The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

  BORIS YELTSIN EMERGES from our reconstruction of the last months of the history of the Soviet Union as a much more complex figure than might be suggested by the popular image of him as the grave digger of communism, killer of the Union, and founder of modern Russia. Yeltsin and his advisers felt much more affinity with the Union than is usually allowed for in commentary about them. Not even the most radical of Yeltsin’s advisers had the dissolution of the USSR on their original agenda. “Initially, the task was not to destroy the Soviet Union,” recalled the most influential of them, Gennadii Burbulis. “The task was to seek out the capabilities and resources to govern the Russian Federation according to all the rules of an effective administration.” Back in the spring of 1990, according to Burbulis, it was the impossibility of bringing about change by means of the conservative Union parliament that had forced the leaders of the democratic opposition to concentrate on Russian politics. Yeltsin’s election as Speaker of the Russian parliament turned that institution into a vehicle for realizing the political goals of the democratic deputies.

  Until the coup, Yeltsin’s goal was to wrest as many powers and resources from the center as possible, including legal ownership of the Russian Federation’s vast natural resources. Yeltsin achieved that goal in late July 1991. The coup threatened his newly acquired powers and control over the resources of Russia, of which he was now the president. But the defeat of the coup gave Yeltsin and his advisers a chance to return victorious to the all-Union political space that they had earlier abandoned and to implement their reforms throughout the Union. Yeltsin, who had prevented the coup plotters from saving the USSR, now adopted that mission himself. With the central bureaucracy defeated and its leader, Gorbachev, weakened, the Yeltsin supporters launched a hostile takeover of Union structures. The ones they could not or did not want to take over, such as the Communist Party, were destroyed. This hostile takeover of the center by a leader much more powerful and dynamic than Gorbachev caused the other republics to rebel, declaring their independence. Yeltsin had to back down. The attempt to take over the Union gave way to negotiations on a confederative structure that would give Russia enough power to implement economic and social reform on its own, free of any restraints on the part of the conservative elites of the non-Russian republics.

  Yeltsin’s advisers and supporters envisioned Russia as an ark for the salvation of the nascent Soviet democracy and its program of economic reform. In that sense they resembled the Bolsheviks of the Lenin era, who saw Russia as an ark for the salvation of the world proletarian revolution and its program of universal social and economic transformation. One of the many differences between those two visions was that in 1917 Lenin argued that, in the interest of the world revolution, the Marxists of the multiethnic Russian Empire should stick together, while now the Russian democrats believed that they had better prospects of succeeding on their own. This made a good deal of sense from the economic viewpoint. If during the Russian Revolution Lenin claimed that the revolution would not survive without Ukrainian coal, in 1991 the Union’s greatest riches, especially its vast mineral resources, were on the territory of the Russian Federation, not in the republics. The death of the Soviet Union differed from that of other empires in that the resource-rich metropolis cut off its former colonial possessions from easy access to those resources. Russia stood to benefit from the loss of its imperial possessions more than any other empire of the past. Yeltsin and his people not only knew that but counted on it.11

  It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the personal rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin for the fall of the USSR. The two were never shy about voicing their mutual grievances at the time or afterward. In his memoirs, the Russian president discussed the psychological reasons for his unwillingness to step into Gorbachev’s political shoes and take over his position at the helm of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, in his memoirs, accused Yeltsin of dissolving the Union for the sole purpose of getting rid of him as president of the USSR. The prospect of being a figurehead in a confederative Union dominated by Russia and Yeltsin was clearly unacceptable to him. Some authors in contemporary Russia tend to see the Gorbachev-Yeltsin rivalry as the main reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others, like the former strongman of the August coup, General Valentin Varennikov, believed that not only Yeltsin but the republican leaders in general simply could not abide Gorbachev, who had fooled them time after time. There is no doubt that Yeltsin’s sense of being wronged by the Communist Party leadership, and by Gorbachev in particular, played an important role in his embrace of the Russian democratic agenda. But overall it was that agenda, defined in political, economic, and social terms, that drove his policies and defined his political choices.12

  For all his dislike of Gorbachev, Yeltsin consulted with him before his trip to Belavezha and began negotiations with Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine by offering him the Gorbachev-approved plan for a reformed Soviet Union. It was the position of the Ukrainian leader backed by the December 1 referendum on the independence of Ukraine that turned out to be crucial in deciding the fate of the Soviet Union. Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin imagined a viable Union without Ukraine. It was the second Soviet republic after Russia in population and economic contribution to the Union coffers. The Russian leadership, which was already skeptical about bearing the costs of empire, could be persuaded to do so only together with Ukraine. Besides, as Yeltsin told George Bush on more than one occasion, without the Slavic Ukraine, Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Central Asian republics, most of which, with the notable exception of Kazakhstan, relied on massive subsidies from the Union center.

  WHEN IT COMES TO ASSIGNING either blame or credit for the disintegration of the USSR, fingers are usually pointed at Russia and its revolt against the center. While this factor is clearly important, it turns our attention almost exclusively to the Gorbachev-Yeltsin confrontation, which diminished in significance as a factor in deciding the fate of the USSR as the events of the August coup receded into the past. By December 1991, Russia had effectively taken over the Union institutions or made them impossible to operate without Russian consent and support. The outcome of the battle between Russia and the Union center was decided before the Ukrainian referendum of December 1, 1991, and the Belavezha Agreement of December 8 of that year. It was Russia’s relations with Ukraine, the second-largest Soviet republic, and not those with the anemic Union center, that would prove crucial to the future of the Soviet empire in the last weeks of its existence.

  Leonid Kravchuk, born in interwar Poland, presided over the drive for independence by a republic whose nationalist mobilization was quite similar to that of the Baltic republics. In western Ukraine, which, like the Baltics, had spent the interwar years outside the USSR, the democratic elections of 1990 led to the complete expulsion of the old local elites from the business of government. Western Ukraine, annexed by the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, was never fully digested by the mighty Soviet Union. It is easy to imagine that the USSR might still exist in one form or another even today if Joseph Stalin had not concluded the “nonaggression pact” with Hitler in August 1939 and then claimed half of Eastern Europe. It would probably still be around, though without its Baltic provinces, if at Yalta Stalin had accommodated Franklin Roosevelt’s desire to leave the city of Lwów (Lviv) in Poland. Stalin insisted on transferring it to Ukraine. In the late 1980s, Lviv became the center of nationalist mobilization for Ukrainian independence. It was as difficult to imagine Ukrainian independence without Lviv as to imagine the Soviet Union without Ukraine in the fall and winter of 1991.

  If in western Ukraine the situation reminded one of the Baltics, in the east it was akin to what was happening in Moscow, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and the mining regions of Russia. In the central and eastern parts of Ukraine, which constituted part of the Soviet Union from its inception, the old communist elites struggled to survive against a rising tide of unrest led by striking miners of the Donbas and the liberal intelligentsi
a, which took over the city councils in the big industrial centers. Thus, in both east and west, the old Ukrainian elite felt abandoned by the Union center and had to make deals with opposition forces to stay in power.

  Back in 1922 the USSR was created with an eye to accommodating Ukraine. The Union emerged as a state with a powerful center whose goal in the first decade of its history was to keep the Ukrainians in and the Russians, the formerly dominant ethnic group, down. Decimated in the wake of the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933, the Ukrainian communist elites bounced back after World War II, becoming Russia’s de facto (but not de jure) junior partner in running the Soviet empire. Influential if not dominant in Moscow during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, Ukrainian elites were removed from the center of power under Gorbachev.

  Despite their grudges against the new leader and his policies, the Ukrainian party apparatchiks remained loyal to the idea of the Union until the August coup, and some of them did so even afterward. Yeltsin’s attempt to take over the center in the wake of the failed putsch threatened the Ukrainian elites with a situation in which the imploded center would leave them one-on-one with a powerful Russia no longer subject to any restraint. While Gorbachev was still trying to co-opt Ukrainians into all-Union structures, offering the second position in the party to a Ukrainian apparatchik before the coup and the office of prime minister in the future Union to a Ukrainian government official afterward, Yeltsin had no plans of that nature. And the Ukrainians were no longer interested in them anyway. It was the Ukrainian elites’ insistence on the independence of their country and the unwillingness and inability of the Russian elites to offer the Ukrainian leadership an attractive integrationist alternative short of a Russia-dominated confederation that led to the fall of the Soviet Union.

  There was little hope for Russo-Ukrainian accommodation after the coup. The Aleksandr Rutskoi mission sent to Kyiv by Yeltsin in late August 1991 failed to achieve its objectives and stop Ukraine’s drive toward independence. By October, Kravchuk stopped coming to Moscow, and his fateful meeting with Yeltsin in Belavezha in December had to be organized by Belarusian intermediaries.

  The Soviet Union never turned into an analogue of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which extended its life in the nineteenth century by obliging the Austro-German elites to share the spoils and responsibilities of running the empire with their Hungarian counterparts. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s vision of a Slavic Union that some believed could materialize after Belavezha was in fact a blueprint for the creation of a greater Russia, not a recognition of the differences between Russia and Ukraine or a proposal of partnership. As the Ukrainian population voted for independence with astounding unanimity, Kravchuk presented not only Gorbachev but also Yeltsin with a fait accompli—Ukraine was leaving the Soviet Union. At Belavezha the Russian and Ukrainian presidents negotiated the exit conditions and a new modus vivendi.

  Gorbachev’s inability to regain power after the coup, Yeltsin’s clumsiness in his original attempt to take over the Union center, his subsequent decision to go ahead with Russian economic reform without the other republics, and, finally, Kravchuk’s dogged insistence on independence left most of the republics that had not yet declared their desire to leave the Union in a difficult position. The Belarusian leaders hosting the Belavezha summit told Yeltsin and Kravchuk that they would support whatever decision the two reached. Privately they knew that under any circumstances they would have to stick with Russia, if only because of their republic’s dependence on Russian energy supplies. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan and host of the Almaty meeting on December 21, shared that position. It was not Russian resources that were on his mind but the Russian and Slavic population of his republic, which outnumbered its titular nationality, the Kazakhs. The leaders of the other Central Asian republics also could not imagine the Union proposed by Gorbachev if it did not include Russia. There was a chain reaction: Ukraine did not want to be in the Union, Russia could not imagine the Union without Ukraine, and the rest of the republics that still wanted to be in the Union could not imagine it without Russia. The Central Asian leaders were all but expelled from the empire by their imperial masters and now had no choice but to join the Commonwealth.

  Unlike the Soviet Union, the Commonwealth structure allowed much more flexibility in defining the level of political, economic, and social integration between the republics. It was varied levels of integration of the non-Russian territories into the imperial center that distinguished the former Romanov empire from the Soviet Union. Whereas in the Russian Empire Finland or the Kingdom of Poland could have special rights and privileges not accorded to the Russian or Ukrainian provinces, in the Soviet Union all republics, from tiny Estonia to huge Russia, were equal in constitutional terms. Giving certain rights to Estonia was impossible without giving the same rights to Russia. It was this characteristic of Soviet federalism that made the disintegration of the Soviet Union all but inevitable once the movement for independence gathered speed in the Baltics, western Ukraine, Caucasus, and Moldova.

  THE INABILITY of the Soviet leaders to discriminate between the Union republics in constitutional terms was one of the realities of Soviet political life that George H. W. Bush and his advisers in Washington never fully grasped. They kept pushing for the independence of the Baltic republics, convinced that the Soviet Union could not only survive but do very well without them. Their argument was about fairness and legality: the United States had never recognized the annexation of the Baltic states after 1939, and they should now be set free. The rest of the republics should stay as they were. That was a difficult proposition to sell to other republics. George Bush tried in vain to do so in his “Chicken Kiev” speech in the Ukrainian parliament, whereas he succeeded in making it difficult, if not impossible, for Gorbachev to employ the coercive power of the state still at his disposal to establish martial law in the Baltics for a lengthy period. And surgical applications of force were no longer effective. With the price for prolonged use of force made prohibitive by Western pressure, Gorbachev had no choice but to play according to the constitutional rules.

  In the final analysis, George Bush’s policies contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, but they often did so irrespective of the desires of his administration, or even contrary to them. The push for Baltic independence is only one example of the unforeseen consequences of American actions. There is little doubt that by helping to save Gorbachev after the coup and pushing Yeltsin to cooperate with him, the United States prevented Yeltsin from either completely taking over the Union center or forcing Gorbachev to negotiate a confederation agreement in September or October 1991, when Kravchuk and the Ukrainian leaders were still attending gatherings of republican leaders convened by Gorbachev. In November, a few weeks before the Ukrainian referendum, the Bush administration continued to apply pressure on Yeltsin, trying to keep him from doing away with the Union government, especially its foreign policy branch, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was only in late November that the Bush administration allowed the leak of news about the coming recognition of Ukrainian independence, pushing the dying Soviet Union over the brink. This time the administration knew the consequences of its action.

  Why did George H. W. Bush and his advisers do as they did? Bush’s personal attachment to Gorbachev, whom he respected as a man and a politician, is of course part of the explanation, but much more important was the administration’s desire to keep Gorbachev and the Soviet Union afloat as long as possible. The immediate goal, as formulated by James Baker in early 1991, was to extract maximum concessions from the dying Soviet behemoth in the realm of arms control and international relations. The strategy worked exceptionally well. The withdrawal of Soviet assistance from Moscow-backed governments in Cuba and Afghanistan, Moscow’s agreement to make deep cuts in its nuclear arsenals, and Gorbachev’s support for the US-proposed peace settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict were among the accomplishments of Bush’s Soviet policy in the fall of 1991.
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  But the most important American concern was the safety of the Soviet nuclear arsenals, which, it was believed in Washington, were much safer under the central control of the Soviet military, with whom the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and other American commanders had worked in the years of Gorbachev’s rule. Here the administration’s policies also met with success. One of the first points made by Yeltsin when he called Bush from Belavezha in December 1991 was to inform him of the agreement of the Slavic presidents on joint but centralized control over Soviet nuclear arms. Last but not least, there was a related concern about the peaceful dissolution of the USSR, especially when it came to the nuclear-armed republics of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Despite Gorbachev’s concerns and grim predictions, the Soviet Union never turned into Yugoslavia with nukes. Russia never became Serbia, and Yeltsin, unlike Slobodan Milošević, never tried to gather what many in Russia considered historical Russian lands, now in the possession of other republics, by force.

  The main credit for the peaceful dissolution of the Union should go to the policies of Boris Yeltsin and the cautious stand on Russian minorities taken by Leonid Kravchuk and Nursultan Nazarbayev. But the American contribution to that process was by no means insignificant. By coordinating his position with the leaders of Western Europe, Bush managed to avoid a situation akin to the one that occurred in Yugoslavia, when Germany encouraged the drive for independence by Slovenia and Croatia, while the rest of the Western powers remained undecided on the issue. In the case of the Soviet Union, Bush was able to get all the Western leaders on board and served as spokesman for their common position. To be accepted in the West, the leaders of the republics had to do what Bush wanted them to do with regard to nuclear arms, borders, and minorities. American expectations were spelled out in the early fall of 1991 by James Baker and followed in spirit, if not to the letter, by the leaders of the Soviet republics.