THREE SOVIET LEADERS DIED IN THE COURSE OF AS MANY YEARS. Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the country for eighteen years, passed away in November 1982; his successor, the former head of the KGB, Yurii Andropov, succumbed to illness in February 1984; and Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, followed suit in March 1985. The old Soviet Union had long run out of new ideas. By the mid-1980s, it had also run out of leaders committed to maintaining old ideological, economic, and social models.
The new Soviet leader, the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, was eager to try new things. The immediate and most obvious challenge before him was the sorry state of the Soviet economy, which was in free fall. Income growth, which had averaged about 14 percent per year in the 1930s, had slowed to about 10 percent in the 1950s, and dropped to approximately 5 percent in the first half of the 1980s. Those were official figures. The CIA estimated the rate of Soviet income growth between 1980 and 1985 at close to 2 percent, while post-Soviet calculations yielded an even lower figure. Meanwhile, the Soviet population was growing at a much faster rate, breaking the 180 million mark in the early 1950s and reaching 280 million in the mid-1980s. Shortages not only of consumer goods but also of food supplies had become part of everyday life by the time Gorbachev assumed office in March 1985. Something had to be done quickly to fix the economy.
Another set of problems facing the new leader had to do with the loss of legitimacy by the ruling party and its elite. The communists ruled the country not only by means of terror and coercion but also with the promise of a brighter future. That future was called the attainment of communism, which in the popular mind meant an abundance of food and consumer goods. Khrushchev had promised the advent of that paradise in the early 1980s. With no communism in sight and the economy in decline, faith in the coming paradise and its prophets hit bottom. In promising a communist future, the authorities had contrasted the achievements of the socialist economy with those of its capitalist counterpart in the West, claiming that Soviet socialism was destined to outperform capitalism in the interest of the toiling masses. That promise was never fulfilled. If the contrast was still plausible in the 1950s and 1960s—the Soviet gross national product (GDP) more than tripled between 1950 and 1965, while that of the United States only doubled—by the 1970s the Soviet economy was no longer competitive. In 1970, it was about 60 percent as large as the US economy; after that, it declined steadily, and by 1989 it was less than half the size of the American economy.
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the rise of Cold War rivalry between the two superpowers. By that time, the Soviet Union was bogged down in Afghanistan, where it sent its troops in 1979 to support what promised to be a socialist revolution and stop the advance of the West, while the United States had begun its recovery from the psychological shock of Vietnam and the energy crisis of the 1970s, becoming more aggressive in its rhetoric and actions abroad. Under Ronald Reagan, who moved into the White House in January 1981 and stayed in office for two terms, the United States challenged Soviet behavior not only in Afghanistan but also in Poland. Workers’ strikes in that country gave birth to the free trade union Solidarity, which contested Polish communist rule and Soviet political control. Reagan revived the arms race, threatening the Soviet Union with the Strategic Defense Initiative, a program that came to be known as Star Wars and proposed the weaponizing of outer space. The defensive antimissile system that was to be constructed under the Star Wars plan had the potential to change the world balance of power by making the Soviet missile threat to the United States largely obsolete. Although the technical complexity of the proposal made it a pipe dream, Reagan believed in it, as did the Soviets, who knew that they lacked the resources to match American investment in the next round of the arms race.
Gorbachev had to act quickly to deal with the crises of the economy and political legitimacy at home and the economic, ideological, and military competition abroad, now all but lost by the USSR. On the international scene, he attempted to ease tensions by negotiating and signing a number of arms-reduction treaties with the United States that were supposed to free funds for domestic reform and ensure Western assistance to the struggling Soviet economy. Gorbachev also tried to reduce the economic burden on the USSR and improve its image abroad by withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which he did in 1988, and allowing the East European satellites of the Soviet Union to decide their own form of government. That decision resulted in the overthrow of their communist regimes in a sequence of largely peaceful revolutions in the summer and fall of 1989, effectively ending Cold War rivalry in Central and Eastern Europe.
But the greatest changes took place within the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev introduced the policy of perestroika, or radical restructuring of Soviet society. He began his offensive against the old system on two fronts, introducing elements of private property and the market in Soviet economic space and opening political space for debate. For Gorbachev and his liberal advisers, the two fronts were interrelated, and victory on one was impossible without victory on the other. As the party’s old guard resisted economic change, Gorbachev used political reform to soften up or crush his opponents. The key component of perestroika was the notion of glasnost, or openness—a series of measures that lifted restrictions on political debate and made party officials vulnerable to criticism by the media and citizens at large.
The change in the Soviet system of government came in 1989 with the first relatively free elections in the USSR since the Revolution of 1917. In the spring of that year, Soviet citizens elected their representatives to a new legislative body, the Congress of People’s Deputies. In the following year, Gorbachev used the Congress to make constitutional changes that ended the Communist Party’s monopoly of power and created the post of president of the USSR, which became the highest office in the land, superior to that of general secretary of the party. Gorbachev, elected by the Congress as the first president of the USSR, maintained his post of general secretary but used it to maneuver the party out of power. Party officials were allowed to keep their power in the regions only if they were elected to the local parliaments or soviets. The move not only ended the party’s political monopoly but also undermined the power of the center. Local officials would henceforth depend on their electorates more than on their superiors in Moscow.
As the former party bosses and leaders of the new democratic institutions born out of the turmoil of perestroika started listening to their electorates, the Soviet Union began to crumble. Electors in every Union republic, from Estonia to Russia to Uzbekistan, and the autonomous republics within them, wanted a say in running their homelands. All of a sudden, people everywhere began to feel that their polities were being mistreated by the government in Moscow. History, language, culture, and, ultimately, nationalism became effective tools of political mobilization, setting the republics onto different cultural, economic, and political trajectories. The introduction of free elections transformed Soviet society, putting the structure and even the integrity of the multiethnic USSR into question. The change was more dramatic than Gorbachev had bargained for, leading in a few years not only to the collapse of the communist regime but also to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
FEW SOVIET REPUBLICS PLAYED A MORE IMPORTANT ROLE IN dissolving the Soviet Union than the Russian Federation, and no Soviet nationality later felt more betrayed by the collapse of the Soviet polity than the Russians. In the 1930s, Stalin used to call the Russians the most Soviet nation. In the decades after the war, they definitely assumed that status. In fact, they became something more, turning into the core of the Soviet people that the party wanted to form. They were more than ready to integrate others into that core. By the 1970s, only a small minority of Russians, between 2 and 8 percent, insisted on endogamous marriage. To be sure, most of those who told pollsters that they were willing to marry outside their ethnic group expected marriage to entail the linguistic and cultural Russification of the non-Russian spouse, not the other way around. Brezhnev’s policy of promoting the concept of the Soviet people along with the Russian language was bearing fruit. (As late as 1998, seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, 52 percent of Russian citizens polled showed close affinity to the notion of a Soviet people.)
But the 1970s also brought resistance to Brezhnev’s policy in the non-Russian republics. In 1978, when Moscow tried to change the Georgian constitution to remove the reference to Georgian as the official language of the republic, students went into the streets of Tbilisi to protest. Moscow retreated. If the Georgians had a reference to the official status of their language in their basic law, other republics tried to gain similar status for their languages, whether or not it was enshrined in their constitutions. Russians and Russian-speakers in those republics who refused or showed reluctance to learn the local language felt discriminated against.
The situation was reminiscent of the 1920s, when the indigenization policy was implemented as a concession to the non-Russians. But the Russians, whose primacy in the Soviet Union had been unquestioned in the 1920s, were now on the defensive, obliged either to adulterate their Russian identity with the concept of the Soviet people or to start treating the non-Russians as equals rather than underlings. Russian nationalists, feeling under siege in what they considered their own state, began to express dissatisfaction. As the regime turned the Russians into the “most Soviet nation,” they had had to give up many elements of their traditional, prerevolutionary identity, which included naïve monarchism and religion. Russian populists of the prerevolutionary era had considered those elements to have been based in and maintained by the village. The recovery and preservation of non-Soviet Russian identity was a cause championed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a score of Russian authors who wrote “village prose,” and whose publications were discussed in the previous chapters.
The Russian nation that was to be defended against the communist regime’s Sovietization and the rise of cultural assertiveness in the borderlands was deeply rooted in the prerevolutionary past. The new crop of Russian nationalist thinkers often defined it in the spirit of Russian imperial nationhood, not limited to ethnic Russians but encompassing Ukrainians and Belarusians as well. Given the spread of the Russian language in Ukraine and Belarus and the ability of Eastern Slavs to communicate in Russian irrespective of their native language, this linguistic and cultural model of Russianness resembled the imperial ideal of a big Russian nation. It found support both in the Russian cultural establishment and among dissidents.
In officially sanctioned texts, references to the population of Kyivan Rus’ as Russians, or old Russians, were commonplace, while Ukrainian and Belarusian territories were often referred to in historical terms as southern and western Russian lands. The lack of particular terms in the Russian language to distinguish between Russians and the Rus’—or Ruthenian—people eased such reversions to imperial discourse. Many underground texts, such as Vladimir Osipov’s journal Veche (referring to a popular assembly of medieval times), published in the early 1970s in print runs of fifty to one hundred copies, openly propagated their authors’ beliefs in the essential unity of the Eastern Slavs, whom they simply called Russians.
But the model of a pan-Russian nation, whether of Soviet or prerevolutionary imperial vintage, encountered tough sledding among the intellectual elites of the second-largest East Slavic nation, Ukraine. In Russia, the dissident movement of the 1970s was divided between liberals, represented by academician Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb turned political dissident, and nationalists, represented by the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a former Gulag prisoner who had made a name for himself during the Khrushchev Thaw. But in Ukraine the dissidents managed to stay together, combining liberalism and nationalism.
That trend defined the ideological and cultural program of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group—a human rights monitoring organization inspired by the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which obliged the Soviet Union to abide by international norms in the sphere of human rights. The group was formed against the will of the authorities in the fall of 1976, soon after the creation of a similar group in Moscow. While the members of the group did not put forward Ukrainian independence as their immediate political goal, they argued for Ukrainian cultural and political equality with Russia. For members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, Moscow was not just the capital of the Soviet Union but also the embodiment of Russia, and struggle against the USSR was a struggle against Russian dominance. A programmatic document of the group adopted in February 1977 made this clear: “We profoundly respect the culture, spirituality, and ideals of the Russian people, but why should Moscow make decisions for us at international forums (like those in Helsinki and Belgrade) on various problems, commitments, and the like?! Why should Ukraine’s cultural, creative, scientific, agricultural, and international problems be defined and planned in the capital of a neighboring (even allied) state?”
Russian nationalists realized that Ukraine was a problem for them. In his Gulag Archipelago, the key samizdat (self-published and secretly distributed without official authorization) text of the era, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lamented the failure of earlier attempts to fuse Russians and Ukrainians without giving up hope that they would stay together. He wrote: “In the Kyivan period we constituted a single people, but since then it has been torn apart, and for centuries our lives, habits, and languages went in different directions.” He blamed communism, especially that of the 1930s and 1940s, for the rupture that had caused Ukrainians to strive for independence from Russia. But whatever their differences, Solzhenitsyn, the son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, wanted them to stay together.
He wrote:
It will be extraordinarily painful with Ukraine. But one has to be aware of the intensity of their general attitude at present. If the question has not been resolved over the centuries, then it is up to us to show prudence. We are obliged to leave the solution to them—federalists or separatists, whoever comes out on top. It would be foolish and cruel not to yield. And the greater our mildness, forbearance, and sagacity now, the greater the hope of restoring unity in the future. Let them live and try it out for themselves. It will soon become apparent to them that not all problems are to be solved by separation.
THE SCENARIO ENVISIONED BY SOLZHENITSYN IN THE 1960S suddenly became reality in the late 1980s with the proclamation of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Solzhenitsyn was able to predict the future because he knew the attitudes of Ukrainian political activists, some of whom he had met in the Gulag. By the late 1980s, the political prisoners, including members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, had been released. They were free to engage in political activity and propose solutions to economic, political, and nationality problems to a politically awakened population. Although the first Union republic to declare sovereignty—the supremacy of republican laws over those of the Union—in the fall of 1988 was Estonia, in the East Slavic core of the Union the first to do so in the summer of 1990, amazingly, was not Ukraine or Belarus but the “most Soviet” nation of the USSR, Russia itself. What led the Russians to do so?
The answer should be sought first and foremost in the cracks that emerged in the traditional equation of Russian with Soviet identity as the Russian intellectual elite dissociated itself from the failing project of Soviet communism, refusing to take responsibility for its past, present, or future actions. With the Soviet economy faltering and the party losing legitimacy, the non-Russian nationalities revolted against Moscow, the center of that system, and, by extension, against the Russians, the agents and administrators, if not the owners, of the empire. But the Russians refused to take the blame for the abuses of the Soviet system. Russian writers of the “village prose” school had long considered their own republic, not the non-Russian republics of the Union, to be the main victim of the communist regime. Like everyone else, they could now openly assert their claims against the regime and engage in a victimization contest with their accusers.
“The ill-considered collectivization of the 30s inflicted great losses not only on the peasantry but also on the whole Russian people,” asserted the Russian “village prose” writer Vasilii Belov, who ran for a seat in the Soviet parliament in 1989. “According to my information,” he continued, “Russians now constitute less than half the country’s [population].” In 1989, ethnic Russians accounted for 145 million of the 286 million Soviet citizens. Their share of the Soviet population was indeed in decline—a rapidly modernizing nation could not compete in terms of birth rate with traditionally Islamic Central Asian republics. In Tadzhikistan, for example, the population almost doubled between 1970 and 1989, attaining a total of 4.2 million. The low Russian birth rate was regarded not as a characteristic of modernity and an outcome of urbanization but as a dire warning—indeed, a Russian tragedy.
While the Russian intellectual response to the challenges of the crumbling empire was formulated in Moscow, the popular mobilization of Russians and their Russian-speaking allies began in the imperial provinces. If Moscow intellectuals such as Belov represented a sovereign nation in the making, their counterparts in the republics mobilized Russians and Russian-speakers as agents, representatives, and defenders of the Soviet Empire in the non-Russian provinces. In that regard, they relied for support not on Russian political leaders, but on the all-Union leadership, which was trying to keep the Soviet Union alive by mobilizing Russian nationalism in the peripheries.
In the course of 1989, after declaring the sovereign status of their republics, the Balts (Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians) went into the streets en masse to protest Moscow’s planned changes to the Soviet constitution. Those changes would have allowed the center to override republican legislation with all-Union laws and unilaterally decide the issue of secession from the Union. In an overwhelming rejection of Soviet sovereignty over their republics, the activists of the Baltic national movements, called national fronts, organized a Baltic Way in August 1989—a human chain linking their capitals, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. The demonstration was organized on the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had led to the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in World War II.
With the support of local communist party committees, which had everything to lose from the Baltic revolt, Moscow struck back, mobilizing ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in support of the Union. Feeling threatened by the revival of local languages and cultures, the Russian-speaking population of the region generally supported the International Front in Latvia and the International Movement in Estonia, Moscow-backed political organizations whose task it was to counteract the popular fronts created by the titular nationalities.
Estonia and Latvia were more vulnerable to pressure from the center than Lithuania. Latvia, with a population of 2.6 million, was in the most precarious position: Latvians constituted only 52 percent of the population, followed by Russians with 36 percent, Ukrainians with 4.5 percent, and Belarusians with 3.5 percent. In Estonia, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians made up 35 percent of the population. Most of the Russian and East Slavic inhabitants of the Baltic republics were recent migrants working in industrial enterprises established and run by Moscow after World War II. If the popular fronts were pushing for the sovereignty and eventual independence of the Baltic republics, the international fronts were pushing back.
In Russia, the first wave of political mobilization came with semi-free elections to the Soviet super-parliament in the spring of 1989 and continued through the elections to the Russian parliament in 1990. Like the dissident movement of the previous decade, this one had two main ideological poles—liberalism and nationalism. The proponents of the latter were conservative in their economic and social agenda, stressing the wrongs done to the Russians by the communist regime, while at the same time demonstrating loyalty to communism and solidarity with movements of the International Front type in the Baltics.
The merger of communism and nationalism in Russia received its institutional embodiment in the creation of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation—a process long opposed and disrupted by Gorbachev, who feared that a separate Russian party would spell the end of Soviet communist unity, and thus of the Union as such. Maintaining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a de facto Russian party had been a consistent policy since the times of Lenin, who wanted a union of republics but was quite content with Russian dominance over the party. But the Russian communists now demanded a party of their own so as to be on a par with the communists of Ukraine, Belarus, and other republics. They finally got their way in the summer of 1990. The Russian conservatives were now on a collision course with the Union.
Another aspect of Russian mobilization came into existence not in opposition to the non-Russians but in alliance with them. The leaders of the Russian liberal intelligentsia shared their vision of democratic transformation of their societies with the leaders of the popular fronts and national movements in the Baltics, Ukraine, and some other Soviet republics. In the summer of 1989, they joined forces in the Interregional Group of Deputies at the first semi-democratically elected Soviet super-parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. The Interregional Group found support in Moscow, Leningrad, and other large industrial cities of Russia and the Soviet Union. The democratically minded deputies all rebelled against the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, but their ability to define a positive political agenda was limited, with members from the non-Russian republics putting their ethnonational demands first. Gorbachev and the center, for their part, found support among conservative deputies from the non-Russian republics, especially those of Central Asia.
Democratic Russia, a coalition of liberal deputies of the Interregional Group, contested the Russian parliamentary elections of March 1990 and won 190 seats, or roughly one-fifth of the total. This made the Russian liberals switch the focus of their activities from the all-Union to the Russian parliament. In May 1989, they were able to elect their leader, the fifty-eight-year-old Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss who had parted ways with Gorbachev over the pace of democratic reforms, to the all-important post of chairman. A party official by background, a maverick by nature, and an autocrat by inclination, Yeltsin embraced the program of the democratic transformation of society. The Russian reformers then decided to press ahead with democratic and market reforms by using their power in the Russian parliament. In June 1990, with two-thirds of the deputies in favor, a resolution was adopted on the sovereignty of the Russian Federation, officially still titled the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
The idea appealed to liberals and conservatives alike. Yeltsin told the deputies: “For Russia today, the center is both a cruel exploiter and a miserly benefactor, as well as a favorite with no concern for the future. We must put an end to the injustice of these relations.” Yeltsin gave voice to the emerging liberal Russian nationalism movement. The object of its loyalty was not the idea of a “small” ethnically based Russian nation, or of the big Russian nation of imperial times, but a nation to be formed out of the inhabitants of the Russian Federation. Although the Russian Federation was overwhelmingly Russian (82 percent) in ethnic composition, it included numerous autonomous republics and regions that had not become Union republics for a variety of demographic, geographic, or historical reasons. With the sole exception of the former East Prussia, now constituted as the Kaliningrad region of Russia, the Russian Federation was territorially continuous from Leningrad (soon to be renamed St. Petersburg) on the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok on the Pacific. It was a good candidate to form a nation, but in 1990 there were numerous odds against that proposition.
In June 1991, Yeltsin won the race for the newly created office of president of the Russian Federation in competition with candidates supported by his onetime protector and then nemesis, the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike Gorbachev, who had been installed in office in the spring of 1990 by the Soviet parliament, Yeltsin was elected by the voters of Russia. As he took office, Yeltsin pledged his loyalty to the citizens of the Russian Federation, promising to defend the interests of the republic and its peoples.
Yeltsin and his liberal supporters regarded the Russian Federation as an engine for the political and economic reform of the entire Union. But the nationalists who voted for Yeltsin saw Russian institutions as an instrument for enhancing Russian identity, providing support for Russian culture, and cutting financial support for the Union republics, which they claimed were bleeding the Russian economy white. But no one advocated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1991, by creating an alliance with leaders of other republics, Yeltsin forced the embattled Gorbachev to agree to a reform of the Union that would benefit Russia and other well-to-do republics. The new Union treaty negotiated by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan in July 1991 gave the preponderance of economic and political power to the republican leaders, first and foremost to the leader of Russia.
The deal was supposed to become the law of the land on August 20, 1991. But on the previous day, some of Gorbachev’s aides, including the heads of the KGB, police, and army, who knew they would lose their positions in the reshuffle, launched a coup to preserve the Soviet Union in its old form. Gorbachev, who refused to go along, was detained by the plotters at his summer resort in the Crimea. Yeltsin and his advisers were taken by surprise as they relaxed in a government compound outside Moscow after a trip to Kazakhstan. They decided to fight back and mobilize the support of the Muscovites. Naina Yeltsin tried to convince her husband not to go: “Listen, there are tanks there: What is the point of your going? The tanks won’t let you through.” But Yeltsin would not budge. “I had to say something,” he remembered later, “so I gave her my best shot: ‘We have a little Russian flag on our car. They won’t stop us when they see that.’” Yeltsin made it unharmed to the White House, the Russian parliament building in downtown Moscow. The flag was not an issue for the KGB special forces—they simply had not been ordered to arrest Yeltsin. But the flag was an issue for Yeltsin’s supporters.
A few hours after reaching Moscow, when Yeltsin first addressed the people from atop a tank in front of the White House, his aides placed a Russian banner behind him. The plotters’ banner was the red flag of the Soviet Union. Those who resisted the plot hoisted the white, blue, and red flag of the Russian republic of 1917. Russia rebelled against its communist empire and won. The coup was defeated a few days later, and the old tricolor flag became the official banner of Russian democracy and the Russian Federation. Yeltsin’s victory launched Russia on a new trajectory that would prove to be quite different from the one followed by the other Soviet republics.
The attempted coup of August 1991 threatened to undo all the achievements of Yeltsin and his supporters, but they fought back successfully, raising the Russian banner against that of the Union. Yeltsin’s victory changed the situation fundamentally, but at the outset it almost killed the project of a new Russian nation. With Gorbachev betrayed by his own aides and shocked by the ordeal, Yeltsin felt himself to be the real power in Moscow. He began the takeover of the Union center by appointing his own prime minister as head of the all-Union government and forcing Gorbachev to revoke his own decrees appointing new heads of the military, police, and security service: people suggested by Yeltsin were appointed instead. Yeltsin and his supporters no longer needed the vehicle of the Russian Federation and its institutions to promote their liberal reforms, which had been envisioned from the very beginning as an all-Union project.
Yegor Gaidar, an ambitious young economist and future author of Russia’s economic reforms who, like many liberally minded Muscovites, had rallied around Yeltsin during the coup, wanted the Russian president to save the Union, now as an extension of Russia. “As it seemed to me at the time, that political basis was the only remaining possibility of saving the USSR,” wrote Gaidar later. “Gorbachev immediately resigns his post, transferring it to Yeltsin as president of the Union’s largest republic. Yeltsin legitimately subordinates the Union structures to himself and, wielding the then unconditional authority of leader of all the people of Russia, brings about the merger of the two centers of power, whose mutual struggle had been one of the basic causes of the collapse.”
It was too late. The other republics, most notably Ukraine, were already going their own ways, fearing a Russian takeover of the center as much as or even more than they feared a successful coup. On August 24, 1991, Ukraine, the Union’s second-largest republic, declared its independence from the Union, which, first and foremost, under the circumstances, meant independence from Russia. By the end of the week, almost every Union republic that had not declared its independence earlier followed suit. Yeltsin panicked, threatening Ukraine and Kazakhstan with revision of borders and Russian claims on parts of their territory if they insisted on independence. He also dispatched a high-profile delegation to Ukraine to talk sense to the leaders of the de jure independent state. The attempt failed. Yeltsin’s ally Anatolii Sobchak, a member of the delegation, was booed by protesters in Kyiv when he tried to talk about Russo-Ukrainian unity. The Ukrainians did not want to stay with Russia. They did not want the Union. They wanted out.
With the collapse of his plan for a Russian takeover of the Union, Yegor Gaidar no longer thought of saving the USSR. His task became that of saving Russia from an all-Union political and economic collapse by means of rapid economic reform. The Russian Federation once again became the focal point of the Russian liberals’ reformist aspirations. By declaring the start of radical economic reform in November 1991 without waiting for the other republics, Yeltsin and Gaidar effectively broke up the previously integral Soviet economic space. As Russia went its own economic way, however, it still hoped to maintain some form of economic union. Yeltsin and his advisers recognized the independence of their former allies in the Baltics against the wishes of the Russians and Russian-speakers in that part of the former Soviet Union. As for the rest of the USSR, they tried to put together a confederation in which Russia would play the key role without picking up the all-Union bill. This proved a fiasco. Gorbachev would not settle for the role of a figurehead in a confederation actually run by Yeltsin, and the other republics, led by Ukraine, had already opted for independence.
ON DECEMBER 1, 1991, MORE THAN 90 PERCENT OF UKRAINIAN voters supported independence for their republic. Yeltsin bowed to the inevitable. A week later, at the Belavezha hunting lodge on the Belarusian-Polish border, he met with President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and the speaker of the Belarusian parliament, Stanislaŭ Shushkevich, to dissolve the Gorbachev-led Soviet Union and create what he believed would be the Yeltsin-led Commonwealth of Independent States. The Soviet Union was gone, dissolved by the leaders of the three republics that had once constituted a big Russian nation.
No one could have predicted such an outcome even a few months earlier. Without ever declaring—or, indeed, dreaming of—its own independence, Russia became de facto independent. When the Union music stopped playing, Yeltsin and the Russian liberals were stuck with the skeleton of the Russian Federation, which had yet to be filled with economic, institutional, and ideological content. Then there was the new Commonwealth, which many in Russia regarded as a continuation of the USSR. Caught between the Russian Federation and the Commonwealth, the Russian political and intellectual elites had to figure out their new political identity.
In the 1990s, Yeltsin called on his advisers more than once to come up with a new definition of Russian statehood. It was no easy task. At his first inauguration ceremony as president of the Russian Federation in June 1991, Yeltsin had addressed himself to the citizens of the Russian Federation and promised to defend the rights of its peoples. This was the formula that Gorbachev had used in his inauguration address the previous year: Yeltsin simply replaced the USSR with the Russian Federation. There was no mention of the Russian people or nation in his brief speech. At his second inauguration in 1996, Yeltsin promised faithfully to serve “the people” without elaboration. Not only Yeltsin but also other Russian officials were reluctant to define the population of Russia in national terms. In official pronouncements, the inhabitants of the Russian Federation were rarely referred to as the Russian nation.
Few people were more disappointed by the word “nation” falling into disuse than Valerii Tishkov, the director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Soviet and then Russian Academy of Sciences. In the early 1990s, Tishkov was at the forefront of promoting the idea of a Russian civic nation consisting of citizens of the Russian Federation of all ethnic and cultural groups. He called that nation rossiiskaia, the adjectival form of the name of the Russian Empire, as opposed to russkaia, the term usually used to define the Russian ethnic group, either in its narrow Great Russian incarnation or its extended East Slavic one.
Tishkov had begun to develop his ideas in 1989, the year of the first semi-free elections to the Soviet super-parliament and the creation of a liberal opposition to the regime in the form of the Interregional Group of Deputies. He saw the rossiiskaia nation as united across ethnic and cultural lines by a commitment to common values and institutions, with symbols originating not in the imperial Russian past but in the liberal revolution. Tishkov protested against the use of the term “multiethnic Russian people,” considering it not only self-contradictory but also politically dangerous, because it denied political legitimacy to the Russian civic nation, investing it instead in ethnic groups that could claim statehood for themselves as discrete nationalities, as happened in the disintegration of the USSR. Some of Tishkov’s views, such as his opposition to ethnically based federalism and his preference for territorial autonomy, harked back to the ideas of the Constitutional Democrats of 1917.
The Russian leadership actively promoted the civic model of Russian identity for the first two years of Russia’s independent existence. Tishkov was appointed minister of nationalities, and his ideas served as the basis for the Russian law on citizenship adopted by the parliament in November 1991. In the text of the law, citizens were called rossiiane rather than russkie, and the acquisition of Russian citizenship did not depend on the ethnicity or language of the applicant. But Tishkov’s model of the new Russian identity soon began to encounter serious difficulties. The idea of defining Russian nationhood by civic loyalty to the new political institutions became tarnished in the fall of 1993, when Yeltsin used force to crush nationalist and communist opposition to his rule. On Yeltsin’s orders, Russian tanks bombarded the headquarters of the conservative opposition to the president, the Russian White House, which Yeltsin and his supporters had heroically defended against the attempted coup two years earlier, and which Tishkov proposed to treat as one of the symbols of the new Russia. Having defeated his opponents, Yeltsin rewrote the constitution, taking powers away from parliament and moving them to the presidential office. Not only was the symbol of the new Russia compromised, but the idea of democracy had suffered a blow from which it would not fully recover.
There were problems outside of Moscow as well. The ethnically based autonomous units of the Russian Federation were not eager to buy into the rossiiskaia civic nation. The Chechens wanted outright independence, while Tatarstan and other autonomous republics wanted more rights. In December 1994, Yeltsin ordered Russian troops into Chechnia to end its de facto independence from Moscow. The Chechens fought back, forcing the Russian army to sue for peace in August 1996. Russian troops left the rebellious republic, postponing a decision on its status until the year 2001. If there were enclaves within the Russian Federation that did not want to be part of it, there were also those outside of Russia that wanted to join it. These included the self-proclaimed Transnistrian republic on the territory of Moldova, as well as Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.
The Russians faced a problem familiar to other ruling imperial nations: the implosion of the empire had produced a class of disenfranchised citizens who considered themselves either members of the formerly dominant nation or sufficiently compromised by cooperation with it to feel unsafe in the former colonial possessions. Russian citizenship laws allowed such individuals to claim Russian or dual citizenship without moving to Russia, which strengthened the cultural and legal components of Russian identity at the expense of its territorial component. According to some estimates, close to 30 million ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers who associated themselves first and foremost with Russia remained outside the borders of the Russian Federation. Many, especially in the Baltics and in the Russian enclave of the Crimea in Ukraine, were eager to claim Russian citizenship, but that desire brought them into conflict with local citizenship laws, which did not welcome dual citizenship and sometimes even prohibited it. The legal conflict turned the post-Soviet space into a powder keg ready to explode.