The Last Empire (66 page)

Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed a reform that showed the predilection of modern revolutions for eating their own children. If the French Revolution was an inspiration to the Bolsheviks, Western liberalism supplied the ideas and language for Gorbachev's perestroika. Like many before him in Russia, Gorbachev looked to the West for solutions to his country's problems, which manifested themselves in an inability to compete with the West in economic, social, and, eventually, military terms. Ever since the rule of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, Russian elites had sought to adopt Western models in order to catch up with the West. Again and again these models would come into conflict with Russia's society and non-Westernized populace. Some segments of the Russian elite tried repeatedly to change both through military coups, such as the one staged by guards officers in December 1825; liberal reforms, such as those introduced by Tsar Alexander II in the second half of the nineteenth century; or bloody revolutions, such as the one launched by Vladimir Lenin in 1917. Gorbachev's reforms were the latest attempt to catch up with the West by emulating it.

Like his immediate predecessors, Gorbachev did not think that he lived in or ruled over an empire. But his attempts to centralize his rule, eliminate widespread corruption in the Central Asian republics, and bring in a new breed of Russian managers including Boris Yeltsin and his onetime mentor, Gennadii Kolbin, only alienated republican elites, setting off the first anti-Moscow riots in decades. Gorbachev pushed the republican bosses and their retinues even further away by unleashing glasnost, opening the party to media criticism, and forcing the communist elites to earn their right to stay in power by facing elections. As the elites in the Russian regions and the non-Russian republics found themselves dealing with nationalist revolts and democratic challenges to their power, they came to depend more on the ballot box than on the supreme boss in the Kremlin. It was only
a matter of time before they challenged Moscow's rule, demanding autonomy and then independence. With the elites turning their backs on him and nationalists and liberal intellectuals demanding more freedoms, Gorbachev soon had no one to rely on but the army. In the last years of the USSR it would be employed more than once, allegedly without the knowledge of the commander in chief, in one Union republic after another. In March 1991 it would be brought onto the streets of Moscow to intimidate Boris Yeltsin and his supporters.

The fact that until the August coup Gorbachev was not only president of the USSR but also general secretary of the Communist Party made it difficult to distinguish the collapse of communism from the fall of the USSR. It has been argued that after the banning of the party, which allegedly served as a glue binding the republics, there was nothing else to hold the Union together. In fact, by the time of the August coup the party was no longer holding anything together, as its leaders in the republics turned into leaders of republican parliaments and, in many cases, presidents not beholden to Moscow. Party bosses who had already become presidents or would soon do so, such as Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, were now pushing if not for the independence of their republics then for a confederative restructuring of the Union.

Yeltsin's ban on the Communist Party did not cut the ties linking Moscow to the republics, which barely mattered any more outside the Soviet army and the KGB, but provoked a revolt of former party elites against what they regarded as a new coup in Moscow aimed at them. Consultations between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, on one hand, and republican leaders, on the other, continued after the ban on the party, following an established trajectory that no longer had anything to do with the party or the decisions of its governing bodies. Gorbachev managed to maneuver the party out of supreme power long before it was banned in Russia—it was an easy target and scapegoat for the coup, which was led largely by the KGB and the army brass.

In his public pronouncements and, later, in his memoirs, Gorbachev all but monopolized the role of defender of the Soviet Union. He claimed that signing his union treaty was the only way to save the Union, while his opponents were out not only to get him but also to destroy the Union. That was true in many cases but not all. The real struggle in Moscow was being waged not between proponents and opponents of the existing Union but between two visions of a
future union. After the coup, Gorbachev rejected the idea advanced by Boris Yeltsin's advisers to turn the Union into a confederation. Formally he was obliged to accept the confederation principle put forward by Yeltsin as a basis for any future negotiations on the fate of the Union, but in practice he resisted it until after the Belavezha Agreement, when it was too late even for a confederation.

The dividing line between proponents of the two visions of the Union passed not only between Gorbachev and Yeltsin but also through Gorbachev's own camp. Gorbachev's aides Georgii Shakhnazarov and Anatolii Cherniaev were skeptical about their boss's efforts to make the republican leaders sign the new union treaty. The Soviet Union's last minister of defense, Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, considered it a major error on Gorbachev's part that he did not take the idea of confederation seriously. “If Gorbachev had gone halfway to meet the tendencies that comprised the idea of confederation, with common consent that the center should have a monopoly on communications, transport, defense, a joint foreign policy, and other components of social life and activity common to all the republics, who knows in what state structure we would be living now,” wrote Shaposhnikov later in the decade. Like the other top military commanders, he refused to back Gorbachev when the latter asked for the military's help to save his model of the Union before and then after the Belavezha Agreement.
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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.
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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.
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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 intelligentsia, 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.