Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Russification gathered speed in the East Slavic republics of the Soviet Union. This led not only to a dramatic increase in the use of Russian at work and in educational institutions in the large urban centers (with the notable exception of western Ukraine), but also to a decline of national consciousness among Ukrainians and Belarusians as measured by identification with a mother tongue rather than Russian for census purposes. The number of ethnic Ukrainians who gave Russian as their mother tongue increased from 6 percent in 1959 to 10 percent in 1979 and 16 percent in 1989. Even more dramatic was the decline in national consciousness in Belarus, where the number of Belarusians giving Russian as their mother tongue increased during the same period from 7 to 16 and, finally, 20 percent. Thus, every fifth Belarusian considered himself Russian, no matter what the nationality recorded on his or her passport.

  While the prospect of forging one Soviet nation out of Slavs and non-Slavs was clearly in trouble, the formation of a big Russian nation out of the Eastern Slavs was just as clearly under way. There appeared to be no barrier to the realization of the old dream of the imperial nation-builders—the formation of an all-Russian nation. The only thing their successors needed to complete the project was time, but by the late 1980s they had run out of it.

  VI

  THE NEW RUSSIA

  18

  RED FLAG DOWN

  THREE SOVIET LEADERS DIED IN THE COURSE OF AS MANY YEARS. Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the country for eighteen years, passed away in November 1982; his successor, the former head of the KGB, Yurii Andropov, succumbed to illness in February 1984; and Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, followed suit in March 1985. The old Soviet Union had long run out of new ideas. By the mid-1980s, it had also run out of leaders committed to maintaining old ideological, economic, and social models.

  The new Soviet leader, the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, was eager to try new things. The immediate and most obvious challenge before him was the sorry state of the Soviet economy, which was in free fall. Income growth, which had averaged about 14 percent per year in the 1930s, had slowed to about 10 percent in the 1950s, and dropped to approximately 5 percent in the first half of the 1980s. Those were official figures. The CIA estimated the rate of Soviet income growth between 1980 and 1985 at close to 2 percent, while post-Soviet calculations yielded an even lower figure. Meanwhile, the Soviet population was growing at a much faster rate, breaking the 180 million mark in the early 1950s and reaching 280 million in the mid-1980s. Shortages not only of consumer goods but also of food supplies had become part of everyday life by the time Gorbachev assumed office in March 1985. Something had to be done quickly to fix the economy.

  Another set of problems facing the new leader had to do with the loss of legitimacy by the ruling party and its elite. The communists ruled the country not only by means of terror and coercion but also with the promise of a brighter future. That future was called the attainment of communism, which in the popular mind meant an abundance of food and consumer goods. Khrushchev had promised the advent of that paradise in the early 1980s. With no communism in sight and the economy in decline, faith in the coming paradise and its prophets hit bottom. In promising a communist future, the authorities had contrasted the achievements of the socialist economy with those of its capitalist counterpart in the West, claiming that Soviet socialism was destined to outperform capitalism in the interest of the toiling masses. That promise was never fulfilled. If the contrast was still plausible in the 1950s and 1960s—the Soviet gross national product (GDP) more than tripled between 1950 and 1965, while that of the United States only doubled—by the 1970s the Soviet economy was no longer competitive. In 1970, it was about 60 percent as large as the US economy; after that, it declined steadily, and by 1989 it was less than half the size of the American economy.

  The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the rise of Cold War rivalry between the two superpowers. By that time, the Soviet Union was bogged down in Afghanistan, where it sent its troops in 1979 to support what promised to be a socialist revolution and stop the advance of the West, while the United States had begun its recovery from the psychological shock of Vietnam and the energy crisis of the 1970s, becoming more aggressive in its rhetoric and actions abroad. Under Ronald Reagan, who moved into the White House in January 1981 and stayed in office for two terms, the United States challenged Soviet behavior not only in Afghanistan but also in Poland. Workers’ strikes in that country gave birth to the free trade union Solidarity, which contested Polish communist rule and Soviet political control. Reagan revived the arms race, threatening the Soviet Union with the Strategic Defense Initiative, a program that came to be known as Star Wars and proposed the weaponizing of outer space. The defensive antimissile system that was to be constructed under the Star Wars plan had the potential to change the world balance of power by making the Soviet missile threat to the United States largely obsolete. Although the technical complexity of the proposal made it a pipe dream, Reagan believed in it, as did the Soviets, who knew that they lacked the resources to match American investment in the next round of the arms race.

  Gorbachev had to act quickly to deal with the crises of the economy and political legitimacy at home and the economic, ideological, and military competition abroad, now all but lost by the USSR. On the international scene, he attempted to ease tensions by negotiating and signing a number of arms-reduction treaties with the United States that were supposed to free funds for domestic reform and ensure Western assistance to the struggling Soviet economy. Gorbachev also tried to reduce the economic burden on the USSR and improve its image abroad by withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which he did in 1988, and allowing the East European satellites of the Soviet Union to decide their own form of government. That decision resulted in the overthrow of their communist regimes in a sequence of largely peaceful revolutions in the summer and fall of 1989, effectively ending Cold War rivalry in Central and Eastern Europe.

  But the greatest changes took place within the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev introduced the policy of perestroika, or radical restructuring of Soviet society. He began his offensive against the old system on two fronts, introducing elements of private property and the market in Soviet economic space and opening political space for debate. For Gorbachev and his liberal advisers, the two fronts were interrelated, and victory on one was impossible without victory on the other. As the party’s old guard resisted economic change, Gorbachev used political reform to soften up or crush his opponents. The key component of perestroika was the notion of glasnost, or openness—a series of measures that lifted restrictions on political debate and made party officials vulnerable to criticism by the media and citizens at large.

  The change in the Soviet system of government came in 1989 with the first relatively free elections in the USSR since the Revolution of 1917. In the spring of that year, Soviet citizens elected their representatives to a new legislative body, the Congress of People’s Deputies. In the following year, Gorbachev used the Congress to make constitutional changes that ended the Communist Party’s monopoly of power and created the post of president of the USSR, which became the highest office in the land, superior to that of general secretary of the party. Gorbachev, elected by the Congress as the first president of the USSR, maintained his post of general secretary but used it to maneuver the party out of power. Party officials were allowed to keep their power in the regions only if they were elected to the local parliaments or soviets. The move not only ended the party’s political monopoly but also undermined the power of the center. Local officials would henceforth depend on their electorates more than on their superiors in Moscow.

  As the former party bosses and leaders of the new democratic institutions born out of the turmoil of perestroika started listening to their electorates, the Soviet Union began to crumble. Electors in every Union republic, from Estonia to Russia to Uzbekistan, and the autonomous republics within them, wanted a say in running their homelands.
All of a sudden, people everywhere began to feel that their polities were being mistreated by the government in Moscow. History, language, culture, and, ultimately, nationalism became effective tools of political mobilization, setting the republics onto different cultural, economic, and political trajectories. The introduction of free elections transformed Soviet society, putting the structure and even the integrity of the multiethnic USSR into question. The change was more dramatic than Gorbachev had bargained for, leading in a few years not only to the collapse of the communist regime but also to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

  FEW SOVIET REPUBLICS PLAYED A MORE IMPORTANT ROLE IN dissolving the Soviet Union than the Russian Federation, and no Soviet nationality later felt more betrayed by the collapse of the Soviet polity than the Russians. In the 1930s, Stalin used to call the Russians the most Soviet nation. In the decades after the war, they definitely assumed that status. In fact, they became something more, turning into the core of the Soviet people that the party wanted to form. They were more than ready to integrate others into that core. By the 1970s, only a small minority of Russians, between 2 and 8 percent, insisted on endogamous marriage. To be sure, most of those who told pollsters that they were willing to marry outside their ethnic group expected marriage to entail the linguistic and cultural Russification of the non-Russian spouse, not the other way around. Brezhnev’s policy of promoting the concept of the Soviet people along with the Russian language was bearing fruit. (As late as 1998, seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, 52 percent of Russian citizens polled showed close affinity to the notion of a Soviet people.)

  But the 1970s also brought resistance to Brezhnev’s policy in the non-Russian republics. In 1978, when Moscow tried to change the Georgian constitution to remove the reference to Georgian as the official language of the republic, students went into the streets of Tbilisi to protest. Moscow retreated. If the Georgians had a reference to the official status of their language in their basic law, other republics tried to gain similar status for their languages, whether or not it was enshrined in their constitutions. Russians and Russian-speakers in those republics who refused or showed reluctance to learn the local language felt discriminated against.

  The situation was reminiscent of the 1920s, when the indigenization policy was implemented as a concession to the non-Russians. But the Russians, whose primacy in the Soviet Union had been unquestioned in the 1920s, were now on the defensive, obliged either to adulterate their Russian identity with the concept of the Soviet people or to start treating the non-Russians as equals rather than underlings. Russian nationalists, feeling under siege in what they considered their own state, began to express dissatisfaction. As the regime turned the Russians into the “most Soviet nation,” they had had to give up many elements of their traditional, prerevolutionary identity, which included naïve monarchism and religion. Russian populists of the prerevolutionary era had considered those elements to have been based in and maintained by the village. The recovery and preservation of non-Soviet Russian identity was a cause championed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a score of Russian authors who wrote “village prose,” and whose publications were discussed in the previous chapters.

  The Russian nation that was to be defended against the communist regime’s Sovietization and the rise of cultural assertiveness in the borderlands was deeply rooted in the prerevolutionary past. The new crop of Russian nationalist thinkers often defined it in the spirit of Russian imperial nationhood, not limited to ethnic Russians but encompassing Ukrainians and Belarusians as well. Given the spread of the Russian language in Ukraine and Belarus and the ability of Eastern Slavs to communicate in Russian irrespective of their native language, this linguistic and cultural model of Russianness resembled the imperial ideal of a big Russian nation. It found support both in the Russian cultural establishment and among dissidents.

  In officially sanctioned texts, references to the population of Kyivan Rus’ as Russians, or old Russians, were commonplace, while Ukrainian and Belarusian territories were often referred to in historical terms as southern and western Russian lands. The lack of particular terms in the Russian language to distinguish between Russians and the Rus’—or Ruthenian—people eased such reversions to imperial discourse. Many underground texts, such as Vladimir Osipov’s journal Veche (referring to a popular assembly of medieval times), published in the early 1970s in print runs of fifty to one hundred copies, openly propagated their authors’ beliefs in the essential unity of the Eastern Slavs, whom they simply called Russians.

  But the model of a pan-Russian nation, whether of Soviet or prerevolutionary imperial vintage, encountered tough sledding among the intellectual elites of the second-largest East Slavic nation, Ukraine. In Russia, the dissident movement of the 1970s was divided between liberals, represented by academician Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb turned political dissident, and nationalists, represented by the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a former Gulag prisoner who had made a name for himself during the Khrushchev Thaw. But in Ukraine the dissidents managed to stay together, combining liberalism and nationalism.

  That trend defined the ideological and cultural program of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group—a human rights monitoring organization inspired by the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which obliged the Soviet Union to abide by international norms in the sphere of human rights. The group was formed against the will of the authorities in the fall of 1976, soon after the creation of a similar group in Moscow. While the members of the group did not put forward Ukrainian independence as their immediate political goal, they argued for Ukrainian cultural and political equality with Russia. For members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, Moscow was not just the capital of the Soviet Union but also the embodiment of Russia, and struggle against the USSR was a struggle against Russian dominance. A programmatic document of the group adopted in February 1977 made this clear: “We profoundly respect the culture, spirituality, and ideals of the Russian people, but why should Moscow make decisions for us at international forums (like those in Helsinki and Belgrade) on various problems, commitments, and the like?! Why should Ukraine’s cultural, creative, scientific, agricultural, and international problems be defined and planned in the capital of a neighboring (even allied) state?”

  Russian nationalists realized that Ukraine was a problem for them. In his Gulag Archipelago, the key samizdat (self-published and secretly distributed without official authorization) text of the era, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lamented the failure of earlier attempts to fuse Russians and Ukrainians without giving up hope that they would stay together. He wrote: “In the Kyivan period we constituted a single people, but since then it has been torn apart, and for centuries our lives, habits, and languages went in different directions.” He blamed communism, especially that of the 1930s and 1940s, for the rupture that had caused Ukrainians to strive for independence from Russia. But whatever their differences, Solzhenitsyn, the son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, wanted them to stay together.

  He wrote:

  It will be extraordinarily painful with Ukraine. But one has to be aware of the intensity of their general attitude at present. If the question has not been resolved over the centuries, then it is up to us to show prudence. We are obliged to leave the solution to them—federalists or separatists, whoever comes out on top. It would be foolish and cruel not to yield. And the greater our mildness, forbearance, and sagacity now, the greater the hope of restoring unity in the future. Let them live and try it out for themselves. It will soon become apparent to them that not all problems are to be solved by separation.

  THE SCENARIO ENVISIONED BY SOLZHENITSYN IN THE 1960S suddenly became reality in the late 1980s with the proclamation of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Solzhenitsyn was able to predict the future because he knew the attitudes of Ukrainian political activists, some of whom he had met in the Gulag. By the late 1980s, the political prisoners, including members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, had been released. They were free to engag
e in political activity and propose solutions to economic, political, and nationality problems to a politically awakened population. Although the first Union republic to declare sovereignty—the supremacy of republican laws over those of the Union—in the fall of 1988 was Estonia, in the East Slavic core of the Union the first to do so in the summer of 1990, amazingly, was not Ukraine or Belarus but the “most Soviet” nation of the USSR, Russia itself. What led the Russians to do so?

  The answer should be sought first and foremost in the cracks that emerged in the traditional equation of Russian with Soviet identity as the Russian intellectual elite dissociated itself from the failing project of Soviet communism, refusing to take responsibility for its past, present, or future actions. With the Soviet economy faltering and the party losing legitimacy, the non-Russian nationalities revolted against Moscow, the center of that system, and, by extension, against the Russians, the agents and administrators, if not the owners, of the empire. But the Russians refused to take the blame for the abuses of the Soviet system. Russian writers of the “village prose” school had long considered their own republic, not the non-Russian republics of the Union, to be the main victim of the communist regime. Like everyone else, they could now openly assert their claims against the regime and engage in a victimization contest with their accusers.