While losing the battle to save the Soviet Union as a junior partner in the international arena, the Bush administration helped orchestrate its peaceful dissolution. This was no small accomplishment, especially if one thinks of the bloody ends of other empires. On a certain level, history had indeed come to an end—not in the sense of a final victory of liberalism, as declared by the leading American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man (1990), but in the disappearance of the old European empires. The United States, born of rebellion against an empire and an archenemy of colonialism throughout the world, unexpectedly found itself presiding over the dissolution of a country often labeled the last world empire. The Americans thus accomplished their anti-imperial purpose without really wishing to do so.13
THERE IS EVERY REASON to see 1991 as a major turning point in world history, and nowhere does this seem more obvious than in the former post-Soviet space, where many present-day trends in international relations, domestic politics, and economic relations continue to develop in the shadow of the year that some call an annus mirabilis, while others, including President Vladimir Putin of Russia, associate it with the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”14
It was in 1991 that the Russian leadership set a policy on the use of military force by which it abided until the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. While the Union republics were allowed to go without a fight, autonomous republics such as Chechnia were not. The Russian leaders learned a lesson from the Soviet collapse and established a new federal system in which some members of the Russian Federation, such as Chechnia or Tatarstan, could have more rights than others. That helped preserve a semblance of unity in the Russian state during the first difficult post-Soviet decade. Coercion and flexibility, the latter having been in short supply in the Soviet Union, became the hallmarks of the new Russian policy of dealing with rebellious autonomies. While crushing the drives of their own autonomies for independence, the Russian leaders took a page from Gorbachev’s book of 1990 and 1991 when he played the leaders of the Russian autonomies against Boris Yeltsin and tried to support rebellious autonomies in other post-Soviet states, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and Transnistria in Moldova.
What is now considered Vladimir Putin’s invention—an aggressive policy of integrating former Soviet republics into common institutions and opposing Ukraine’s and Georgia’s membership in NATO and structures affiliated with the European Union—also harks back to the events of 1991. Many of Yeltsin’s advisers regarded the Commonwealth not as an instrument of divorce but rather as a means of Russian control over the post-Soviet space. They believed that Russia needed to free itself from the burden of supporting a traditional empire, but in twenty years, once it recovered from its economic and political problems, the republics would come back to Russia of their own free will. Some republics, such as Belarus, did come back and joined Russian-led political, economic, and military organizations. But others did not, and a semblance of a new Cold War between Russia and the West all but materialized in the wake of the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, which resulted in the coming to power of the Western-educated president Mikheil Saakashvili, and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which saw the election of the pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko over his Russian-backed and -funded competitor. Today, as in 1991, the former republics most politically distant from Russia are the Baltic states, while the country on which prospects for the reintegration of post-Soviet space under Moscow’s auspices most depend is Ukraine.15
The origins of American policies that shaped international relations during the first decade of the twenty-first century also go back to 1991, when James Baker persuaded Gorbachev and Yeltsin to withdraw support from the Afghan government of Najibullah. Afghanistan soon became a no-man’s-land, a country of warlords, saved from chaos and daily violence by the Taliban. The peace at home, enforced by religious zealots, brought destruction abroad, as Osama bin Laden turned the former graveyard of the Soviet army into his backyard. The response by the administration of the forty-third president of the United States, George W. Bush, to the challenge of 9/11 was also greatly informed by the experiences and lessons that the members of his administration drew from the events of 1991.
In the last months of 1991, as the fall of the USSR unfolded before CNN television cameras, the Bush administration’s experts began making preparations for a new world in which the Soviet Union would be a much smaller factor in world politics or might even disappear altogether. The planning was entrusted to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and placed under the direct supervision of Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The new doctrine produced by the Pentagon experts reflected the view presented in George H. W. Bush’s State of the Union address of 1992: the Cold War did not just end but was won. The United States now had a special mission in the world defined by its new status as the sole global superpower. The geographical and political limits imposed on that vision by its former Cold War adversary no longer applied.
A few weeks after Bush’s address of January 1992, when elements of the Wolfowitz Doctrine were leaked to the press, it turned out that the special mission was not only to support freedom throughout the world, as the president had claimed, but also to prevent the emergence of any potential rival on the world scene, if necessary by means of preventive war. This was the template for the foreign policy adopted by George W. Bush. In March 2003 he ordered American troops into Iraq to forestall a threat that never existed—alleged weapons of mass destruction that were never found. The invasion removed Saddam Hussein from power, but at the ultimate price of killing more than 190,000 people and destabilizing the country and the region. It cost the United States the lives of close to forty-five hundred military personnel and at least thirty four hundred civilian contractors.16
George W. Bush believed that America had won the Cold War, and he praised the “moral clarity” that had made the victory possible. In November 2003, after the initial success of the Iraq invasion, Bush gave a speech marking the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. In it he credited American resolve for the fact that the “global nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union ended peacefully—as did the Soviet Union.” In this triumphalist narrative he found inspiration for his plan of bringing democracy to the Middle East and transforming the Muslim world. “And now we must apply that lesson in our own time,” the president argued in the same speech. “We’ve reached another great turning point—and the resolve we show will shape the next stage of the world democratic movement.”17
The next stage never came. It was displaced by the nightmare of the long and bloody occupation of Iraq. In many ways, the road to the Iraq War had begun in 1991. It was not only the desire to finish the Gulf War of 1990–1991 by toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime but also a deep-seated belief in the power of the United States as the country that won the Cold War by wiping its main adversary off the world map that informed the decisions of those who ordered American forces into Iraq in March 2003.
Acknowledgments
Like one of the characters in this book, the Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, I left Moscow on the second day of the coup, August 20, 1991. He was on a flight to Paris, while I took the Aeroflot flight to Montreal. Until we landed, no one knew whether the plotters in Moscow (or, rather, the Aeroflot authorities) would allow the plane to go all the way to Canada or reroute it to Havana. They never did what many on my flight were afraid of—they let us fly all the way to our destination. More important, they lost control not only over our plane but also of the situation on the ground in Moscow.
By the next day, there was no longer a coup to worry about. My colleagues at the University of Alberta in Canada, where I was scheduled to teach as a visiting professor, were excited about the events in the Soviet Union and wanted me to teach a course on the USSR in crisis, focusing on the fate of Russian and Soviet democracy and its final victory over totalitarianism. Coming from Ukraine
and being aware of the importance of national mobilization in that Soviet republic, I offered instead to teach a course on the nationality question in the USSR. My hosts were skeptical. The nationality question appeared to be marginal, with no clear relation to what was going on in Moscow, or at least that was how the events were viewed by many in North American academia. I insisted, and they dropped their objections.
By the time my course ended in December 1991, there was no Soviet Union anymore. Instead of exemplifying the triumph of democracy, it disintegrated into fifteen republics. Unlike many of my North American colleagues, I realized the importance of the “national question” in the USSR and closely followed the drive of the Soviet republics toward independence. Like them, however, I was taken aback by the speed of developments and had little understanding of the peaceful but revolutionary process that took place between the defeat of the coup and the triumph of democracy on the streets of Moscow in August and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December.
The existing literature on the collapse of the Soviet Union, written by journalists, political scientists, and, in the past decade, by historians, offers little help in explaining what exactly happened in the Soviet Union during my Canadian sabbatical. It turned out that I had little choice but to write this book in order to understand what actually took place in the Soviet Union and in the world during the last months of 1991 and why it happened. To answer these and many other related questions, I relied on the help and assistance of many people.
I would like to begin here with participants in the events who agreed to be interviewed for this book. They include President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine; the Speaker of the Belarusian parliament, Stanislaŭ Shushkevich; the minister of defense of Ukraine, General Kostiantyn Morozov; the deputy of the Soviet parliament, Ukrainian writer, and later diplomat Yurii Shcherbak; the American ambassador to Poland and, later, to Pakistan, Thomas Simons; and National Security Council staffer, and later ambassador to Greece and undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns. I am also grateful to those who helped me arrange the interviews: Marshall Goldman, Marta Dyczok, Lubomyr Hajda, and Leonid Poliakov.
Secretary of State James Baker gave permission to use his papers in the Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University. Ambassador Burns read the entire manuscript and provided exceptionally useful comments and corrections. Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Adamishin of the Russian Federation read the book and did not raise major objections. I am also grateful to my Harvard colleagues Mark Kramer and Mary Sarotte and to my graduate student Elizabeth Kerley for their comments on various drafts of the manuscript.
Terry Martin, Charlie Maier, and Erez Manela commented on my papers and presentations based on research for this book, as did Blair Ruble of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, Vlad Zubok of the London School of Economics, and Olga Pavlenko of the Russian University for the Humanities. Their advice helped me greatly in crystallizing my argument, cutting less important parts of the manuscript, and avoiding mistakes. As always, my friend and longtime editor Myroslav Yurkevich did a wonderful job of “Englishing” my prose.
I am grateful to the Department of History for granting me a sabbatical in the fall of 2011 to work on the book and to the Ukrainian Research Institute and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies for providing financial support. Special thanks go to my colleague Tim Colton, with whom I co-taught the seminar “Imperial Legacies and International Politics” in the 2012–2013 academic year, and to the Davis Center fellows and graduate students who took that course. I learned a lot from Tim and from the seminar participants about Soviet and post-Soviet politics and the ways in which they have been interpreted in the last few decades.
Princeton University archivist Daniel J. Linke helped me to secure permission to use Secretary Baker’s papers at the Mudd Manuscript Library. Alexei Litvin was very helpful with getting access to the archive of the Gorbachev Foundation. Mikhail Prezumenshchikov, Peter Ruggenthaler, Yurii Shapoval, and Volodymyr Viatrovych advised me on the former Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian archives. I am grateful to Evgenia Panova at the International Department of the ITAR-TASS Photo Agency and to Oscar Espaillat at Corbis Images for help in selecting the illustrations for this book.
My literary agent, Jill Kneerim, not only helped me find an excellent publisher for the manuscript but also helped make my argument as clear as possible not only to specialists in the field but also to a broader readership. One could not wish for a more supportive and enthusiastic publisher and editor than Lara Heimert, who took an immediate interest in the manuscript and, together with her highly motivated, friendly, and energetic team, turned it into a book. At Basic Books I am especially grateful to Roger Labrie, whose editing made my prose more lucid, and to Katy O’Donnell, who helped guide the book through the editorial process. Like all my previous books, this one could not have been written without the interest, support, and advice of my wife, Olena.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. George H. W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Commonwealth of Independent States,” December 25, 1991, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Archives (hereafter Bush Presidential Library), Public Papers, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=3791&year=1991&month=12; George H. W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” January 28, 1992. C-SPAN http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/23999-1
2. “Statement on the Resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union,” December 25, 1991, Bush Presidential Library, Public Papers, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=3790&year=1991&month=12.
3. Apart from Bush’s own pronouncements, see Brent Scowcroft’s comments in George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, 1998), 563–564, and Robert M. Gates in his From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York, 1996), 552–575.
4. Ellen Schrecker, “Cold War Triumphalism and the Real Cold War,” in Ellen Schrecker, ed., Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism (New York, 2006), 1–26; Bruce Cumings, “Time of Illusion: Post–Cold War Visions of the World,” in Ellen Schrecker, ed., Cold War Triumphalism, 71–102; “Tainy mira s Annoi Chapman, no. 79. Gibel’ imperii,” YouTube video posted by ChannelProXima, February 13, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1zr8Fr1Nbs; “Sekretnyi stsenarii razvala SSSR i Rossii v planakh TsRU,” YouTube video posted by AndreyFLKZ, January 31, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfeiGv6IkQc.
5. On the Soviet Union as a multinational state, see Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–23 (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY, 2005).
6. For the interpretation of the Soviet collapse as the fall of an empire and the role of political nationalism in that process, see Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA, 2000); Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, CT, 2002), ch. 9; Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge, 2002), 4; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2010), ch. 13.
7. David Remnick, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York, 1994), devotes only two and a half pages to that important concluding chapter of Cold War history; Michael Dobbs, the author of the widely acclaimed Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York, 1997), six pages; Stephen Kotkin in his thought-provoking Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2001), five pages.
8. Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, introduction and ch. 4; Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York, 2009), preface; David A. Lake, “The
Rise, Fall, and Future of the Russian Empire: A Theoretical Interpretation,” in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective (Armonk, NY, 1997), 30–62; Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York, 2008), chs. 8 and 9.
CHAPTER 1
1. David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century (New York, 2007), 1–102.
2. “U.S.-Soviet Relations and the Moscow Summit,” July 26, 1991, C-SPAN, www.c-spanvideo.org/program/19799-1; Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, July 31, 1991. US Department of State, http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/starthtm/start/start1.html.
3. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2006); Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1996), 423–732; Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 1–226.
4. Scott Shane, “Cold War’s Riskiest Moment,” Baltimore Sun, August 31, 2003.
5. “Atomic War Film Spurs Nationwide Discussion,” New York Times, November 22, 1983; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York, 1990), 585–586; Beth A. Fisher, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, MO, 2000); Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation and Other Countries on United States–Soviet Relations, January 16, 1984,” http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/11684a.html.
6. Barbara Bush, A Memoir (New York, 1994); George Bush, All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York, 2000); Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: An Unauthorized Biography (Joshua Tree, CA, 2004).
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