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
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 (
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
Soviet Moldavia, squeezed between Ukraine and Romania, was a different and rather more interesting case.[324] 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 preemptive 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
In the increasingly uncertain mood of the times, Soviet (and later Russian) authorities were not at all reluctant to offer patronage to a micro-state that was of necessity loyal to Moscow, wholly dependent on Russian goodwill and whose rulers were local Communist satraps who had seized control of the territory and would convert it in short order into a haven for smugglers and money-launderers. Transnistria being the source of 90 percent of Moldova’s electricity, the new rulers even had a legitimate economic resource of sorts, one that they could threaten to withhold should Chisinau refuse to cooperate.
Transnistrian independence was not recognized by Moldova or anyone else: even Moscow never went so far as to accord the breakaway region official legitimacy. But the scission in tiny Moldova offered a foretaste of more serious troubles to come a few hundred kilometers further east, in the Caucasus. There the longstanding antagonisms between Armenians and Azeris, complicated in particular by the presence in Azerbaijan of a substantial Armenian minority in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, had already resulted in violent clashes both with each other and with Soviet troops in 1988, with hundreds of casualties.[325] In the Azerbaijan capital of Baku there were further clashes in January of the following year.
In neighbouring Georgia, twenty demonstrators were shot during clashes in the capital Tbilisi between nationalists and soldiers in April 1989, as tensions rose between crowds demanding secession from the Union and authorities still committed to preserving it. But Soviet Georgia, like the neighbouring Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, was too geographically vulnerable and ethnically complex to be able to contemplate with equanimity the insecurity that must accompany Soviet collapse. Accordingly the local authorities decided to anticipate that eventuality by precipitating it, the ruling Communist parties re-defining themselves as national independence movements and regional Party leaders—of whom by far the best known was Edvard Shevardnadze in Georgia—positioning themselves to seize power as soon as it fell into the street.
By the spring of 1991, then, everyone at the peripheries was waiting to see what would happen at the centre. The key, of course, was Russia itself—by far the dominant republic of the Union, with half the country’s population, three-fifths of its Gross National Product and three-quarters of its land mass. In a certain sense the country of ‘Russia’ as such did not exist: it had for centuries been an empire, whether in fact or in aspiration. Spread across eleven time zones and encompassing dozens of different peoples, ‘Russia’ had always been too big to be reduced to a single identity or common sense of purpose.[326]
During and after the Great Patriotic War the Soviet authorities had indeed played the Russian card, appealing to national pride and exalting the ‘victory of the Russian people’. But the Russian people had never been assigned ‘nationhood’ in the way that Kazakhs or Ukrainians or Armenians were officially ‘nations’ in Soviet parlance. There was not even a separate ‘Russian’ Communist Party. To be Russian was to be Soviet. There was a natural complementarity between the two: in a post-imperial age the Soviet Union provided cover for the Russian imperial state, while ‘Russia’ furnished the Soviet Union with historical and territorial legitimacy. The boundaries between ‘Russia’ and ‘the Soviet Union’ were thus kept (deliberately) blurred.[327]
By the time of Gorbachev there was a marked increase in the emphasis on ‘Russianness’, for some of the same reasons that the East German state had begun to take a very public pride in Frederick the Great and to exalt the properly
