The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy

what the world watched in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine in the spring and summer of 2014 was a sequel to the dramatic disintegration of the Soviet Union twenty-three years earlier.

Putin’s speech was meant to remove all doubt that the “hard times” were over and that Russia was back, prepared to undo the “injustice” inflicted on it by the disintegration of the USSR.

Yet many policies of the present-day Russian leadership have their origins in the last years and months of the existence of the USSR. By far the most important of those policies has been the Russian leadership’s early decision to maintain Moscow’s political, economic, and military control over the “near abroad,” as the Russian political elite and media dubbed the former Soviet republics.

Russia opted out of the empire because it lacked the resources to keep the costly imperial project going. Unlike most of its counterparts, however, it took along the rich oil and gas resources of the empire—most of the Soviet oil and gas reserves were located in Russian Siberia. Thus Russia had more to gain economically than to lose from the collapse of the USSR. Russian control over oil and gas resources made the divorce with the empire in 1991 easier in economic terms and prevented armed conflict between Russia and the republics that declared independence.

In 1994, Kyiv gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for ”assurances” of territorial integrity and independence given by Russia, the United States, and Great Britain. In 1997, the Ukrainian government agreed to lease the naval base in Sevastopol to the Russian fleet in exchange for a treaty that recognized the inviolability of Ukrainian borders. It took the Russian parliament two years to ratify the treaty that formally recognized the Crimea and Sevastopol as integral parts of Ukrainian territory.

In the late 1990s, Ukraine began its drift toward the West, declaring integration into the European Union as the goal of its foreign policy and refusing to join Russia-led economic, military, and political institutions.

In 2004, Ukrainian civil society refused to accept the results of a rigged election and endorse the Russian-backed candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, as the country’s new president. After a long and peaceful protest that became known as the Orange Revolution, the outgoing president of Ukraine agreed to a new round of elections that brought to power a pro-Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. From that time on, Moscow treated Kyiv’s orientation on the West not only as a growing external danger but also as a threat to its own increasingly authoritarian regime.

The current crisis in Russo-Ukrainian relations began on the night of November 21, 2013 with a Facebook post by a Ukrainian journalist of Afghan descent, Mustafa Nayem. He was disturbed by news that the government of Viktor Yanukovych, who had come to power in 2010, had refused to sign a long-awaited association agreement with the European Union.

The Euromaidan, which had begun with protests against the postponement of the signing of the EU association agreement, turned into what became known as the Revolution of Dignity. Hundreds of thousands of people would join the protests that continued through December 2013 into January and February 2014.

With the United States and EU countries applying pressure on President Yanukovych for a peaceful resolution of the crisis, Yanukovych turned to Russia.

The Russian government was extremely displeased with the turn of events in Kyiv. On February 21, the Russian representative at the negotiations conducted by Sikorski refused to sign the agreement on behalf of his state, but after Yanukovych fled Kyiv, Moscow accused the West and the Ukrainian opposition of not honoring the agreement. It declared the Kyiv events a coup and branded the new Ukrainian government unconstitutional.

The new revolutionary government in Kyiv was completely unprepared to deal with the Russian annexation of the Crimea and the hybrid war that the Kremlin had begun in the eastern Ukrainian Donbas (Donets Basin).

The Russian strategists of the hybrid war were much more successful in the Donbas industrial region on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, where Russian-backed separatists declared the formation of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics.

Petro Poroshenko,

In early September 2014, with the participation of Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the two sides signed an agreement that resulted in a shaky ceasefire, which was violated more than once and saw the Russia-backed rebels seizing more territories from the Ukrainian government.

The Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and then post-Soviet Russia all associated international power and security with control over territories along their borders. If they could not control such territories completely, they would partition them and control what they could.

This book challenges the triumphalist interpretation of the Soviet collapse as an American victory in the Cold War.

These newly available documents show with unprecedented clarity that the president himself and many of his White House advisers did much to prolong the life of the Soviet Union, worried about the rise of the future Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the drives for independence by leaders of other Soviet republics, and, once the Soviet Union was gone, wanted Russia to become the sole owner of the Soviet nuclear arsenals and maintain its influence in the post-Soviet space, especially in the Central Asian republics.

They show how Cold War–era political rhetoric clashed with realpolitik as the White House tried to save Gorbachev, whom it regarded as its main partner on the world stage. The White House was prepared to tolerate the continued existence of the Communist Party and the Soviet empire in order to achieve that goal. Its main concern was not victory in the Cold War, which was already effectively over, but the possibility of civil war in the Soviet Union. That would have threatened to turn the former tsarist empire into a “Yugoslavia with nukes,”

The declaration of the fall of the USSR as an American victory in the Cold War helped create an exaggerated perception of the extent of American global power at the time when such perception mattered most, during the decade leading up to the 9/11 attacks and the start of the nine-year-long Iraq War.

Inflated accounts of the American role in the collapse of the Soviet Union feed present-day Russian nationalist conspiracy theories, which present the collapse of the Soviet Union as the outcome of a CIA plot.

join those political scientists and historians who argue that while the lost arms race, economic decline, democratic resurgence, and bankruptcy of communist ideals all contributed to the Soviet implosion, they did not predetermine the disintegration of the Soviet Union. That was caused by the imperial foundations, multiethnic composition, and pseudofederal structure of the Soviet state, features whose importance was fully recognized neither by American policy makers in Washington nor by Gorbachev’s advisers in Moscow.

The Russians were de jure in charge of the largest republic by far, the Russian Federation, but there were fourteen others. Numbering close to 150 million, the Russians constituted only 51 percent of the total Soviet population.

Not until 1991 did the world finally comprehend that the Soviet Union was not Russia.

I approach the history of the Soviet collapse with the basic premise that imperial rule is incompatible with electoral democracy and that the conflict between them led to the fall of the world’s last empire. Once Gorbachev introduced elements of electoral democracy into Soviet politics in 1989, the newly elected politicians in Russia were suddenly empowered to say whether they were willing to continue bearing the burdens of empire, while the politicians in the non-Russian republics faced the question of whether they wanted to remain under imperial rule. Eventually, both groups answered in the negative.

My main argument is closley linked to the idea that the fate of the Soviet Union was decided in the last four months of its existence, between the coup that began on August 19 and the meeting of the leaders of the Soviet republics in Almaty on December 21, 1991.

but rather the relationship between the two largest Soviet republics, Russia and Ukraine. It was the unwillingness of their political elites to find a modus vivendi within one state structure that drove the final nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union.

The airplane not only revolutionized warfare but also had the same effect on diplomacy, which aimed to prevent war.

Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov

KGB, Vladimir Kriuchkov,

Soviet power was no longer concentrated in the hands of one person and was not wielded in Moscow alone.

In domestic policy Gorbachev initiated perestroika (literally, “restructuring”), which loosened party control over the centralized economy and introduced elements of the market. He also began the policy of glasnost (openness), a term borrowed from the arsenal of the Soviet dissidents, which reduced party control over the media and made some allowance for ideological pluralism.

Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

minister of defense, Marshal Dmitrii Yazov,

“The U.S.S.R. has conceded so much and the U.S. reciprocated so little for a simple reason: the Gorbachev revolution is history’s greatest fire sale. In such transactions, prices are always very low.”

Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser, Anatolii Cherniaev,

The conversations that so greatly impressed the Soviets, who were desperate for support and hungry for recognition as equals by their new American partner, barely registered on the American radar.

Judging by Bush’s memoirs, Gorbachev’s overtures to him at Novo-Ogarevo regarding the creation of a joint Soviet-American world order were lost in translation. Gorbachev was daydreaming.

The exodus left party bureaucrats flummoxed. In January 1991 a Central Committee secretary, Oleg Shenin, warned the secretaries of the republican and oblast committees that many of those who had left the party in 1990 were workers and peasants—a worrisome signal to a party that prided itself on just such members.

Even worse was the mass exodus of the intelligentsia. While workers were always reluctant to join a party that offered few if any benefits to its rank and file, many members of the intelligentsia had been eager to join it in order to advance their careers and gain entry into the managerial class and, eventually, the nomenklatura—the top echelon of the party and state bureaucracy, which consisted almost exclusively of party members.

But the informal arrangement between the party apparatus and the Soviet intelligentsia, whereby the party agreed to accept formal declarations of loyalty at face value and the intelligentsia agreed to offer such declarations in return for the perquisites of working abroad, reached its limit in 1990.

Yeltsin’s resignation from the party without losing his post as Speaker of the Russian parliament showed the elite that party membership was no longer a prerequisite for a professional career.

The revolt in the Soviet Foreign Service and among Soviet citizens working in international organizations was indicative of the party’s failure to keep its ideologically disillusioned managerial class in line.

The first steps taken by Gorbachev and his allies toward the democratization of the authoritarian system did little to mobilize public support for his effort to reform the USSR from the center. Instead, they gave the Soviet nationalities an opportunity to assert themselves and threaten the integrity of the union into which they had been brought by force.

In late 1989 the Lithuanian Communist Party declared its independence from the Central Committee in Moscow.

In March 1990, the newly elected parliament of Lithuania declared the republic’s independence from the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1990 most of the Soviet republics, including Russia under Yeltsin’s leadership, had declared sovereignty, which meant that republican laws took precedence over those of the Soviet Union.

Russian national mobilization began in earnest in early 1989 not in the Russian Federation but beyond its borders as a reaction to the rising tide of local nationalism in the Baltics, Moldova (Moldavia), and other non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev did not want the creation of a separate Russian party organization, as it might well strengthen chauvinistic tendencies in Russia and nationalism in the non-Russian republics; moreover, it could turn into an organizational platform of conservative opposition to his reforms.

in June 1990. That month a separate Communist Party of the Russian Federation was born. As expected, it became a bastion of ultraconservative anti-Gorbachev opposition within the all-Union Communist Party.

Vadim Medvedev, the leading party ideologue at the time, spoke out against giving Russia sovereign rights already conceded to other republics: “If we fashion it like the other republics, then the transformation of the USSR into a confederation is inevitable. The RSFSR [[Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic]] is the core of the Union.”