The Atlantic and Its Enemies

in which the chief judge himself committed suicide. Iliescu, who had managed very cleverly to avoid contamination, took over, with a government of former Communists; soon he too was using ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ to put down the dissidents. This ‘revolution’ had been a montage if ever there was one, down to faked massacres: but it was soon followed by the greatest montage of them all, the coup of August 1991 in Moscow.

The ‘dissent’ that had the greatest explosive potential was indeed national. It was one and perhaps even the main factor in the very creation of the USSR that Russia consisted of several nations, some tiny, some large, some Slav, some Turkic. If you included the Ukraine among them, then half the population was non-Russian. The early Communists had found allies among these peoples, one remark being to the effect that the Revolution had been made by ‘Latvian rifles, Jewish brains and Russian fools’. Moslems in the Caucasus and Central Asia, like the Tatars in Russia proper, had made common cause with Lenin and at one level were rewarded, in that early schooling and basic newspapers were made available in native languages. However, in Stalin’s time Russification became the rule, and with let-ups from time to time so it remained. Because the regime operated strict censorship, the nationalist discontent hardly showed; when it did, there were vast camp-sentences for the people involved. In the 1950s semi-thaw, here and there, discontent emerged. Stalin had deported whole peoples, of whom a third would die during or just after the transport to some Central Asian waste, and the regime could also divide and rule, setting peoples against each other by the award of some territory to a different republic. This was done when the Crimea was handed to the Ukraine by Khrushchev, or, earlier, when Nagorny Karabakh, widely Armenian, was assigned to Azerbaidjan, in the capital of which, Baku, there was also a substantial Armenian population. Russians flooded into the Baltic states, though less so to Lithuania, for whatever reason. What was so very strange was that the Russians themselves were poorer than most of the others, imperial people though they might be, and the contrast with the satellites (except for Romania) was even more striking. Estonians ate 87 kilos of meat per head per annum and Russians 66 kilos; Estonians had three times as many motor cars; Baltic consumer goods were of higher quality as well; Azerbaidjan ate better because private plots were larger and less threatened. Russians muttered that they were parting with cheap energy to make these things possible, and also grumbled at the low levels of culture in Central Asia, which swallowed investment and made babies. However, as regards nationalities, tectonic plates were shifting.

Something of a Russian cultural revival got under way, with, in 1965, a society for the preservation of old buildings (something vastly needed) with 15 million members. A cult of Andrey Rublev developed; Suzdal was restored as a ‘museum city’ and the Golden Ring towns, little Moscows, complete with jewel-like Kremlins of their own, such as Uglich or Rostov, followed. Historians who wished to avoid overt politics could work on medieval themes, and there were writers who lamented what was happening to the language and to nature itself (particularly Valentin Rasputin, but also a Kirghiz, Cingiz Aitmatov, who, later on, was promoted as an instance of multi-nationalism). There was always at least potentially an anti-semitic element in this, given that Jews were crudely accused of hating old Russia. Religion was, again, potentially involved in this, and the regime kept a close eye upon it, not a single bishop being appointed without Central Committee say-so. Orthodox clergymen sent to the West, for the World Council of Churches, were straightforwardly agents, spouting Moscow’s lines on peace. A council of religious affairs and KGB oversight meant infiltration and control, though in Central Asia (and especially in Chechnya) resistance was stoutly managed, the more so as Islam was a way of life and not just a cult. Khrushchev, in pursuit of modernization and the creation of ‘new Soviet man’, persecuted religion, and since it could buttress nationalism closed churches. In 1981 another atheist campaign brought about the demolition of 300 of them, mostly in the Ukraine, while the devout might also lose their jobs, and monks were sometimes sadistically persecuted. Khrushchev had also been quite harsh as regards lesser nationalities, and little Siberian peoples could almost be wiped out with drink. Under Brezhnev, there was some lightening, and ethnographic institutes studied the lesser nationalities quite thoroughly. Brezhnev himself spoke, at the 23rd Congress in 1966, of the need for ‘solicitude’ as regards ‘peculiarities’; he also claimed that ‘the national question is now resolved completely and irrevocably’; Andropov remarked that Russian ‘has entered quite naturally into the lives of millions of people of all nationalities’. Brezhnev’s policy had been to appoint loyal ‘natives’, which led to some odd outcomes.

There was even a weird descant on the old French line, applicable in a surprisingly large number of countries, that ‘the south governs and the north works’: Ukrainians made up over 80 per cent of the Politburo in 1979. Under Petro Shelest and then Vladimir Shcherbitsky, a Ukrainian but also a Russifier, Kiev went its peculiar way as the Moscow centre came to rely on local ‘barons’ who could promote their own nationality, though in the form almost of a freemasonry. In this way, Haydar Aliev in Azerbaidjan or Leonid Kravchuk in the Ukraine were able to emerge as national leaders when the USSR itself disintegrated; in Central Asia the transition was even smoother. There, a system not far from apartheid developed, as Islam was a way of life almost independent of institutions, and there was almost no way of controlling, say, circumcision (although a fatwa pronounced it unhealthy in 1962). The four Sufi tarikat flourished surreptitiously, and Murids avoided contact with non-Moslems; after 1970 the proportion of the European population declined, and Moslems rose from one eighth to one fifth of the whole. Only in Kazakhstan did the Russian element rise, in proportion. To placate the locals, the great Uzbek monuments at Tashkent and Samarkand were restored, partly as a gambit in foreign policy, given Moscow’s closeness to the Arabs. But mosques were also closed down, and only twenty men were allowed to go on the Mecca pilgrimage every year. This was not reflected in Moscow, where there were few non-Slavs, but, short of Stalinist methods, there was no way to run the localities except through these locals, even if Andropov tried to break the system in the Caucasus by having ‘workers’ representatives’ somehow pushed in.

In the early 1970s, while accepting the Germans’ Ostpolitik, Andropov had told the Politburo what, in effect, the strategy was. The Soviet Union was falling behind the United States, and in areas that mattered, as distinct from kitchen equipment. He even hinted that, one day, the Soviet Union might just abandon central and eastern Europe, as a liability. Get rid of the Berlin Wall, cultivate good and profitable relations with Germany, fall back within the Soviet borders, and use the respite to recoup: it was not bad, as Leninist strategy, and in effect the various coups of 1989 were in some degree provoked or stage-managed, though none quite as obviously so as that in Romania. So far so good: Gorbachev was hero of the hour in the West, which, Germans in the lead, did indeed offer a great deal of money. However, Andropov’s strategy went wrong: he had clearly utterly underestimated the threat that would come, within those borders, from separatist nationalism, and officials had always claimed that Communism had solved the problem. But in 1990 this began to spread — in the event, overnight destroying the entire Soviet Union.

The process was devious, but the main lines were clear enough. Already in the later 1970s there had been a great many detailed studies as to how reform should be conducted, and at the 27th Congress, early in 1986, these had been implemented. After ‘acceleration’ there was to be ‘reconstruction’, the famous perestroyka. Great slabs of prose were then written about this, but the Party shrank back from any sort of private property, and the most that emerged was permission for a few small co-operatives. Later on, there was talk of ‘joint ventures’ with the West, a scheme by which the West supplied capital and knowledge, and the Soviet side the land. For the moment very few of these emerged, and they did not last for long, as the Western investors soon found themselves losing money through this or that administrative trick, what the French call chicane. Then there was the even more famous glasnost, ‘openness’ or perhaps just ‘criticism’: the intellectuals, the periodicals, the press were now free to discuss earlier taboo subjects. Ridiculous pieces of censorship were set aside, as for instance with the great writer Mikhail Bulgakov, and the historians were supposed to become less dishonest. This, welcomed universally, was not quite what it seemed: Bulgakov had been quite widely read in pirated editions, and no-one really needed to be told about the crimes of Stalin all over again. It can even be said that when, later on, some archives were opened, there were remarkably few ‘revelations’, or at any rate there was very little that came as a surprise. Still, what there was, in a Soviet context, was remarkable enough, and in Germany there was ‘Gorbymania’. By 1989, under pressure to show democratic credentials, Gorbachev did allow a Congress of People’s Deputies, in which roughly a fifth of the members had been freely elected. In that context, Russian nationalism now emerged in great strength, as the figure of Boris Yeltsin took the lead.

Yeltsin was an odd hero, yet another of those sinister clowns whom Russian history throws up. His background was pure Party, and he was mayor of Moscow from 1985 to 1987; there he criticized Party privileges, and attacked Gorbachev himself. He was then humiliated and sacked. However, he had his friends, and they were now advancing the cause of Russian nationalism: Russians were poor, and blamed the ungrateful empire for this; get rid of it, and keep the fabulous material resources of Siberia. Yeltsin was elected to Gorbachev’s Congress in