Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (129 page)

After a hectic six months during which virtually every other major Soviet republic asserted its ‘sovereignty’ if not yet its full independence, Gorbachev’s position was becoming untenable. His efforts to rein in the Baltic initiatives had substantially weakened his image as a ‘reformer’, while his failure to suppress talk of autonomy, sovereignty and independence was stirring up resentment among his colleagues and—more ominously—in the army and security forces. On December 20th 1990 his Foreign Minister, Edvard Shevardnadze, resigned and warned publicly of the growing risk of a coup.

On January 10th 1991, with the US and its allies thoroughly distracted by the Gulf War then getting under way in Iraq, Gorbachev issued an ultimatum to the Lithuanians, demanding in his capacity as President of the Union that they adhere forthwith to the Constitution of the USSR. The following day soldiers from the élite forces of the KGB and the Soviet Ministry of the Interior seized public buildings in Vilnius and installed a ‘National Salvation Committee’. Twenty four hours later they attacked the radio and television studios in the city, turning their guns on a large crowd of demonstrators who had gathered there: fourteen civilians were killed, 700 wounded. A week later troops from the same units stormed the Latvian Ministry of the Interior in Riga, killing four people.

The bloodshed in the Baltics signaled the opening of the endgame in the Soviet Union. Within a week over 150,000 people had gathered in Moscow to demonstrate against the shootings. Boris Yeltsin, erstwhile First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee and—since May 1990—Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, traveled to Tallinn to sign a mutual recognition of ‘sovereignty’ between Russia and the Baltic Republics, bypassing altogether the Soviet authorities. In March 1991 referenda in Latvia and Estonia confirmed that electors there too overwhelmingly favored full independence. Gorbachev, who had half-heartedly started to repress the recalcitrant republics, now reverted to his earlier stance and vainly sought a
modus vivendi
with them instead.

But the Soviet President was now under attack from both sides. His reluctance to crush the Balts definitively alienated his military allies (two of the generals who staged the attacks in Vilnius and Riga would figure prominently in the subsequent coup in Moscow). But his former friends and admirers no longer trusted him. Yeltsin in March 1991 publicly denounced Gorbachev’s ‘lies and deceptions’ and called for his resignation, defying official pressure to remain silent or face impeachment. Meanwhile the Baltic example was being taken up in other republics.

So long as the overarching structures of Soviet power remained secure, Communist rulers from Ukraine to Kazakhstan had confined their ‘reforms’ to cautious mimicry of Gorbachev himself. But following the débâcle in the Baltics the same well-honed antennae that attuned them to
perestroika
now signaled that the Union itself might well be doomed; in any case they could see for themselves that in certain ruling circles the Soviet President was a marked man. Thus whereas the new politics of the Baltic republics reflected a genuine and widespread national renaissance, moves towards ‘sovereignty’ in many of the other republics were typically a more variable mixture of national feeling and
nomenklatura
self-preservation. There was also a growing element of fear: a sense that if security and authority were crumbling at the apex—or, worse, might soon be forcibly and unilaterally reasserted by Gorbachev’s foes—then it would be prudent to gather the essential reins of power into local hands. Finally, there was a dawning awareness among Soviet managers that should the center fall apart an awful lot of valuable public assets would be up for grabs: party property, mineral rights, farms, factories, tax revenues and so forth.

By far the most important of the would-be ‘sovereign’ republics now asserting their distinctive claims was Ukraine.
³¹²
Like the Baltic republics, Ukraine had a history of independence (albeit chequered), last asserted and promptly lost in the aftermath of World War One. It was also intimately associated with Russia’s own history: in the eyes of many Russian nationalists, Kievan ‘Rus’—the thirteenth-century kingdom based on the Ukrainian capital and reaching from the Carpathians to the Volga—was as integral to the core identity of the empire as Russia itself. But of more immediate and practical consideration were the material resources of the region.

Sitting squarely athwart Russia’s access routes to the Black Sea (and the Mediterranean) as well as to central Europe, Ukraine was a mainstay of the Soviet economy. With just 2.7 percent of the land area of the USSR it was home to 18 percent of its population and generated nearly 17 percent of the country’s Gross National Product, second only to Russia itself. In the last years of the Soviet Union Ukraine contained 60 percent of the country’s coal reserves and a majority share of the country’s titanium (vital for modern steel production); its unusually rich soil was responsible for over 40 percent of Soviet agricultural output by value.

The disproportionate importance of Ukraine in Russian and Soviet history was reflected in the Soviet leadership itself. Both Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were Russians who hailed from eastern Ukraine—Khrushchev returning there in the 1930s as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Party. Konstantin Chernenko was the son of Ukrainian ‘kulaks’ deported to Siberia, while Yuri Andropov had risen to the top as a consequence of occupying the strategically central post of KGB head in Ukraine. But this close association between the Ukrainian republic and the Soviet leadership did not imply any special regard for its inhabitants.

Quite the contrary. For much of its history as a Soviet republic, Ukraine was treated as an internal colony: its natural resources exploited, its people kept under close surveillance (and, in the 1930s, exposed to a program of punitive repression that amounted to near-genocide). Ukrainian products—notably food and ferrous metals—were shipped to the rest of the Union at heavily subsidized prices, a practice that continued almost to the end. Following World War Two, the Ukrainian Socialist Republic was considerably enlarged by the annexation from Poland of eastern Galicia and western Volhynia: the local Polish population, as we have seen, was expelled westwards in exchange for ethnic Ukrainians forced out of Poland itself.

These population exchanges—and the wartime extermination of much of the local Jewish community—resulted in a region that was by Soviet standards quite homogenous: thus whereas the Russian Republic in 1990 contained over one hundred minorities, thirty one of them living in autonomous regions, Ukraine was 84 percent Ukrainian. Most of the rest of the population were Russians (11 percent), with the remainder comprising small numbers of Moldovans, Poles, Magyars, Bulgarians and the country’s surviving Jews. Perhaps more to the point the only significant minority—the Russians—was concentrated in the industrial east of the country and in the capital Kiev.

Central and Western Ukraine, notably around Lviv, the second city, was predominantly Ukrainian in language and Eastern Orthodox or else Uniate (Greek-rite Catholic) in religion. Thanks to the relative tolerance of the Habsburgs, Ukrainians in Galicia had been allowed to preserve their native tongue. Depending upon district, anything from 78 percent to 91 percent of the local inhabitants used it as their first language in 1994, whereas in the territories once ruled by the Czar even those who identified themselves as Ukrainians often spoke Russian more readily.

The Soviet constitution, as we have seen, ascribed national identities to the residents of its separate republics and indeed defined all its citizens by ethnic-national categories. As elsewhere, so in Ukraine—particularly the recently-annexed Western Ukraine—this had self-fulfilling consequences. In earlier times, when the local language was mostly confined to the remote countryside, and the cities were Russian-speaking and Soviet-dominated, the theoretically decentralized and federal character of this union of national republics was of interest only to scholars and Soviet apologists. But with the growing number of urban-dwelling Ukrainian-speakers, Ukrainian-language media, and a political élite now identifying itself with self-consciously ‘Ukrainian’ interests, Ukrainian nationalism was the predictable accompaniment to Soviet fragmentation.
³¹³

A non-Party movement—RUKH (the ‘People’s Movement for
Perestroika
’)—was founded in Kiev in November 1988, the first autonomous Ukrainian political organization for many decades. It gathered considerable support, notably in the major cities and from ‘60s-era reform Communists; but in marked contrast to independence movements in the Baltic it could not automatically count on mass backing and did not reflect any groundswell of national sentiment. In elections to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in March 1990 the Communists secured a clear majority; RUKH won less than a quarter of the seats.

Thus it was not Ukrainian nationalists who were to seize the initiative but rather the Communists themselves. The Communists in the Ukrainian Soviet voted, on July 16th 1990, to declare Ukrainian ‘sovereignty’ and asserted the republic’s right to possess its own military and the primacy of its own laws. And it was under the direction of Leonid Kravchuk—a Communist
apparatchik
and former ‘Secretary for ideological questions’ of the Ukrainian Party—that Ukrainians took part in a March 1991 all-Union referendum and indicated their continuing support for a federal system, albeit ‘renewed’ (in Gorbachev’s term). Only in Western Ukraine, where voters were asked whether they favored outright independence over intra-federal sovereignty, were the Ukrainian Communists outflanked by those seeking a complete break with Moscow: 88 percent voted yes. Kravchuk and his fellow Party leaders duly took note, while cautiously awaiting the outcome of developments elsewhere.

This pattern was repeated in the smaller western Soviet republics as well, varying according to local circumstances. Byelorussia (or ‘Belarus’), to the north of Ukraine, had no comparable national identity or traditions. The ephemeral independent ‘Belarusan (
sic
) National Republic’ of 1918 never secured external recognition and many of its own citizens felt closer allegiance to Russia, or else Poland or Lithuania. After World War Two, with the annexation of parts of eastern Poland, the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic contained a significant minority of Russians, Poles and Ukrainians. Belarussians themselves—though by far the largest linguistic community in the republic—showed no sign of wanting or expecting sovereignty of any kind; nor could their country, heavily dependent on Russia, hope to sustain genuine independence.

A poor, marshy region better suited to livestock-rearing than large scale agriculture, Belarus had been devastated by the war. Its most significant contribution to the post-war Soviet economy was in chemicals and flax—and in its strategic position athwart major gas lines and communication links from Moscow to the Baltic Sea. The nearest thing to an independence movement was Adradzhenne (‘Rebirth’), an organization based in the capital Minsk that emerged in 1989 and closely echoed the Ukrainian RUKH. In Belarus as in Ukraine, the Soviet elections of 1990 saw the Communists returned in a clear majority; and when the Ukrainian Soviet declared itself ‘sovereign’ in July 1990 its northern neighbour duly followed suit two weeks later. In Minsk as in Kiev, the local
nomenklatura
was moving prudently, waiting upon events in Moscow.

Soviet Moldavia, squeezed between Ukraine and Romania, was a different and rather more interesting case.
³¹⁴
The territory in question—‘Bessarabia’ as it was better-known under the Czars—had see-sawed back and forth between Russia and Romania over the course of the century and the fortunes of war. Its four and a half million residents were predominantly Moldavian, but with large Russian and Ukrainian minorities and quite a significant number of Bulgarians, Jews, gypsies and Gagauz (a Turkic-speaking Orthodox people living near the Black Sea). In this characteristically imperial mix of peoples the majority were Romanian-speakers; but under Soviet rule—the better to separate them from neighbouring Romanians—the citizens of Moldavia had been constrained to write their language in Cyrillic and describe themselves not as Romanians but as ‘Moldovans’.

National identity here was thus more than a little uncertain. On the one hand many of its people, especially in the capital Chisinau (Kishinev), spoke Russian well and thought of themselves as Soviet citizens; on the other hand the Romanian connection (in history and in language) provided a bridge to Europe and a basis for burgeoning demands for increased autonomy. When a ‘Popular Front’ movement emerged in 1989 its primary objective was the demand that Romanian become the official language of the republic, a concession that the local Communist authorities granted that same year. There was also some incendiary talk, mostly speculative and actively discouraged from Bucharest, of Moldova ‘rejoining’ Romania itself.

Following the 1990 elections, in which the Popular Front won a majority, the new government proceeded first to change the name of the republic from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic to the ‘Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova’ (later plain ‘Republic of Moldova’) and then, in June, to declare itself sovereign. These largely symbolic moves caused rising anxiety and talk of pre-emptive separatism among Russian-speakers as well as the tiny Gagauz community. Following a referendum on autonomy in the autumn of 1990 the Communist leadership in Tiraspol—the main town in eastern Moldova, across the Dniester river, where Russians and Ukrainians formed a local majority—declared a Transnistrian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, echoing a similarly ‘autonomous’ Gagauz Soviet Socialist Republic in the southeast.

Given that there are at most 160,000 Gagauz, and that ‘Transnistria’ is a banana-shaped sliver of land, just 4,000 square kilometers in area with a population of fewer than 500,000, the emergence of such ‘autonomous republics’ might seem absurd, the
reductio ad absurdum
of ‘invented traditions’ and ‘imagined nations’. But whereas the Gagauz republic never got beyond proclaiming its existence (the future Moldovan state would re-incorporate it peacefully, against a right to secede should Moldova ever ‘rejoin’ Romania), Transnistrian ‘independence’ was underwritten by the presence of the Soviet (later Russian) XIVth Army, which helped its clients fight off initial Moldovan attempts to recover the territory.