Postwar

24th) resigned as its General Secretary, it was too late. Communism was now irrelevant, and so too was Mikhail Gorbachev.

Of course, the former General Secretary was still President of the Soviet Union. But the relevance of the Union itself was now directly in question. The failed putsch had been the last and greatest impulse to secession. Between August 24th and September 21st Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Tajikistan and Armenia followed the Baltic republics and declared themselves independent of the Soviet Union— most of them making the announcement in the confused and uncertain days that followed Gorbachev’s return.[330] Following Kravchuk’s lead in Ukraine, regional First Secretaries like Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan, Askar Akaev in Kyrgyzstan, Gaidar Aliev in Azerbaijan, Stanislav Shushkevich in Belarus and others cannily distanced themselves from their longstanding Party affiliation and re-situated themselves at the head of their new states, taking care to nationalize as quickly as possible all the local Party’s assets.

Gorbachev and the Supreme Soviet in Moscow could do little more than acknowledge reality, recognize the new states and lamely propose yet another ‘new’ constitution that would embrace the independent republics in some sort of con-federal arrangement. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards away, Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament were establishing an independent Russia. By November Yeltsin had taken under Russian control virtually all financial and economic activity on Russian territory. The Soviet Union was now a shell state, emptied of power and resources.

By this time the core institutions of the USSR were either in the hands of independent states or else had ceased to exist: on October 24th the KGB itself was formally abolished. When Gorbachev proposed a new ‘Treaty on the Economic Community of Sovereign States’ most of the independent republics simply refused to sign. At the October sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR the western republics were absent. Finally, on December 8th, the presidents and prime ministers of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus—the core Slav states of the Soviet empire—took it upon themselves to meet near Minsk and denounce the Union Treaty of 1922, in effect abolishing the Soviet Union. In its place they proposed establishing a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Upon hearing of this, Gorbachev in Moscow angrily denounced the move as ‘illegal and dangerous’. But the opinions of the President of the Soviet Union were no longer a matter of concern to anyone: as Gorbachev at last was coming to appreciate, he was effectively in charge of nothing. Nine days later, on December 17th, Gorbachev met with Yeltsin and they agreed (or, rather, Gorbachev conceded) that the Soviet Union must be formally abolished: its ministries, embassies and armies were to pass under Russian control, its place under international law to be inherited by the Russian Republic.

Twenty-four hours later Gorbachev announced his intention to resign as Soviet President. On Christmas Day 1991 the Russian flag replaced the Soviet insignia atop the Kremlin: Mikhail Gorbachev ceded his prerogatives as Commander-in-Chief to President Yeltsin of Russia and stepped down from his post. Within forty-eight hours Gorbachev had vacated his office and Yeltsin moved in. At midnight on December 31st 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union was a remarkable affair, unparalleled in modern history. There was no foreign war, no bloody revolution, no natural catastrophe. A large industrial state—a military superpower— simply collapsed: its authority drained away, its institutions evaporated. The unraveling of the USSR was not altogether free of violence, as we have seen in Lithuania and the Caucasus; and there would be more fighting in some of the independent republics in the coming years. But for the most part the world’s largest country departed the stage almost without protest. To describe this as a bloodless retreat from Empire is surely accurate; but it hardly begins to capture the unanticipated ease of the whole process.

Why, then, was it all so apparently painless? Why, after decades of internal violence and foreign aggression, did the world’s first Socialist society implode without even trying to defend itself? One answer, of course, is that it never really existed in the first place: that, in the words of the historian Martin Malia, ‘there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.’ But if this accounts for the futility of Communist authority in the satellite states, held in place by nothing more than the shadow of the Red Army, it does not quite suffice to explain what happened in the imperial homeland itself. Even if the society that Communism claimed to have built was essentially fraudulent, the Leninist state, after all, was decidedly real. And it was a home-grown product.

Part of the answer is Mikhail Gorbachev’s unintended success in eviscerating the administrative and repressive apparatus on which the Soviet state depended. Once the Party lost its grip, once it was clear that the army or the KGB would not be deployed without mercy to break the regime’s critics and punish dissent—and this did not become clear until 1991—then the naturally centrifugal tendencies of a huge land empire came to the fore. Only then did it become evident—seventy years of energetic claims to the contrary notwithstanding—that there was indeed no Communist society as such: only a wilting state and its anxious citizens.

But—and this is the second aspect of the explanation—the Soviet state did not in fact disappear. The USSR shattered, rather, into a multiplicity of little successor states, most of them ruled by experienced Communist autocrats whose first instinct was to reproduce and impose the systems and the authority they had hitherto wielded as Soviet managers. There was no ‘transition to democracy’ in most of the successor republics; that transition came—if it came at all—somewhat later. Autocratic state power, the only kind that most denizens of the domestic Soviet empire had ever known, was not so much dethroned as downsized. From the outside this was a dramatic change; but experienced from within its implications were decidedly less radical.

Moreover, whereas the local Communist secretaries who metamorphosed so smoothly into national state presidents had every reason to act decisively to secure their fiefdom, the Soviet authorities at the center had no territorial fiefdom of their own to protect. All they could offer was a return to the decrepit structures that Gorbachev had so enthusiastically cut down; unsurprisingly, they lacked the will to battle on.[331] The only former Communist leader with a power base in Moscow itself was Boris Yeltsin; he, as we have seen, did indeed act decisively—but on behalf of a renascent ‘Russia’.

Thus the efflorescence of successor states should not be interpreted as evidence that the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of a hitherto quiescent, newly reawakened nationalism in its constituent republics. With the exception of the Baltic countries, whose trajectory more closely resembled that of their western neighbours,the Soviet republics were themselves a product of Soviet planning and—as we have seen—were typically quite ethnically complex. Even in the newly-independent states there were many vulnerable minorities (especially the omnipresent Russians)—erstwhile Soviet citizens with good reason to regret the loss of ‘imperial’ protection and who would prove distinctly ambivalent about their new circumstances.

They were not alone. When President George Bush visited Kiev on August 1st 1991 he made a point of publicly recommending to Ukrainians that they remain in the Soviet Union. ‘Some people’ he declared, ‘have urged the United States to choose between supporting President Gorbachev and supporting independence-minded leaders throughout the USSR. I consider this a false choice. President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things… We will maintain the strongest possible relationship with the Soviet Government of President Gorbachev.’ This rather hamfisted attempt to shore up the increasingly vulnerable Soviet President was not quite tantamount to an endorsement of the Soviet Union… but it came perilously close.

The American President’s publicly-aired caution is a further salutary reminder of the limited part played by the USA in these developments. Pace the self-congratulatory narrative that has entered the American public record, Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism—Communism imploded of its own accord. Meanwhile, if his Ukrainian audience ignored Bush’s advice and voted overwhelmingly a few months later to quit the Union for good, it was not out of a sudden access of patriotic enthusiasm. Independence in Ukraine, or Moldova, or even Georgia, was not so much about self-determination as self-preservation—a sound basis for state-making, as it turned out, but a poor foundation for democracy.

Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it. Much the same was true of the break-up of Czechoslovakia, the ‘velvet divorce’ between Slovaks and Czechs that was peaceably and amicably consummated on January 1st 1993. At first glance this would appear a textbook instance of the natural onrush of ethnic sentiments into the vacuum left by Communism: the ‘return of history’ in the form of national revival. And that, of course, is how it was advertised by many of the local protagonists. But on closer inspection the division of Czechoslovakia into two separate states—Slovakia and the Czech Republic—illustrates once again, on a provincial