops served in Afghanistan, with 15,000 killed, 35,000 wounded and over one millions Afghan civilians killed. The military establishment was crippled financially and embarrassed on the international stage, the USSR had over 3,500 tanks, 4,450 ATC’s and 2,250 field artillery in Afghanistan in 1987 and lost over half of this. General Varenikov, Commander-in-Chief of Soviet ground forces and Deputy Minister of Defence claimed the army opposed any intervention in the country in the first place and were therefore happy to oblige withdrawal.
Furthermore, the Soviet Union lost their hold on Eastern Europe as Gorbachev made the decision to allow any satellite to move away from Soviet dependence. He explicitly stated these aims to the United Nations in 1988, on the world stage. The overthrow of Soviet-friendly regimes in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania took place in 1989 and by 1991 the Warsaw Treaty Organisation had disbanded. This was seen in the Soviet Union as a disaster, and popular protests against Gorbachev surged. Yet he established a strong rapport with western leaders, and was on his way to developing the Soviet Union, if not for the aforementioned economic problems and lack of ideological power base to support himself from the popular protests. The Russian Premier was announced as Time magazine man of the year in 1987 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, but he was domestically vilified. Gorbachev removed his ‘Socialist Commonwealth’ in favour of a balanced foreign economy, yet with the incoming dual power dichotomy, the geopolitical disintegration of the Soviet Union caused the downfall of Gorbachev himself.
The final and most important process in the dissolution of the Soviet Union is the fervent nationalism drives across the other fourteen Soviet republics. From the early 1930s, the Kremlin pursued the policy of korenizatsia, which focused on the promotion of each nation’s leadership cadre and developed each national language and culture of the individual Republics. The USSR cannot be a Union of one republic, and would inevitably fall once the minor nationalities on the fringes of the empire took advantage of the dire socio-economic situation of the nation.
Ethnic Russians consisted of only 50% of the nation, with over one hundred distinct national ethnicities, over two hundred different languages and dialects — even Russian wasn’t the official language until 1990. Ninety of these ethnicities are indigenous to the territory of the Soviet Union and is in effect a reincarnation of the Russian Empire. However, all Empires are diverse. Intense disaffection and nationalism grew out of the paradoxical Soviet state; one on hand national aspirations were brutally crushed, yet national politics were encouraged by the state, with each republic granted their own Communist party, their own Council of Ministers, and their own politicians staffed these institutions. Due to this, the Soviet regime was often characterised by the struggle between the Russian centre and the nationalities on the periphery, and these nationalities took advantage of the problems caused by the aforementioned three processes to finally announce long-term autonomy.
Before this point, Gorbachev all but decided international relations, but with the geopolitical collapse of the nation, international developments from now would decide the future of the Union. In these Baltic States, nationalism manifested itself as disaffection at Soviet rule and was intensified after the loss of the Eastern European satellites. The most pressure for sovereignty festered here, with almost universal literacy levels radicalising many amidst the openness glasnost provided and perestroika allowed. In the Baltic States, a watershed moment was the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of the Baltics and ratification of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which the three capitals (Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn) were linked by a human chain symbolically facing west.
After the Baltics, nationalist sentiment festered strongest in Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine (although the latter’s was a minority in size due to the size of the Russian ethnic populace, it was very visible). Focussing on the Baltic States, popular movements gained majorities in elections promoted by Gorbachev in March 1990. The Politburo desperately used economic and legal force to blackmail them into dissuading; in a note on ‘Urgent Measures to prevent Lithuania Leaving the USSR’, members of the Central Committee prepared to ‘consider measures to defend USSR property located within the authority of the Lithuanian SSR’. As a result of the failure to deter Lithuania, Gorbachev repealed Article 6 of the 1977 Constitution; the banning of opposition parties in February 1990. In response, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia all effectively declared themselves independence from February-October as the Communist Party lost out to national parties in all six republics.
As such, Gorbachev crumbled away both a pillar of the Communist Party and the last bastion protecting his position. Before the August Coup, only Lithuania was officially independent, with Estonia and Latvia declaring during. After the coup, the remaining twelve republics declared independence, including the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR pulling out its deputies from the Union, and Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk announcing officially the end of the Union on 8 December 1991. The Soviet Union’s national minorities took advantage of the political disaster opened by Gorbachev, to turn a failing state into a dissolved, decolonised empire.
Historiographically, debates are split generally not just over the east-west axis, but also over the differing arguments as to how breakdown ensued. Antony Kalashnikov has claimed the latter as the ‘different factors for collapse’. Kalashnikov interestingly denotes the four factors as; economic, political, nationalities and systemic. However, he largely ignored the nationalist role played in the historiography itself, suggesting that differing historians and politicians come to their conclusions as to how the Soviet Union fell due to their academic backgrounds and subject-specific research methods. Two historiographical trends formed immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union; the Soviet and American view.
The former, dominated by Marxists immediately claimed the end of the USSR was an American plot, engineered by Ronald Reagan and the CIA. Stephen Cohen was the main proponent of this view, even claiming that the economic collapse was driven by America, giving Gorbachev ‘misplaced advice…of a free-market ideal’. This view has somewhat levelled out over time, but still strongly defends that the Soviet Union’s reasons for collapse were not “systemic” as many in the American school have claimed. Edward Walker claimed the Soviet republics were de facto trapped in a state centralised around one city in Russia and ‘wanted out from the beginning’.
Other sections of this American school have coined the “triumphalist” theory, that America won the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union were caused by American military might and Soviet weaknesses, as highlighted by the events in Afghanistan. Historiography has developed over nationalist terms, as each new republic has determined their own historiography and their role played in the collapse.
The most vehement of this is the Ukrainian school since the turn of the Century, led by Serhii Plokhy’s recent work Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. Plokhy was born in Nizhni-Novgorod, but is ethnically-Ukrainian and grew up in Zaporizhia. In this work, he cites Ukrainian nationalism as the chief cause of the collapse of the Union, as without ‘Little Russia’, there is no Soviet Union. Plokhy claims the house arrest of Gorbachev in August 1991 persuaded Ukrainian President, Leonid Kravchuk to not sign his proposed Union Treaty — a proposal for a smaller union. In December, with Boris Yeltsin and the Belarussian President, they jointly announced the end of the Soviet Union, thirteen days before Gorbachev’s resignation. The Soviet Union could not possibly exist without Kiev, the original capital of the Empire until the Mongol invasion of 1240 and the home of the Slavic race.
Although the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a process that took place both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was neither a collapse nor sudden. Gorbachev did not want the end of the Soviet Union, he merely aimed to revitalise it through the introduction of democratisation, “new thinking” and acceleration away from a centralized economy. In a speech to the United Nations on 7 December 1988 he claimed;
‘The de-ideologisation of interstate relations has become a demand of the new stage. We are not giving up our convictions, philosophy or traditions. Neither are we calling on anyone else to give up theirs. Yet we are not going to shut ourselves up within the range of our values…We intend to expand the Soviet Union’s participation in the monitoring mechanism on human rights in the United Nations and within the framework of the pan-European process’.
Essentially, Gorbachev claimed in the typically Soviet technical style that enacting his policies of perestroika and glasnost was not bringing an end to the Soviet Union, but to “arrange broad, mutually advantageous and equitable cooperation between peoples…to transform social and economic relations…[and] to overcome underdevelopment”. Gorbachev was desperate to revert the stagnation of the Brezhnev era, and to reform the Soviet Union without the cadres under a new generation of radical, Soviet thought. Russian-born anthropologist Alexiy Yurchak in his work Everything was Forever, Until it was No More, surveyed the last generation of the Soviet Union, claiming the long-term stagnation suffered under Leonid Brezhnev caused this generation to cease talking about and believing in Socialism. Over time, ideology became meaningless, participation became discourse and the Soviet citizens reacted paradoxically; the collapse had seemed both completely unimaginable and completely unsurprising. This generation was more than willing to follow Gorbachev’s new policies of reform.
However, in enacting his “diplomacy of decline”, Gorbachev destroyed his only power base, bankrupted the economy and allowed the angry, disparate minor nationalities to dismantle the Union from under his feet. Even his successor, and the first democratically elected leader in Russian history, Yeltsin, used Russian nationalism and his position as the President of the RSFSR to supersede both Gorbachev and the Soviet Union itself. The four processes were intertwined and could not have taken place missing any singular one, as they combined to cause a house of cards which neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin could ultimately control. However, the most important factor causing the disintegration is irrevocably the nationalism of the other fourteen republics in the Union. The process was a gradual one, and the nationalities protesting across Eastern Europe, the Baltic and Central Asia took advantage of the problems within all three policy sectors of government; the party, the economy, and foreign affairs to manifest the sequences which led to the dismantlement of Soviet power.