5 THE FATE OF THE SOVIET UNION WHY DID IT END? [It is] the question of all questions. LEON ONIKOV, VETERAN COMMUNIST OFFICIAL

MOST explanations of the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 assume in one way or another that it had been unreformable. But if that was not the case, why did the vast state long known as the world’s “second superpower,” one that had survived and even grown stronger from repeated turmoil, trauma, and internal changes during its seventy-four-year existence, abruptly disappear? For the answer, or to search for an answer, we must first recall the context in which that historic event occurred.

By mid-1990, in the sixth year of Gorbachev’s reforms, the Soviet Union was being destabilized by growing crises and disorder on almost every front—economic, social, and political. During the next year and a half, the government’s budget deficit and foreign debt soared, as did inflation caused by relaxed controls over wages and the money supply, while the state’s financial resources—gravely depleted by the plunge in world prices for Soviet oil since 1985—declined to virtually nothing. By 1991, production had begun to fall, and a growing number of basic consumer goods all but disappeared from state shops. The economic hardships—rationing was introduced in several regions for some essential goods—shattered any remaining social consensus about Gorbachev’s perestroika. Many Soviet citizens now wanted the reforms ended, even reversed; an influential minority called for more far-reaching and rapid economic marketization and privatization; and still others, in an older Russian tradition, were “waiting for a Messiah,”¹ a role soon ascribed to Boris Yeltsin.

The political crisis was the most serious, threatening to destabilize the Soviet state from bottom to top. Gorbachev’s democratization measures had created public space for all manner of long repressed discontents and newly aroused demands. By 1991, this space was being amply filled by, elections across this most vast country; nationalist demands for more sovereignty in many republics, including outright secession in the Baltics Western Ukraine, and parts of the Caucasus, and even ethnic pogroms; mass political strikes by miners in the coal fields of Russia and Ukraine; and a nationwide “rally mania” featuring large anti-Communist (and, often overlooked, pro-Communist) demonstrations in the streets of Moscow and other cities.²

Meanwhile, parliamentary elections in the Soviet Russian Republic in 1990 produced a movement of self-described “radical reformers” rallying around the maverick former Politburo candidate Yeltsin. Virtually all of the prominent new “radical democrats,” as they also called themselves, had begun as Communist Party members and fervent Gorbachev supporters. In the summer of 1990, following Yeltsin’s lead, a growing number of them began deserting the Party, repudiating both its present-day role and historical record all the way back through Stalin to Lenin himself.

Gorbachev’s personal leadership was also in deep crisis. In the second half of 1990, his public popularity, which had remained remarkably high for five years, fell precipitously while Yeltsin’s soared.³ His authority was further diminished in June 1991, when Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Republic by popular vote; Gorbachev’s presidency of the Soviet Union, bestowed by a vote of its Congress the pervious year, now seemed substantially less legitimate. The same was true of his once liberator-like standing with the proreform intelligentsia, which had been perhaps his most important constituency. No longer united around him or by his conception of a socialist reformation, some of its best-known figures, his own “foremen of glasnost and perestroika,” defected to Yeltsin.

More ominously in those uncertain conditions between dismantled dictatorship and democracy, support for Gorbachev in the Party-state elite plummeted. By the fall of 1990, his original perestroika coalition with moderate nomenklatura reformers, which had enabled him to enact such great changes since 1985, had completely collapsed. For its most influential members, notably Ligachev and Ryzhkov, Gorbachev’s policies had finally become not just too radical but destructive acts bringing the country “to ruin.” Even his close allies could no longer support him, as his chief military adviser explained: “Gorbachev is dear to me, but the Fatherland is dearer!”⁴ Neither Ligachev nor Ryzhkov yet directly opposed him, but nor did they any longer stand between him and the growing bureaucratic wrath directed at his leadership.

Having discovered the uses of glasnost for themselves, leaders of every powerful Soviet institution were now openly aligned against Gorbachev—the Party apparatus, state economic ministries, the military, the KGB, and even his own Congress. They charged that his reforms had “destroyed the Communist Party, shattered the Union, lost Eastern Europe, liquidated Marxism-Leninism… dealt a blow to the entire army, devastated consumer shops, fostered crime,” and more. The depth of their opposition was reflected in the emotionally charged accusation that he had put “our Fatherland in a danger even more threatening than in 1941,” the year of the Nazi invasion. At first privately but then increasingly in public forums, they threatened to remove him if he did not quickly “restore order.” Rumors of an anti-Gorbachev coup were now rife.⁵

They were not empty threats. Anti-Gorbachev attitudes were rabid among military and other security officials, “men with guns,” as one of his advisers reminded observers.⁶ They particularly despised his foreign policies, which by 1991 included major disarmament concessions to the United States, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern and Central Europe, the reunification of Germany on Western terms, and support for the American war against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Gorbachev insisted that these unprecedented steps were necessary for ending the Cold War and the arms race with the United States, bringing the Soviet Union into a reunited Europe, and thus enhancing the country’s security. His enemies saw them as a “Soviet Munich,” the “betrayal of everything our wartime generation achieved,” a “catastrophe equal in its consequences to defeat in a third world war,” and, of course, as “criminal.”⁷

Beleaguered by reactionary threats on one side and demands for more radical changes on the other, as well as over three-fourths of the public calling for “firm order in the country,” Gorbachev made a desperate political shift in late 1990 and early 1991 that has been widely misunderstood.⁸ Known as his “turn to the Right,” he distanced himself publicly from several of his most prominent proreform associates and reconstituted his government in a way that seemed to put it “in the hands of hardline opponents of reform,” creating the impression he had become, “in a profound sense, conservative,” even “head of a revived authoritarianism.”⁹ Many onetime followers bitterly accused him of abandoning perestroika, and his close ally and foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, resigned.

In fact, Gorbachev, who had promised only a few months earlier to “radicalize” his political and economic policies and still proclaimed himself to be “a democrat who is inclined toward radical views,” was trying to save his reforms by forging a new coalition with different high-level officials who he thought, not unreasonably, were moderates in the circumstances of 1990 and 1991. He called his revised stance “centrism” and defended it against what he understood to be growing “extremism” on both sides of his leadership.¹⁰ During these few months, Gorbachev did adopt a number of tougher measures in the name of “order and stability.” But he assured sympathizers that they were a “tactical maneuver,” promising that his reforms were “eternal values” and he would never “turn back.” Nor did he actually reverse any of his prodemocracy changes and, indeed, even pushed forward with the unprecedented national vote on the Union. As one of his “radical” critics remarked at the time, “That Gorbachev has suddenly turned into a rightist… is absurd.” Two scholars later agreed, concluding that Gorbachev “did not suggest turning back but simply going ahead more cautiously.”¹¹

However interpreted, the maneuver was a political disaster and short-lived. In those highly polarized circumstances, there was no stable center. Torn between his cherished role as the father of a Soviet democratic reformation and his perceived need to stabilize the country, as well as his leadership position, Gorbachev fluctuated between Yeltsin’s radicals and his own government, while his new ministers, who did not trust him, intrigued against him. And when he gathered Yeltsin and other republic leaders at his residence at Novo Ogarevo, in April 1991, to negotiate a radically decentralized Union, his appointees set into motion the fateful August coup.

As serious as those crises were, they do not explain the end of the Soviet Union. They resulted primarily from the abolition of “command” elements in the prereform political and economic administrative system before new democratic and market processes could fully function. Given time, the further development of new institutions and anticrisis measures proposed by Gorbachev and other leaders were feasible solutions. Indeed, the Soviet system had survived much worse kinds of destabilization, including those caused by collectivization and famine in 1929 through 1933 and the German invasion in the early 1940s. Moreover, the crises of 1990 and 1991 were often exaggerated by contemporary commentators, whose accounts strongly influenced later studies. They came to overstate the problems partly for partisan reasons, partly because it had become “fashionable to speak and write about crisis,” but mainly because such political and economic disorders, while not uncommon elsewhere, were unprecedented in the Soviet Union and therefore had an extraordinary psychological effect.¹²

Even so, few, if any, informed observers at the time saw the crises as the death knell of the Soviet system. Most interpreted them instead as a general “crisis of recuperation”—as symptoms, even positive signs, of the country’s ongoing transformation or “transition.”¹³ In this respect, they agreed with Gorbachev: “The logic and values of stability… do not coincide with the logic and values of reformationist breakthroughs.” Or as he expressed this philosophy of high-wire reform elsewhere, “stability would mean the end of perestroika” and therefore “there is no reason to fear chaos.”¹⁴ The world’s leading intelligence services evidently agreed. Reporting to their governments in 1991, none foresaw the end of the Soviet Union, only of the form in which it had previously existed.¹⁵

HOW, then, is that historic outcome to be explained? The importance of the question can hardly be overstated. For many Russians, probably most of them, the end of the Soviet Union naturally remains the “question of the century,” to which “no one has given the people a straight answer.” It is a question that arouses passions like those of “religious fanatics” and becomes “harder to understand as the years pass.”¹⁶ But the disappearance of that enormous, epochal nation-state, and why this happened, is also a vital part of our own history. More than any other modern event, it has shaped the world in which we have lived since 1991. (Why, then, would a prominent Western scholar think that explaining the Soviet breakup is “a can of worms… perhaps best left unopened”?)¹⁷

Most of the answers given in the large specialized literature are, like many interpretations of Soviet history, riddled with fallacies, myths, ideological bias, and conceits of hindsight. A senior scholar assures us, to take an example similar to one quoted in the preceding chapter, that “in retrospect,” the end of the Soviet Union “is easily understood and not at all surprising,” even though he did not foresee it and does not really explain it.¹⁸ Readers may be surprised to learn, however, that despite many emphatic assertions in the literature, there is no consensus whatsoever as to what factors actually explain the end of the Soviet Union.

There are, instead, as many as ten different explanations.¹⁹ Some of them, like generalizations about the purported unreformability of the Soviet system, are too poorly formulated to be useful. These include, for example, assertions that the system “really collapsed of its own weight” or “simply imploded and collapsed of itself.” Others, as a Russian scholar noted, are “extraordinarily impressionistic and superficial,” little more than a “collection of banalities” and “stereotypes.” And still others, though serious and substantial, emphasize so many different, even contradictory explanatory factors as to add up to no coherent explanation at all.²⁰

Putting those unhelpful accounts aside, and combining several related factors frequently cited in the specialized literature, six different but widely propounded explanations require attention:

• The end of the Soviet Union was “inevitable” because it was “doomed” by some irremediable genetic or inherent defect

• The system fell victim to a popular anti-Soviet revolution from below, a democratic one in Russia, nationalist revolts in the other ethnic republics, or both

• The Soviet system was undermined by an unworkable economy that resulted in economic collapse

• The gradualist reformation (perestroika) attempted by Gorbachev unleashed and succumbed to a Russian tradition of ideological and political maximalism, or extremism, as had happened before in the nation’s history, which destroyed the foundations of the system

• The disappearance of the Soviet Union was a classic example of the crucial role of leaders in history, in this case first Gorbachev and then Yeltsin

• The Soviet breakup was an “elite-driven” event, which means the explanation is to be found in the behavior of the nomenklatura, or segments of it, in the late 1980s and early 1990s

To begin with inevitability, the argument that the Soviet Union was inescapably doomed is, as Russian intellectuals often point out, a simplistic kind of historical determinism not unlike the crude Marxism once taught in Soviet schools.²¹ It is also a quintessential example of post facto predetermination. Consider these revealing statements about Western scholarly opinion by three of its leading representatives. In 1990, according to the first, the end of the Soviet Union “seemed absolutely unthinkable.” But in 1998, the second reported, “Nobody really expresses any surprise that the Soviet Union collapsed.” And in 2002, according to the third, the “prevailing view” was that “the breakup was inevitable.”²² Was it conceptual revelation, hindsight bias, or political fashion that led expert opinion from unthinkable to inevitable?

As for the fatal defect said to have doomed the Soviet Union, three are variously cited. Each relies, of course, on the axiom that the system was unreformable. One, which I already rejected as both theological and disproved by the historical experiences of other nations, including America, is a fatal original Soviet sin or inherent evil. The second is the “effects of socialism,” which is construed to be an unnatural ideology that killed the system. This, again, is mostly an expression of intense ideological dislike, and therefore little more needs to be said about it.²³ The third inherent feature of the system purported to have been the doomsday factor is less simplistic: the Soviet Union was an “empire,” and all “multinational empires are doomed.” (For the sake of this discussion, I leave aside the report that four leading Western historians of empire could “agree on only one thing: that none of them know what an empire is.”)²⁴

There are several serious problems with this widespread explanation. First, its proponents frequently confuse or conflate the end of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe two years earlier, which is a different matter. (This is not to say there was no spillover effect from the developments in Eastern Europe, though its importance can be debated.)²⁵ Second, this, too, is almost entirely a retrospective analysis. Many Western scholars later decided the “Soviet Union was clearly an empire,” but before 1991, few of them actually treated that multinational state as an empire.²⁶ Third, it too has a strong ideological flavor, “empire” being a pejorative characterization of the Soviet Union. As a result, this explanation lost some of its analytical integrity (and ideological satisfaction) after September 11, 2001, when a broad spectrum of U.S. policy opinion decided that there was, or should be, an American empire—and not an evil or doomed one, but even, some argue, a “benevolent empire.”²⁷

The main question, however, is whether the Soviet Union was an empire at home and, even if so, whether that is an adequate explanation of its disappearance. Writers often assert that the “USSR fell apart because it was an empire.” But three leading Western authorities on the subject conclude that its end was not inevitable; another resists classifying it as an empire; and yet another denies it was an empire, as do a large number of post-Soviet Russian scholars and democratic thinkers.²⁸ Indeed, even proponents of the explanation concede that the Soviet Union was a “peculiar kind of empire” and “differed… in several important ways” from traditional ones.²⁹ For all the political repression over the years, there was not, for example, a pattern of economic exploitation of the other republics by the Russian center. Instead, the backward ones were considerably modernized under the Soviet system, arguably to the economic detriment of Russia.³⁰

Nor did the Soviet Union end like most traditional empires, including its presumed tsarist predecessor, which disintegrated under the pressures of war and political opposition on their colonial peripheries. In the Soviet case, there was no war, and seven republics were still negotiating a new Union with Moscow at the end. Among them were the five Central Asian republics, presumably the most “colonized” but that least of all wanted to abandon the Union. Instead, the Soviet Union was broken up first and foremost by its own “imperial” center, Moscow, now controlled by Yeltsin. In short, whatever imperial aspects the Soviet state may have had, they were not enough to mean, as most authoritative studies conclude, that “it was necessarily doomed to disintegration.”³¹

The equally widespread idea that a revolutionary “vast movement from below” destroyed the Soviet Union is no more persuasive. There are two versions of these “populist interpretations” and “political myths,” as a Russian expert on the subject labels them.³² By now, the first requires no special attention. As I showed in chapter 4, there was no popular anti-Soviet revolution in Russia itself. Nor does the evidence support a related argument that the Soviet system succumbed to a “legitimacy crisis”—essentially a “delegitimization” of its socialist ideology primarily as a result of Gorbachev’s glasnost ideas and historical revelations.³³ Russians may have valued their new political liberties and turned against the Communist Party, but the “overwhelming majority” remained pro-Soviet and prosocialist.

The second version of “revolution from below” locates it primarily outside Russia, in the other Soviet ethnic republics. In this dramatic and sweeping explanation, sometimes coupled with the empire thesis, the Union was overthrown by the “peoples… of all those republics,” a “rebellion of the [Soviet] nations,” and a “remarkable nationalist mobilization” resulting in “multiple waves of nationalist revolt.” In a word, it was the “popular will… that the Soviet Union should die.”³⁴

This explanation is at odds with the essential facts, not the least being the 76 percent pro-Union vote in the referendum held only nine months before the breakup. It is also contradicted by the submissive behavior of most of the Soviet republic leaders, from Central Asia and Transcaucasia to Ukraine, in August 1991. When they thought the military coup in Moscow might succeed and forcibly reimpose the center’s control throughout the country, they were either compliant or silent.³⁵ For these and other reasons, a number of Western and Russian analysts give a different account of the end of the Soviet Union. There was “only limited mobilization of the masses”; it “was not broken up by crowds of people who came into the streets under nationalist slogans”; and, as a group of (non-Communist) Russian experts concluded five years later, the Union’s breakup occurred “against the will of its peoples.”³⁶

The ramifying mistake made by proponents of the nationalist revolution-from-below explanation is interpreting all or most of the thousands of ethnic protests during the Gorbachev years as demands for secession and full independence.³⁷ In reality, the great majority of them sought redress of various grievances within the framework of the Union, were “not a struggle against the USSR” but against other ethnic groups, and became separatist only after the end of the Soviet state—or, several Russian observers point out, were “decoration” for the self-interested politics of regional elites,³⁸ an important subject to which I will return.

The mistake is compounded by failing to understand the confusion that developed, and remains, over the words “sovereignty” and “independence.” Even according to the pre-Gorbachev Soviet constitution, every Union republic was “sovereign.” In early 1990, he urged the newly elected republic congresses to reaffirm their sovereignty as preparation for negotiating a new Union Treaty.³⁹ All but one did so without any of them, outside the Baltics, construing it to mean independence from the Union. Even the fateful sovereignty resolution adopted by the Russian Republic at its congress in June 1990, despite later claims, “actually had nothing to do with independence.” That is why 907 of 929 deputies voted for it, including the adamantly pro-Union Communist delegates.⁴⁰ And it is why the agreement reached by Gorbachev and republic leaders at Novo Ogarevo in mid-1991, including the Russian leader, could call for a new “Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics.”

And yet, construing “sovereignty” to mean full independence did play a critical role in the end of the Soviet Union. This is partly because of the ambiguous meaning of the word, which was used differently in various Soviet languages, but mainly because it suited the political ambitions of several republic leaders and elites, particularly Russia’s Yeltsin and Ukraine’s Leonid Kravchuk. By late 1991, the words “sovereignty” and “independence” figured prominently in political struggles under way across the country, but not even longtime students of Soviet media could be sure what exactly was meant by either.

That helps explain the incongruous result of the December 1991 referendum in Ukraine, which is usually cited as conclusive evidence of a popular nationalist revolution. In this instance, 90 percent of the turnout voted for “independence” even though nine months before, in the March referendum, 70 percent of Ukrainians (and 80 percent in a supplementary ballot) had voted for the Union. Ukraine, along with Russia, Belarus, and Western Kazakhstan, were the Slavic core of the Soviet Union. And when Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and, following their lead, the leader of tiny Belarus abolished it a few days later, they used the December referendum as justification.

But did so many Ukrainians, linked to Russia for centuries and scarcely distinguishable from their fellow Slavs, really vote to leave the Union? In Ukraine, there was already “considerable confusion” over the words “sovereignty” and “independence,” which were being used almost interchangeably and manipulated by the former Communist elite, turned nationalist and headed by Kravchuk.⁴¹ Protesting Kravchuk’s use of the referendum vote, Gorbachev could tell him “with some justice,” as an American scholar notes, that other republics had declared independence without it meaning an “obligatory exit from the Union.” Moreover, as another American scholar argues based on polling data, the wording of the referendum was ambiguous, simply asking voters if they favored “the independence of Ukraine”; had it said this meant leaving the Union, the outcome probably would have been significantly different.⁴² (A decade later, 60 percent of Ukrainians favored some kind of union with Russia and only 46.5 percent said they would have voted for a referendum on independence.)⁴³

Whatever the result, Ukraine, like most of the other republics, did not experience a popular secessionist revolution. There and elsewhere, the growth of anti-Union sentiment was “more at the level of elite politics than of mass public opinion,” and “separatism came… from above.”⁴⁴ Looking back on the events of 1990 and 1991, a Russian specialist concluded that there had been an “almost complete absence of any serious separatist attitudes in the Soviet republics except the Baltics and Georgia.” A leading British scholar, warning that “hindsight can mislead,” agreed: “Only in the Baltic (and perhaps Transcaucasia) did the local national question take the form of a demand for immediate independence.”⁴⁵

The third common explanation of the end of the Soviet Union argues the entire system was “nonviable” because of a “fundamentally unworkable” economy that finally resulted in “utter and complete collapse.” (In some of these accounts, President Reagan’s military buildup of the early 1980s is incorrectly credited with having precipitated or accelerated the economic collapse.) As evidence, it emphasizes the economic crisis of 1990 and 1991, which is said to have left the country on the brink of catastrophe, even “teetering on the edge of famine.”⁴⁶ An explanation propounded with equal certainty by anti-Marxists and some Marxists, though by very few economists, it also contains strong ideological elements: some of its proponents portray the “doomed” Soviet economy as perversely socialist, others as fatally nonsocialist.⁴⁷ It also draws on self-serving assertions by Yeltsin’s “radical reformers.” Their “shock therapy” having brought even greater misfortunes to Russia in the 1990s, they insisted that the “collapse of the Soviet economy” had left them with no choice.⁴⁸

This explanation is no more convincing than the other two. Long-established economies do not suddenly “collapse” or destroy nation-states. It did not happen, for example, earlier in Soviet history, despite periods of greater economic disorder and misery; during the corrosive American Great Depression of the 1930s; or later in Russia when the post-Soviet economy plunged into considerably worse crises.⁴⁹ Moreover, what was in crisis in 1990 and 1991 was not actually the Soviet economy, which still recorded growth from 1985 to 1989, but an already post-Soviet or transitional one.⁵⁰ By 1990, Gorbachev’s reforms and other developments had removed or weakened the elements of Party-state command and control that had defined the Soviet economy and made it workable in important ways for decades.

Nor was the economic crisis, however severe, truly a “collapse.” (An American economist later concluded, using new information, that “the Soviet economy was a lot sturdier than it appears in hindsight.”) Citizens continued to work and be paid, and the overall economy, even in mounting disarray, continued to function, occasionally even showing some signs of recovery.⁵¹ Industrial production began to fall sharply in 1990, but the agricultural output that year was one of the highest in decades. Indeed, citizens were earning more disposable income than ever before, which contributed to the crisis: “Too many rubles,” as the saying went, were “chasing too few goods,” as many essential items, including foodstuffs, disappeared from state shops.

Those widespread shortages helped foster the myth of a total economic breakdown, but the problem was primarily one of distribution. Anticipating a major upsurge in state-controlled prices, both consumers and suppliers were hoarding goods, the former at home in fear of higher costs, the latter in warehouses in hope of greater profits.⁵² (Thus, goods would soon suddenly reappear on store shelves in abundance, far from all of them imports, after January 1992, when Yeltsin’s policies decontrolled prices and vaporized the value of rubles.) And even that crisis of supply has been exaggerated. Although Soviet citizens had endured periodic shortages for decades, overwrought predictions of impending catastrophe, including a nationwide famine, became part of the general “hysteria” of 1990 and 1991 and passed into now standard accounts. (Panicky buying of household basics in response to rumors of shortages, thereby creating them, was and remains a Russian tradition. In 2006, for example, it happened in pursuit of salt, when it was correctly diagnosed as a “psychological” phenomenon having “nothing to do with the actual economy.”)⁵³

Bare shelves in state stores, to take the starkest example, did not mean mass hunger. In the countryside, people grew much of their own food, as they always had, but even many urban dwellers were not greatly dependent on official shops. In addition to resorting to more costly but readily accessible nonstate markets and cultivating their own food gardens, almost all employed Soviet citizens and students traditionally received their main meal at midday in workplace and school cafeterias, where employees could also buy take-home supplies. That long-standing system continued to operate in 1990 and 1991, though no doubt with declining quantity and nutrition. In any event, as was later pointed out, the “sausage thesis” hardly explains the end of a Soviet state that had endured more severe food shortages before.⁵⁴

But no matter how serious the crisis may have been, its primary cause was not economic. As many Western and Russian economists agree, “The USSR was killed… by politics, not economics.”⁵⁵ From the late 1980s to 1991, one political decision and development after another steadily dismantled or undermined the old Soviet economic system without leaving time for another to develop in its place. As a direct result, the economic crisis unfolded while the longstanding problem of implementing new policies inherent in the Soviet bureaucratic system became even worse. (By mid-1990, Gorbachev, despite his new presidential powers on paper, was unable to have any major economic initiative actually carried out. “The boldest reform decisions,” a top aide complained, “are left hanging in the air.”)⁵⁶

Political factors that destabilized the economy began with Gorbachev’s adoption of democratizing and other decentralizing reforms, which soon diminished the Party-state’s controls on enterprises, resources, wages, the money supply, and eventually property. They were followed by the “parade of sovereignty,” which many regions and republics increasingly interpreted to mean economic autonomy over their own resources and products; by spontaneous “privatization” with little concern for production; and by a series of premature official announcements of forthcoming price increases, first by Gorbachev’s ministers and then by Yeltsin’s, that triggered the hoarding of goods. Even aspects of Gorbachev’s foreign policy had a negative effect on the economy, the use of so much railway capacity to remove military equipment from East Europe further disrupting food distribution. In response to growing shortages, regional officials—among them, it seems, some of Gorbachev’s enemies, who engaged in sabotage—began withholding their products from the national market, crippling it still more.⁵⁷

Here, too, the August 1991 coup, by further weakening Gorbachev’s central government, made everything worse, from hoarding to the dismemberment of the Union economy. By late autumn, Yeltsin was not only refusing to pay his Russian Republic’s taxes to the Union budget but in Russia’s name systematically stripping the Union of its economic and financial assets.⁵⁸ “Economics,” as Gorbachev lamented, had become the “hostage of politics.”⁵⁹ And as politics grew increasingly radical and extreme, so did the economic crisis.

The political radicalism afflicting the country in 1990 and 1991, especially in the capital cities Moscow and Leningrad, is the focus of the fourth explanation of the Soviet breakup. Believing that Russian history is “cyclical,”⁶⁰ it argues that Gorbachev’s perestroika collapsed for much the same reason as had all previous attempts to modernize the nation through a gradualist or evolutionary reformation—as a result of impassioned and ultimately destructive extremism.

In this “tragic” view of Russia’s long tradition of failed reforms and lost opportunities, “with its terrible grimaces and cruel irony,” the outcome was always a reactionary backlash, revolution, or both.⁶¹ Thus, the liberalizing reforms of Aleksandr II in the 1860s led to his assassination by radicals, harsh crackdowns by successor tsars, and the revolutionary upheaval of 1905; the modernizing land policies begun by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1907 ended in his assassination and eventually the collapse of tsarist rule in the revolution of February 1917; the centrist, prodemocracy government emerging from that historic event was swept away by the Bolshevik coup of October; Lenin’s evolutionary NEP of the 1920s perished in Stalin’s revolution from above; and even Khrushchev’s limited de-Stalinizing reforms of 1956 through 1964 resulted in his overthrow and twenty years of reactionary “stagnation.”⁶²

The agent of destructive radicalism in the tsarist era is said to have been the extremist wing of the Russian intelligentsia—educated, oppositionist, often guilt-ridden people of some privilege who emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Usually described as politically immoderate, impatient, and nihilistic, the radical intelligentsia repeatedly sought to destroy Russia’s existing order for the sake of a new one inspired by Western ideas, most fatefully Marxist socialism.⁶³ This nihilistic tradition, according to the explanation, reasserted itself under Gorbachev, as longtime Communist Party intellectuals, now enamored with free-market capitalism and calling themselves radical democrats, undermined his evolutionary perestroika with an onslaught of impatient criticism and increasingly anti-Soviet demands.

This interpretation of the end of the Soviet Union appears only occasionally and fragmentarily in Western studies—possibly because most of them sympathize with that anti-Soviet “extremism”—but it is wide-spread in Russia, where the primary role of the intelligentsia is seen as an “immutable law of all Russian revolutions.”⁶⁴ A leading Russian historian is unequivocal: “There is no doubt that the intelligentsia was the main force in shattering the Soviet order.” Another scholar agrees that it was those “political opponents of Gorbachev and his cautious, evolutionary course” who “suffocated perestroika and destroyed the Soviet Union.” Other Russian writers are even more prosecutorial. One asks the “sacred question, ‘Who is to blame?’” and answers emphatically, “the intelligentsia.”⁶⁵

Unlike several other explanations of the Soviet breakup, this one is not an afterthought. From 1988 to 1991, moderate Soviet intellectuals, anxiously pointing to the “notorious” precedents, warned “ultra-radicals” against an “inverted Bolshevism” that would again “raze everything to the ground.” They feared that traditional intelligentsia “impatience and extremism,” the new “spell of maximalism,” would lead to “more historical upheavals” and again abort the “evolutionary possibilities of our civilization.”⁶⁶ So great was the fear that tradition would doom the ongoing Soviet reformation that its supporters, from self-described “moderate democrats” to the Gorbachev leadership itself, began worrying publicly about the most ominous analogy: “Our perestroika [might] suffer the tragic fate of NEP.”⁶⁷

The intelligentsia tradition clearly did play a significant role during the last years of the Soviet Union. The “revolution of ideas” sometimes attributed to “the people” was actually limited primarily to a radicalized segment of the intelligentsia. It was apparent in the behavior of the many middle-aged Communists who turned so quickly and completely against their own long-professed ideology (including the anti-Stalinist ideas that had spawned perestroika) and, in a “peculiar Oedipus complex,” against the Soviet leader who had just liberated them. (In turn, Gorbachev resented the “betrayal of the intelligentsia, to which I gave everything,” though he almost never said so publicly.) As with their tsarist-era predecessors, such radicalism often seemed to be “personal repentance” for the “shameful fact” of their prior lives of privilege—this time as conformist Party intellectuals.⁶⁸ Not surprisingly, it included another characteristic aspect of the tradition—enthusiasm for a new maximalist “fairy-tale,” a revolutionary leap, in only “500 days,” to a fully privatized, marketized economy. (Even though the International Monetary Fund and other Western financial institutions also initially opposed the plan, when Gorbachev rejected this first draft of shock therapy in 1990 as unworkable, fraught with social pain, and likely to break up the Union, the radical intelligentsia’s impatience with him only grew.)⁶⁹

Like their forerunners, from nineteenth-century underground revolutionaries to Lenin himself, perestroika-era intelligentsy became passionately active in politics. (A fellow intellectual was “horrified by… the ‘revolutionary throng’ made up of PhDs and academics.”)⁷⁰ Having been entrusted with an important part of the mass media by Gorbachev for purposes of his glasnost policies, they used them increasingly to polarize the political atmosphere. Meanwhile, by 1990, they were in the forefront of the most radical movements of the period and abandoning Gorbachev for a maximalist hero—one declared, “The smartest people take Yeltsin’s side”—which some of them would later deeply regret.⁷¹ By November, and again following official violence in the Baltics in January 1991, for which they held Gorbachev responsible, even “foremen of glasnost” whom he had promoted and protected since 1985 were demanding his resignation.⁷²

In the end, however, the radical intelligentsia did not cause the breakup of the Soviet Union. It did much to focus popular discontents on Gorbachev’s leadership and to bolster Yeltsin’s, but it had no effective power apart from those commanding figures. However great their public prominence and loud their voices, radical intellectuals had almost no standing with rank-and-file Russians, who mostly disliked them. Nor did they represent the entire intelligentsia even in Moscow or Lenin-grad, and still less in the provinces, where they were scarcely present. As was true during most of Russian history, the intelligentsia was a secondary actor.

WE come, then, to the role of leaders—Gorbachev, Yeltsin, or both—in the fateful drama of 1985 through 1991. Understood in its context, this “subjective” factor was the primary cause of the end of the Soviet Union or what some Russians call its “imposed dissolution.”⁷³ Many Western specialists (though few Russian ones) strongly disagree. Like most modern-day interpreters of history, but also for their own Sovietological reasons, they dislike explanations of great events that point to the behavior of individuals, even powerful ones. They prefer equally great causes—in this case, “objective processes” determined by those large, defining elements of the Soviet system said to have “doomed” it.⁷⁴

But the “decisive role of the subjective factor” in the Soviet breakup, to quote a Russian scholar, is clear from a simple counterfactual exercise: Remove the two leading protagonists, particularly Gorbachev, and it becomes almost impossible to imagine the events that led from 1985 to 1991 but easy to imagine, as a senior American scholar argued, the Soviet Union having “continued to muddle through without overt instability. That is the only possible conclusion.”⁷⁵ The great majority of Russian writers on the question agree with that conclusion, as do most of the Russian citizens periodically surveyed and at least a few Western authors. They too “do not see the kind of powerful objective economic, social, and political causes capable of destroying such a strong and large state.”⁷⁶

Even among proponents of the leadership explanation, however, there are substantial disagreements. Disputes (especially in Russia) about the nature of that leadership—whether it was well intentioned or malign, wise or bungling, worthy or unworthy of admiration, and whether its results were intended or unintended—are important but not my main interest here. More to the point is which leader was primarily responsible for the disappearance of the Soviet state. Some Western and Russian “subjectivists” point to Gorbachev, others to Yeltsin, and a few to both leaders.

At first historical glance, it would seem to have been Yeltsin. On December 8, 1991, at a secluded hunting resort for top officials in the Belovezh Forest near Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belorussia, he met secretly with two junior republic leaders to sign an agreement abolishing the Soviet Union. But the absent Gorbachev’s contribution to that fateful outcome was larger and more essential, even though he desperately tried to prevent it. Without the political changes Gorbachev had introduced during the preceding six years, neither Yeltsin nor any of the other factors said to have caused the Soviet breakup would have played a significant role, certainly not in the foreseeable future.

It was, after all, Gorbachev’s democratization policies that freed the intelligentsia to speak openly about the “sins” of the past and present, permitted popular discontents to be aired and organized, enabled nationalist sentiments to grow into defiant movements, and contributed to the economic crisis by loosening central controls. As for Yeltsin, he was the biggest individual beneficiary of Gorbachev’s prodemocracy reforms, being elected to the first Soviet Congress in 1989, the first Russian parliament in 1990, and Russia’s first popularly chosen presidency in 1991. No matter what part any of those developments may have had in ending the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s leadership was therefore the “critical precipitating factor”—so much so that another American scholar reasonably concludes: “Without Gorbachev there would still be the Soviet Union.”⁷⁷

Judgments about the consequences of Gorbachev’s leadership vary enormously in both Russia and the West. They range from the view that he “led [Russia] out of bondage” and, as the “liberator of such a country,” was the “only great Russian reformer whose reform succeeded”; to the verdict that his “mind-boggling political ineptitude” made him “one of the greatest examples of failed leadership in history”; to darker indictments of Gorbachev (and Yeltsin) as knowing or unknowing agents of a U.S. conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union.⁷⁸ (Widespread Russian conspiracy theories are the counterpart of American triumphalist assertions that a U.S. president or secret agency “ended Communism.” Neither has any merit, and both are therefore excluded from this consideration.)⁷⁹

But whatever the judgment of informed commentators, none of them doubt that in 1985 Gorbachev was the only person in the ruling Communist Party leadership, even in the expanding political class, willing and able to begin such reforms and during the next few years radicalize them in the face of growing opposition. It is why several American and Russian scholars argue that Gorbachev was an exceedingly rare figure in history—an “event-making” leader or, as one characterizes his equally singular role in ending the Cold War, a “historically fateful personality.”⁸⁰

As a direct result of Gorbachev’s influence on events, Yeltsin, a little-known provincial Party boss until the new Soviet leader promoted him to Moscow, also became a fateful personality. (“Had there been no Gorbachev,” a man in a position to know assures us, “there would have been no Yeltsin.”)⁸¹ By 1991, as president of Russia, the Union’s only truly in-dispensable republic, leader of the growing legion of “radical reformers,” and for now the people’s “messiah,” Yeltsin held the fate of his former patron’s crisis-ridden, evolutionary reformation in his hands, most directly the future of the Union. Until the failed August coup, he alternated between opposing and supporting Gorbachev. But immediately after that event, Yeltsin began, in a kind of unfolding coup of his own, to diminish his already weakened rival by systematically dismantling the institutions of the Union center and arrogating to his Russian Republic virtually all of the political powers and economic assets of Gorbachev’s Union government.⁸²

Abolishing what remained of Gorbachev’s presidency—his state and country—was the final step. Formally, three men signed away the Soviet Union in the Belovezh Forest, but in effect it was one. Without Yeltsin, as a former republic leader later explained, “there would not have been a Belovezh document.”⁸³ Of the other two, the head of Soviet Belorussia (soon to be Belarus), faithful to its tradition as Moscow’s “little Slav brother,” deferentially followed the Russian leader. And though Ukraine’s Kravchuk was now bent on “independence,” he, too, had been influenced by Yeltsin, perhaps even his secret collaborator for several months.⁸⁴

Echoing Yeltsin’s justification of Belovezh—he insisted it had been “inevitable”⁸⁵—most Western authors have concluded that by December 1991 the Union alternative no longer existed. But clearly it did—in the form of Gorbachev’s ongoing negotiations with republic leaders and in polls showing continuing public support for the Union, as Yeltsin himself had acknowledged only a month before and one of his top advisers at Belovezh later confirmed.⁸⁶ Moreover, a Yeltsin-backed Union of the remaining seven or eight republics, considering its size and resources, might have persuaded others to return, including Ukraine. The real problem was different. Yeltsin had already decided, even while negotiating with Gorbachev, that the Union alternative no longer suited him.⁸⁷

What drove these two leaders toward the destruction of a twentieth-century superpower, a development almost no one foresaw even a few months before? Obviously, both were men of extraordinary political will but, it is clear, of different kinds: Gorbachev’s was a will to reform, Yeltsin’s a will to power. The distinction can be made without prejudging either man; the consequences of Gorbachev’s pursuit of reform may be applauded or condemned, as may his rival’s pursuit of power. But there can be no doubt about their mutual role in the events that led from the seemingly indestructible Soviet state of 1985 to its disappearance barely six years later.

Gorbachev’s remarkable will to reform the Soviet system he inherited—and, inseparably related in his mind, the international order based on the long U.S.-Soviet Cold War—is often obscured by the misperception that he was a half-hearted reformer who moved too slowly. In reality, as I explained earlier, a passionate, unrelenting commitment to the reformation he called perestroika was the defining feature of Gorbachev’s leadership, and many knowledgeable observers thought it caused him to introduce changes too quickly. With that almost evangelical reformism in mind, a onetime critic dubbed Gorbachev the “Apostle Mikhail,” pointing out that he had used power “not for the sake of power” but out of “concern for the fate of the reconstruction of life he had begun.” Nor did most observers doubt that “all the titanic changes for the better” by 1990 were due to the “political will of Gorbachev.”⁸⁸

Only that overriding will to reform can explain the fateful steps Gorbachev took—and did not take. It explains his launching of heretical changes, trampling over totems and taboos even though he lacked any such mandate within his own perestroika coalition, and his radicalization of those policies even while confronted by increasingly menacing opposition. It explains why he could tell an aide early on, “No one knows how far I will go,” as indeed he did, crossing one political Rubicon after another while abandoning both the Communist Party dictatorship at home and the Soviet empire abroad, and never turning back.⁸⁹

No less remarkably, Gorbachev’s will to reform explains two elements of his leadership that were, and remain, unprecedented in Russian political history. One was his systematic dispersal—literally, giving away—of the immense personal power he had inherited as general secretary. Had he not done so in pursuit of a democratic reformation, as he often said truthfully and without regret, “I could have operated just like they… ruled before me, like Brezhnev… like an emperor,” adding for emphasis: “Is there another case in history of a person receiving power and giving it away himself ?”⁹⁰ As a result, he became more and more powerless.

The other unique feature of Gorbachev’s rule was his “deep aversion to the use of force.” How often he actually resorted to armed force is disputed—many Russians still resent that he did not use it more often and effectively—but considering the country’s violent past and the turbulent changes during his years in power, he left with remarkably little or, arguably, “no blood on his hands.”⁹¹ This, too, is explained by his commitment to an unprecedented kind of Russian reformation—a modernizing “revolution without shots.” Gorbachev largely adhered to his “credo of reform,” or “principled non-violence,” insisting that “for me they are not merely words but a firm conviction, a vitally important idea,” to the end. It was, a Russian scholar emphasizes, “his victory over centuries-long Russian, and later Soviet, traditions.” For the sake of his reform mission, another pointed out, Gorbachev “was ready to give up everything—his crown, state, and allies.”⁹²

If Gorbachev’s will to reform was sometimes in doubt, Yeltsin’s will to power was not. The distinction was recognized even by one of Gorbachev’s critics: “He fights for programs and ideas while his opponents fight for power.” (Gorbachev said the difference between them was that “Tsar Boris,” as he derisively called him, “worships power.”)⁹³ From the moment Yeltsin appeared on the Soviet national scene, he was perceived as a man who believed he was “destined to rule.” He had, wrote a British correspondent, “a huge thirst for power and a shrewd nose for finding it.” A Russian journalist and early admirer later characterized him as a “power alcoholic, addicted to power.” Yeltsin himself did not entirely disagree: “To be ‘first’ probably has always been part of my nature.” Nor did one of his former press secretaries: “Power is his ideology.”⁹⁴

That was not, of course, the sole aspect of Yeltsin’s political personality. He thought of himself as the heroic “father of an independent, democratic Russia,” as did his many admirers.⁹⁵ But his relentless pursuit of power—compounded by a “pathological, destructive, all-consuming hatred of Gorbachev”⁹⁶—ultimately determined his political positions. At various times, Yeltsin was for and against every disputed issue of the period—perestroika, the Communist Party, shock therapy and a free market, the emerging parliamentary system, nomenklatura Communists, the Union—and for “neither a capitalist nor a socialist” Russia. Even his touted support for Baltic independence was thought to be “a way of asserting himself against Gorbachev.” Indeed, most of his increasingly radical positions seem to have been adopted “not as ends in themselves but primarily to advance his personal political objectives.” This pursuit of power led Yeltsin, the American ambassador observed. “to tell people what they wanted to hear, and he did so with abandon,” or as a Russian academic quipped: “For the sake of power, he can become whomever you want, even a Muslim.”⁹⁷

The ultimate expression of Yeltsin’s will to power was the historic coup d’etat at Belovezh that overthrew what was still, despite its crises and defections, a nuclear superpower with some 280 million citizens. Yeltsin and his collaborators always denied Belovezh was a coup, insisting that after the aborted August putsch the “Soviet Union had in fact already ceased to exist, and it was necessary to declare this de jure,” though their real concern may have been that the “cunning Gorbachev” was making a political comeback and his pro-Union position gaining new support.⁹⁸ But if it was necessary to formally end the Soviet Union, Yeltsin could have stated the case openly and turned to the leaders or legislatures of all the remaining republics or even to the people in a referendum, as Gorbachev had done nine months before and was now calling for again.⁹⁹

Instead, Yeltsin acted illegally, in complete disregard for a longstanding constitution, in (as he admitted) “super-secrecy,” and—a telltale sign of a coup—in some fear of being arrested. (As precautionary measures, the heavily guarded Belovezh conspirators met near the Polish border and the first person they informed, to assure him that he would still be the top military commander, was the head of the now former Soviet armed forces.) The result, as a broad spectrum of independent observers, including the British ambassador, concluded, was a coup—or, considering the failed putsch against Gorbachev in August, a “second coup.” It was, a Yeltsin supporter widely admired in the West later acknowledged, “neither legitimate nor democratic.”¹⁰⁰

Yeltsin took that fateful step, as many Russian and Western authors also agree, primarily to be completely rid of Gorbachev.¹⁰¹ To be “first,” the presidency of a republic of the Soviet Union, even the most important one, was far from enough; he needed the seat and symbol of supreme power, Gorbachev’s Kremlin. No other anti-Gorbachev, proreform leader in Russia had that kind of will to rule. Nor did anyone on the other side of the political barricade. The August plotters amassed overwhelming military force in the center of Moscow, but did not use it or even arrest Yeltsin or any of his allies. Various reasons were given, but they all came down to one—“a fatal lack of will.”¹⁰²

Thus did the opposing but symbiotic wills of two extraordinary figures—extraordinary also in that they appeared at the same historical moment and the fate of each would have been different without the other—lead to the end of the Soviet Union. Readers may still resist attributing such an epochal development to two individuals, but it was in keeping with Russia’s long tradition of leader-dominated politics. Two eminent students of that tradition, a Russian and an American, understood the roles Gorbachev and Yeltsin had played. The first expressed it in a Russian historical analogy: “Gorbachev was our February revolution, and Yeltsin our October.” The American expressed it in a Western idiom: “The Gorbachev-Yeltsin rivalry seemed to contain all the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy.”¹⁰³

That is the essential explanation of the end of the Soviet Union, which means, of course, the outcome was not inevitable. But is it a sufficient explanation? It remains to be asked why Yeltsin, who had no armed forces or even a political party, was able, almost on his own, to abolish an enormous, seventy-four-year-old state, even in its weakened condition, without any significant resistance by ordinary citizens, the parliament, or other important groups, at least in Soviet Russia itself.

Three factors seem to explain why there was no popular resistance to Yeltsin’s extraordinary step at Belovezh, despite widespread support for the Soviet Union during and after 1991. The passivity of the Russian people during fateful political struggles among the nation’s leaders, whether out of deference, indifference, hope, or fear, was another strong tradition. December 1991 was not the first time “the people kept silent,” in an often-quoted expression from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, about a sixteenth-century breakup of the Moscow state.¹⁰⁴ The second factor was contemporary. Public opinion had turned so sharply against Gorbachev by 1991 that many Russians undoubtedly saw Belovezh not as the end of the Soviet state but as the welcomed end of its unpopular president.¹⁰⁵

The third factor was closely related and almost certainly the most important. At Belovezh, Yeltsin and his co-abolitionists announced that the Soviet Union was immediately being replaced by a Commonwealth of Independent States that would keep most of the former republics, peoples, armed forces, and economies together. On paper, it strongly resembled the “soft” union recently proposed by both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. As such, a Russian historian points out, Belovezh “was presented not as the liquidation but as the transformation of the previously existing state,” which was the view of 66 percent of Russians surveyed at the time.¹⁰⁶ Whether the Commonwealth was an authentic aspiration on the part of Yeltsin and Kravchuk or a ruse that “deceived their own people,” they immediately led Russia and Ukraine away from any such unity. (Reports of heavy drinking, even drunkenness that night, especially on the part of Yeltsin, may explain why one of the three signatories later felt confused or “deceived” by what had happened there.)¹⁰⁷

Why the Soviet Russian parliament, or Supreme Soviet, ratified the Belovezh agreements almost unanimously after barely an hour of mostly perfunctory discussion—188 deputies voted in favor, 6 against, and 7 abstained—is less obvious.¹⁰⁸ Popularly chosen in 1990 by an electorate that also voted for the Union in the March 1991 referendum, it was the same parliament which only two years later, in October 1993, defied Yeltsin to the point of an armed showdown. For some of Russia’s independent democrats, the ratification vote would “forever remain the indelible shame and guilt of the Russian parliament.” And for Gorbachev, who sent a desperate pro-Union plea to the deputies, nothing could ever fully explain their “lunacy.”¹⁰⁹

Above all, this would involve explaining why the large bloc of Communist delegates, most of whom had supported the attempted August coup to “save the Union,” “rubber-stamped” Yeltsin’s abolition of the Soviet Union or did not even attend the fateful session on December 12. (Nearly a third of the membership of the parliament was conspicuously absent.) Some of the Communists were motivated, not surprisingly, by hatred of Gorbachev, one exulting before casting his vote, “Thank God, with this the Gorbachev era is ended.”¹¹⁰ And like the general electorate, many of them believed, or hoped, that in voting at the same session for the new Commonwealth, they were actually ratifying a “renewal, a rebirth of the Union,” as Yeltsin seemed to suggest in his remarks to the assembly and several observers later testified.¹¹¹

But a darker, more compelling consideration also motivated Communist and possibly other pro-Union deputies—a “fear of repression.” (Even Yeltsin’s vice president, head of a democratic Communist Party, was opposed to the Union’s abolition but remained silent.) Since the failed coup in August, for which the Communist Party had been menacingly blamed and banned, anti-Communism had been the political watchword of the new Yeltsin regime, inspiring a kind of “witch-hunt.” Since their Party had repressed so many people in the past, “disoriented and crushed” Communists feared their turn had now come. And just as millions had bent to the will of their predecessors, they now bowed, under the weight of “a genetic fear inherited from previous eras,” to Yeltsin’s.¹¹² With scarcely a word of protest, Communist delegates voted to end the state that embodied their ideas, history, and current ambitions, as they would be loudly reminded seven years later when they tried, in a different Russian parliament, to impeach him for that “crime.”

Not even those factors fully explain, however, the seeming indifference of more important Soviet elites, the high-level bureaucratic nomenklatura, to Yeltsin’s abolition of the state that had created and rewarded them with power, status, and privilege. The compliance of the armed elites, the KGB and military, is perhaps the most easily understood. Having been drawn into the disastrous coup attempt against Gorbachev three months earlier, they were demoralized and fearful of becoming entangled in yet another conflict between the country’s political leaders. In addition, the military had long since soured on Gorbachev, and, even more, only Yeltsin now could guarantee generals and other commanders their salaries, benefits, and promotions.¹¹³

The acquiescence of Soviet economic and administrative elites, who, observers agree, “still remained firmly in control of the formidable state machine,”¹¹⁴ was more complex. It brings us to the last explanation of the end of the Soviet Union to be considered here: by the early 1990s, a small but strategically located segment of the nomenklatura was zealously “privatizing” the great wealth shaken loose from the Soviet state by Gorbachev’s economic reforms. They were “transforming power into property,” as most accounts agree, and thus potentially into even greater power. They therefore had little if any self-interest in defending a state whose assets they were stripping.

DIFFERENT interpretations of the crucial question of “nomenklatura privatization” appear in the many Russian writings and in the considerably fewer Western studies that present this explanation of the Soviet breakup. Some see it as the outcome of a long historical process during which the appointed nomenklatura strove to become an independent ruling class owning the enormous state property it only administered and could not legally profit from or bequeath to its families; others view the frenzied privatizing as a spontaneous, opportunistic reaction to the undoing of the nomenklatura’s dominant position by Gorbachev’s political reforms, and to economic developments in East Europe, a “golden parachute” to a new system.¹¹⁵ Some depict it as the natural (in Soviet circumstances) emergence of a Russian capitalist class, others as “criminal” looting of the nation.¹¹⁶

Whatever its origins and nature, the development was exceptionally important. When Gorbachev became leader in 1985, the vast Soviet economy was almost entirely state-owned, at least 90 percent of it under the control of Moscow ministries and their nationwide nomenklatura. As Gorbachev’s promarket policies increasingly liberalized property rights in the late 1980s, high-level officials, particularly the managerial elite and others with direct access to state (and Party) assets, began to find ways—legal, semilegal, and illegal—to make themselves, their associates, and even their relatives owners or primary shareholders of that property.¹¹⁷

By 1991, the process had spread from Moscow to the republics and localities, and from modest confiscations to oil and other natural resources, major manufacturing enterprises, banks, export-import and trade networks, and real estate. Typically, ministers privatized and commercialized their industries, financial executives their capital, factory directors their plants, the Party’s officials its enormous holdings, and even high-ranking military officers their assets.¹¹⁸ (An undetermined number of these transactions also involved “criminal” elements from what until recently had been the black-market or “shadow” economy.) Formal privatization came later in the 1990s, in post-Soviet Russia under Yeltsin, but by late 1991 “spontaneous” property seizures, as they were called, had already consumed multi-billion-dollar components of the Soviet economy and were growing into a “true bacchanalia of redistribution.”¹¹⁹

Compelling political ambitions were an integral part of the nomenklatura’s “grab-it-ization,” as it also became known, particularly at high levels in the fifteen Soviet republics. By the late 1980s, republic leaders, following Gorbachev’s own example in Moscow and mindful of the fate of their East European comrades, were shifting their power base from the slumping Communist Party to new parliaments and presidencies on their own territories. (The ethnic nature of Soviet federalism and the official nurturing of native elites had long made such a centrifugal shift possible.)¹²⁰

Soviet elites knew instinctively, in part no doubt because of their Marxist upbringing, that power without the authority and resources of the Party apparatus could best be secured by property. With less than 10 percent of the Soviet economy under direct control of the republics, their leaderships began claiming “sovereignty” over the Union’s assets located within their borders. By 1990, almost every dispute between Gorbachev’s government and the republics included the ongoing struggle over “redistribution of property and power,”¹²¹ and even more so as he tried to negotiate a new Union treaty.

That development was the primary force behind many of the nationalist and secessionist movements that swept across the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991. Those movements are often attributed to “the people” and characterized as a “revolution from below,” but the majority were actually “extremely elite-dominated” by “nomenklatura nationalists.”¹²² Certainly, there is no mistaking their leaders, longtime Party bosses who quickly reinvented themselves as declared nationalists of their respective republics, from Yeltsin in Russia and Kravchuk in Ukraine to Communist chieftains in Central Asia and Azerbaijan, where one now insisted he had long been a “secret Muslim” and “genuine anti-Communist.”¹²³

In that new guise, republic elites played a crucial role during the last years of the Soviet Union—one much larger that that of “the people,” except perhaps in the Baltics and parts of the Caucasus—but it should not be misunderstood. Their drive for property-based power eventually determined the lines along which the Union was dissolved, each of the fifteen republics becoming an independent state. And their zealous privatizing of state assets sometimes made it seem that the Soviet breakup was an act of “self-dissolution,” “self-destruction,” or “suicide.”¹²⁴

But authors who focus on spontaneous privatizing are wrong in concluding that the Soviet breakup was “elite-driven” and the nomenklatura was the “catalyst.”¹²⁵ Again, by 1991, that primary role belonged to Yeltsin. The related argument that the institution of ethnically based republics doomed the system is unconvincing because institutions behave largely as their elites choose.¹²⁶ And little in the history or contemporary behavior of most Soviet republic elites suggests defiance of Moscow to the point of secession. In the 1980s, they complied even as Gorbachev’s prodemocracy policies undermined their power, and they did so again in August 1991 when Moscow putschists threatened to reimpose control over their republics. Indeed, several “sovereign” republic heads telephoned the coup leaders in the Kremlin to negotiate their place in the “new order.”¹²⁷ They went their independent ways only when Yeltsin, in Moscow, paved the way.

In short, though the property-seeking nomenklatura was the main beneficiary of the Soviet breakup,¹²⁸ it was not the primary causal factor, even at the center of its bureaucratic power in Russia. It was, however, the crucial enabling factor. It may be true that “no force would have brought down the Soviet Union if the Russian elite had not wanted this.”¹²⁹ But in this regard, the nomenklatura was mostly indifferent. Its attention fixed on untold wealth, it simply “kept silent,” as Gorbachev bitterly remarked, while Yeltsin, the real “catalyst,”¹³⁰ abolished the Soviet state.

Why property-grabbing Soviet elites, who now favored some kind of capitalism over any kind of socialism and about whom it was said “property is more important than ideology,” preferred Yeltsin to Gorbachev is easy to understand. Their antipathy to the Soviet leader began during his democratic reforms, when “‘nomenklatura’ became a curse word,”¹³¹ but by 1991 they had a more important reason—the devoutly socialist nature of Gorbachev’s perestroika reformation. Adamant in the face of new political fashions and rampant greed, his goal remained a social-democratic Soviet Union based on “mixed” state and private economics and a “regulated” market to preserve the social benefits of the old system.

That “socialist idea” underlay Gorbachev’s opposition to the rapid wholesale privatization called for by the 500-Day Plan and other shock-therapy proposals. He was prepared “to go boldly” toward “destatization,” but “on the condition… that property created by whole generations does not fall into the hands of thieves” and end with “someone standing over us.” As people around him often emphasized, “Perestroika was not created to convert power into property.” Warning against a Soviet “Klondike,” he wanted a privatization that was gradual, partial, guided by “high legal and political standards,” and “in the interests of the working people.”¹³² Western writers mock Gorbachev’s belief in such a “socialism with a human face,” but Soviet elites knew he was determined and therefore was a major obstacle to their ongoing property seizures.¹³³

Yeltsin, on the other hand, was sending them a different message. He had emerged as a popular politician by opposing nomenklatura privileges, but in mid-1990, and even more upon becoming president of the Russian Republic a year later, he began appealing to disaffected Soviet elites in his campaign against Gorbachev.¹³⁴ Yeltsin’s “radical reform” positions were interpreted by the mass electorate as populism but by the nomenklatura as an endorsement, even an incitement, of their freelance privatizing, or “eagerness to seize,” as a well-known reformer viewed it. That was the case, for example, with his demonstrative support for the “free-market” 500-Day-Plan and his astonishing exhortation to regional elites: “Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.”¹³⁵

If any doubt remained as to what Yeltsin meant by “sovereignty,” it was removed by his confiscation of the Union’s vast economic assets on his Russian republic’s territory, from natural resources to banks, during the second half of 1991. Elites throughout the Soviet Union, observers recalled, “watched Yeltsin’s behavior” and “imitated” it. (Some of their representatives, including his collaborator at Belovezh, Kravchuk, he simply bribed with property.)¹³⁶ By the time Yeltsin went to Belovezh in December to abolish the Union, soon-to-be-post-Soviet elites knew he was the leader who would ratify their privatized holdings. They knew, as a Yeltsin aide understood at the time, “who would play first fiddle in this historic divvying up. That was the main thing.”¹³⁷