‘Constitution of the State of Lithuania’ and nullifying the authority in the Republic of Lithuania of the Constitution of the USSR.
It says a lot about the uncertain state of affairs in 1990—when even the government of the Russian Republic itself was now asserting its ‘sovereignty’ and the precedence of Russian laws over ‘all-Union’ decrees— that the Soviet rulers’ response to the Vilnius declaration was to initiate nothing more threatening than an economic boycott: unable to prevent a Lithuanian breakaway, Gorbachev was nonetheless still capable of forestalling the military intervention that many of his hard-line colleagues were now demanding. Even the boycott itself was abandoned in June, in return for a Lithuanian agreement to ‘suspend’ the full implementation of its declaration of independence.
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 elite 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
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 debacle in the Baltics the same well-honed antennae that attuned them to
By far the most important of the would-be ‘sovereign’ republics now asserting their distinctive claims was Ukraine.[322] 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 elite now identifying itself with self-consciously ‘Ukrainian’ interests, Ukrainian nationalism was the predictable accompaniment to Soviet fragmentation.[323]
A non-Party movement—RUKH (the ‘People’s Movement for
