the long years of Brezhnev's rule became incontro-vertibly a time of stagnation and corruption. Economic indicators generally pointed downward, although thus far only the rate of increase of productivity and product rather than productivity and product themselves declined. In spite of great expenditures and extensive efforts, the condition of Soviet agriculture remained dismal. In industry, as before, quality lagged behind quantity. Even more important, the entire industrial establishment, a direct inheritance from the initial five-year plans, failed to respond competitively to the new age of computers and electronics. Indeed, falling behind in science and technology became one of the main Soviet worries. Military needs continued to devour huge chunks of the gross national product - percentagewise more than twice that devoured in the United States. Stagnation and economic crisis found their natural counterpoints in pessimism and low morale, which pervaded the country.
The first two or three years of the Gorbachev regime, inaugurated on March 11, 1985, displayed a fairly 'traditional' cast. The new Party secretary had to concentrate on strengthening his position, and, indeed, over a period of time he effected a major turnover of ruling and high administrative personnel. Thus on July 1, 1985, Shevardnadze became a member of the Politburo, and on the following day he was appointed foreign minister, replacing Andrei Gromyko, who was moved to a more ceremonial high office. Other new men entered the Politburo, while Victor Grishin, Gorbachev's original rival for the position of Party secretary, retired.
Perestroika, Gorbachev's proposed rebuilding of the Soviet country and system, was loud in promise but, everything considered, initially quite similar to the
proposals and exhortations of earlier Soviet reformers. The draft plan, as presented by Gorbachev in October 1985, called for doubling the national income in fifteen years, with special emphasis on the modernization of equipment and an increase in labor productivity. It was all-important to overcome stagnation, to get the Soviet Union moving. But although the leader spoke of a 'radical transformation of all spheres of life' and although such concepts as profits and profitability, decentralization, initiative, and even market economy and private enterprise increasingly entered national discourse, in practice the effort was limited mainly to an attempt at a speed-up, in particular by eliminating such evils as absenteeism and drunkenness - witness the major anti-alcohol campaign mounted in May 1985 and in subsequent months and years.
Gorbachev showed more originality in gradually promoting the concept of glasnost, or free discussion in speech and print. In its full, or at least rich, development a stunning novelty for Soviet society, it largely won for Gorbachev the initial support of the intellectuals and, even more broadly, of the educated public at home and great acclaim abroad. Foreign praise was powerfully augmented, of course, by the increasingly accommodating and peaceful foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Yet it is worth noting that whereas at the time the deficiencies of the Brezhnev regime were endlessly excoriated and whereas Gorbachev himself resumed de-Stalinization in July 1987 by condemning Stalinist terror, Lenin remained the lodestar of the new course. As of that time perestroika and glasnost, too, were expected to fit neatly into a gloriously reformed, somewhat humanized, and professedly Leninist Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, almost nothing worked during the first years of the Gorbachev regime. The economy would not respond to mere exhortations. Indeed, the government's own economic, especially financial, policies led to budget deficits and inflation and thus made matters worse. Even the anti-alcohol campaign proved to be a disaster, its only incontrovertible result a great increase in the illegal production of spirits, to the extent that sugar disappeared from stores in parts of the U.S.S.R. Before long under the new administration and its vacillating and confusing direction, the economy began to lose what cohesion it had had under Brezhnev without gaining anything to replace it. The war in Afghanistan, exceedingly painful to the population of the Soviet Union, continued to take its toll. On April 28, 1986, a nuclear reactor exploded in Chernobyl; the resulting medical and environmental catastrophe threw a glaring light on multiple Soviet deficiencies, from those in engineering to those in the news media. Indeed, that tragic episode, treated at first in the firm tradition of Stalinist secrecy, eventually became both an opening into glasnost and a strong argument in its favor. But then glasnost itself, a valuable and undeniable achievement of the Gorbachev years, was becoming increasingly dangerous to the Soviet regime and all its plans. Gorbachev's worst miscalculation might well have been his belief that glasnost would strengthen rather than destroy communism. Freedom of speech meant freedom to ask questions, and there were so many questions the Soviet
government would rather not answer. Freedom of speech also meant freedom of different political and other opinions, and consequently the legitimacy of different political and other parties, an obvious conclusion which Gorbachev tried for a time to deny by upholding glasnost but rejecting political pluralism. Glasnost and related measures of liberalization would lead to the appearance of diverse groups - from monarchists to Fascists and from Orthodox clergy to the champions of homosexuals - in the streets and squares of Moscow and other Soviet cities. Perhaps most important, they led to the revival of numerous nationalisms, suppressed but still alive in the Marxist superstate. The new time of troubles, like the original one at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, was to have its national phase.
Because of the number, richness, variety, and specificity of ensuing developments, it is impossible to present in a brief general account an adequate summary of the rise of nationalism, or rather nationalisms, in the Soviet Union after centralized control was removed or even merely weakened. All fifteen constituent republics were radically affected. Moreover, many ethnic subdivisions within these republics and still other ethnic minorities also entered the fray. In line with the nature of nationalism, the relations of the participants were usually antagonistic, sometimes to the point of physical combat. It was illustrative of the many-sided struggle that Tskhinvali, the main town of the South Ossetian Autonomous Region within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, came to be held one-third by the local Ossetian militia, one-third by Georgian nationalist forces, and one-third by the Soviet army. This treatment of the issue of nationalism in the Soviet Union is limited to mentioning a few highlights and suggesting certain emerging patterns.
In many respects, the three Baltic republics - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - led the way. Independent states between the two world wars (and in the case of Lithuania, of course, in the much longer, richer, and more complex historical past), forced to join the Soviet Union only about fifty years ago, and possessed of their own languages and, on the whole, of a skilled and well-educated citizenry, the three republics, once self-expression became possible, made no doubt of their desire for independence. It was in Estonia that the first large-scale non-communist political coalition, the People's Front, received recognition, in June 1988, and it was Estonia that proclaimed on November 17, 1988, the right to reject Soviet laws when they infringed on its autonomy. On January 18, 1989, Estonian became the official language of the republic; legislation was enacted in an even more rigorous form a week later for the Lithuanian language in Lithuania, and still later, after mass demonstrations, for the Latvian language in Latvia. In May 1989, the Lithuanian legislature adopted a resolution seeking independence, and on August 22, 1989, it declared null and void the Soviet occu-
pation and annexation of Lithuania in 1940. In early December 1989, Lithuania became the first republic to abolish the Communist Party's guaranteed monopoly of power, while later that month the Communist Party in Lithuania voted to break away from Moscow, thus becoming the first local and independent Communist Party in the U.S.S.R., and to endorse political separation. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania, led by its president, Vytautas Landsbergis, proclaimed full independence. Events in Estonia and Latvia followed a similar course. It is worth nothing that whereas Lithuanians constituted at least three-quarters of the total population of their republic, Latvians and Estonians composed only a little more than half of theirs, and that all three new states tended toward rather exclusive policies that mandated a single official language and, for citizenship, a residential or familial connection with the pre-Soviet period to eliminate Russian newcomers. Yet in spite of the resulting built-in opposition, which claimed discrimination, in February 1991, 91 per cent of the voters in Lithuania approved independence; in March, referendums in Estonia and Latvia gave independence a three to one majority - clearly, not only the Baits, but also many Russians and people of still other ethnic backgrounds wanted above all to escape the Soviet system.
Gorbachev drastically underestimated the power of nationalism in the Baltic area, as well as elsewhere, and at first tried to ignore or dismiss the demands for recognition and independence. Once the crisis became obvious, he attempted persuasion, political maneuvering with the many elements involved, including different kinds of communists, and coercion, although never to the extent of mass military repression. Thus on January 11, 1990, he
