By Patricia H. Kushlis
Twenty years ago this past week, the 70 year old Communist rule over the once mighty Russian Empire ended. A small group of apparachiki-cum-coup-leaders were turned out by Russians in Moscow and Leningrad taking to the streets and squares in response to a failing coup.
The dissolution of that enormous empire had been in the works for months, or more accurately, years. It didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen in response to a foreign invasion or a Soviet military loss – although the drain of the decade old war in Afghanistan and a militarized economy were contributing factors.
The regime’s collapse happened internally in response to a failed system imposed from the top on an empire of restless and resentful minorities some of whom had seen far better days before their forcible incorporation into a sprawling empire that stretched across Asia from Europe to America and the Artic to the Black Sea.
The dissolution was messy - seemingly chaotic and unpredictable.
It occurred in overlapping maze-like stages - not neat quantifiable steps. And it didn’t happen with help or even official US and other governments’ encouragement despite Ronald Reagan’s seemingly meaningless 1982 proclamation of Baltic Freedom Day nearly a decade earlier.
On August 1, 1991 less than three weeks before the end, President George H.W. Bush had delivered his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech extolling Ukrainians to stay with the Union. High level US administration officials were still so wedded to support for then President Mikhail Gorbachev, the first Soviet leader they could actually talk with in years – if ever, that they continuously cautioned Baltic independence leaders against rocking the then leaky boat adrift on turbulent seas.
Unfortunately, most twentieth anniversary commemorations of the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union disappeared from American view before they had hardly begun.
They were overtaken by the rebirth of the Arab spring with the Libyan rebel forces entering Tripoli after weeks of seeming stalemate in the desert, the made for television gun battles with Gaddafi loyalists, and the disappearance of the country’s former colorful leader and his less colorful sons who, at this writing, are apparently holed up somewhere and last heard from in a futile Gaddafi radio broadcast calling on his loyalists to fight to the finish.
Back to Moscow
Nevertheless, as Fred Weir wrote in the Christian Science Monitor on August 22, 2011 “Why Half the Russians Regret the August 1991 Coup,” its aftermath was far from unanimously acclaimed. Yes, the Yeltsin government made mistakes – including one colossal one which Weir only partially explains. Yeltsin kept the 1978 Russian Republic Constitution in place. This meant that he and his administration faced old Communists and their allies who still controlled the Russian parliament until – that is - Yeltsin used the military to remove them. Had a new Constitution been written and implemented at the outset of the Russian Federation, the 1993 shoot-out at the Russian White House might never have occurred. But then, isn't hindsight always better than foresight?
Food shortages, high prices for basic commodities, fire sales of Soviet assets, traumatic loss of empire and equally important, the unraveling of an economic and social platform or social contract that underpinned a low, but seemingly secure, cradle-to-grave standard of living for all were part and parcel that fueled popular disenchantment with what followed the August coup and remains today. Several of these complaints - especially the food problem and the fraying of the social services support network - were already evident when I visited Leningrad (not yet St. Petersburg) in 1990.
It's not all bad: A mixed result
But what people forget is that the Russian Federation is, in fact, far different from the Soviet Union just a quarter century ago. As Weir also points out, quoting Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies: “it may sounds banal, but people today can travel freely abroad, read whatever they want, listen to the music they like, and enjoy a lot of things that would have been banned in the USSR. People today just don’t understand it all might have been otherwise.”
This, I might add, includes private property ownership as well as the mushrooming of schools and universities unheard of before 1991 despite the all too rampant corruption and dubious scams that emerged like mushrooms after a rain once the Soviet edifice was no longer and that still plague Russia.
There were other major changes as well: some good; others bad.
Shedding many disgruntled minority nationalities was, in my view, among the most positive - for both Russians and the minorities. In fact, one has to wonder why other ethnically geographically compact minorities weren’t also allowed – if not encouraged - to leave – especially those in regions with external borders – old or new.
The European Soviet Republics – including Russia - had paid a high economic price so the Soviet government could maintain its Central Asian empire. Wealth from Russia and the Baltics, for example, was routinely transferred to Central Asia to support the regime there. If I remember correctly, only the Central Asians were not clamoring at the gates upon the Union’s dissolution. No wonder why.
But what did Russia get from them in return?
These Republics did not exactly contain beach front property or Silicon Valley intellectual capital. True, Kazakhstan was and is oil rich but then Russia itself does not lack for petroleum reserves. And the Russian Empire’s version of Manifest Destiny was not destroyed – this enormous country still stretches from the Baltic to the Pacific across 9 time zones and 1/8th of the earth’s inhabited territory. It maintains a nuclear arsenal second only to the US - far more than either will ever need - as well as the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council and in other international organizations.
Meanwhile, Russia’s problems in the Caucasus continue to fester. The worst: Moscow’s Chechen headache will not end until and unless this north Caucasus region is let go and also economically stabilized. It could have happened constitutionally and with Russian help – but instead, the Russian Federation waged war against the Chechens – first under Yeltsin then under Putin – playing off intra-Chechen rivalries in the ages old game of divide and rule. Yet, the anti-Russian Chechen insurgency is not likely to evaporate in thin air. The roots are just too old and deep.
Sometimes true federation or even confederation – which is what the Gorbachev Constitution that set off the 1991 coup was all about - can make a difference – but Putin’s centralization of power in Moscow and his tough line against the Chechens – is likely just a band aid that buys time- not a permanent solution.
Meanwhile today’s Tripoli saga continues to dominate the airwaves here – that is, on the channels that actually carry international news.
August 27, 2011 addendum: See Ambassador James Collins' excellent first person account Fall of the Soviet Union: the Inside Story from the vantage point of the US Embassy in Moscow where he was then in charge.