The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy

Gorbachev’s economic adviser Vadim Medvedev

The next major victory for Gorbachev came on September 2, the opening day of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR, the Soviet superparliament that had the authority to change the constitution.

Earlier he had informed the Russian president, who was insisting on a federal structure for the Union, that the only structure acceptable to Ukraine was confederal. Nazarbayev, asserting that Ukraine’s declaration of independence had rendered the old federal Union obsolete, also threw his support behind the idea of confederation. It envisioned the Soviet Union not as a state in its own right but as a coalition of states that would create joint bodies for the conduct of foreign and military policy.

The two Kremlin presidents were brought and kept together by two factors now beyond their control: the leaders of the non-Russian republics, who did not want either of them to become more powerful than the other, and the president of the United States, who remained loyal to Gorbachev and looked to the Gorbachev-Yeltsin alliance for hope that a weakened but still stable Soviet Union would continue to exist.

Should Washington support the drive of the other republics for independence, or should it try to save whatever was left of the Soviet Union? This would become the main question on the administration’s agenda in the weeks and months to come.

Gorbachev’s reliance on Western economic assistance in the last two years of his rule was among the factors that obliged him to deal with the Baltic crisis by granting the rebellious republics ever greater autonomy.

As the White House understood quite well, encouraging Baltic independence also meant undermining Gorbachev and thus US interests in other parts of the world.

The problem was that neither Bush nor his advisers had a clear vision of what they should do next: the White House was as reactive as ever in its treatment of the rapidly developing situation.

Baker and his State Department advisers did not want to let Gorbachev down after what he had done to improve Soviet-American relations. To them, Gorbachev and the people around him were known, likable, and predictable. No one in the State Department was well acquainted with Boris Yeltsin or his minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Kozyrev, not to mention the leaders of the other republics. People close to Eduard Shevardnadze had warned the US secretary of state that the center was collapsing and nationalism was on the rise. A State Department memo prepared for Baker after the coup pointed to “the real possibility that these current declarations of independence will now lead to territorial, economic and military disputes between republics.”

Baker responded, “The peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union is in our interest. We do not want another Yugoslavia.”

The only agenda item on which President Bush suggested action that day—an extremely important item—was nuclear disarmament. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who took part in the meeting, believed that as long as nuclear arms were in the hands of the Soviet military and not the politicians, they were safe.

“We longed to be accepted,” wrote Pankin. “In those days the common obsession that gripped our entire leadership was with the idea of becoming a ‘civilized state.’” The desire for acceptance informed Pankin’s behavior during his first meeting with Baker. He began by handing Baker a copy of an internal memo that he had prepared for Gorbachev, spelling out Soviet readiness to reverse every position taken on issues ranging from Afghanistan to Eastern Europe, Israel, and Cuba. Pankin probably wanted to indicate that henceforth Soviet diplomacy would have no secrets from the “civilized world.” As the surprised Baker examined the memo, Pankin told him, “I hope we can come to a common understanding on many of these issues. But I want to make one request: even if the agreement we reach is closer to your original position than to ours, please avoid the temptation to tell the press that these are concessions extracted by you. All this stems from the ideas and positions of the people who are running our foreign policy today.”

What Baker did in Moscow vis-à-vis the republics had the full support of the president. George Bush did almost everything diplomatically possible to keep the Soviet Union alive.

GEORGE H. W. BUSH indeed wanted the Soviet Union to survive. It was essential to his security agenda, which remained focused on Soviet nuclear weapons, just as it had been at the height of the Cold War.

While Silaev advocated a cautious approach to reform and its coordination with the other republics, Burbulis argued for what became known as “shock therapy,” an aggressive reform effort associated with rapid liberalization of prices and an initial sharp decline in living standards, which had been tried successfully in Poland.6 Burbulis and his supporters—who included the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, and the information minister, Mikhail Poltoranin—put Russia’s interests first, seeking to grab as much power as possible from the center and to do so as quickly as they could.

Gorbachev’s first postcoup meeting with Yeltsin and the leaders of the other republics, which took place on August 23, had left no doubt that not only the old Union but also the old union treaty that triggered the coup were now dead.

Translated into plain language, Burbulis’s proposal meant the following. The revolutionary takeover of the center by Russian institutions immediately after the coup had failed. Because of the position taken by the leaders of the Union republics and George Bush, Yeltsin was obliged to work with the center. His advisers were prepared to turn the center into an ally. If Gorbachev cooperated, he could provide a screen for Russian hegemony in the Union and help maintain it.

While Yeltsin vacationed in Sochi, the struggling Soviet president gained unexpected support from two of his staunchest allies: the mayors of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, and of St. Petersburg, Anatolii Sobchak. Their millions of citizens depended on food supplies from the Union republics to survive the winter, which required the prompt restoration of all-Union ties. Gorbachev was their only hope to achieve that. “Leningrad has been taken off the Union and republican supply network; we have ceased to receive provisions from Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” reported Sobchak at a meeting of Gorbachev’s political council on October 2. “In return for what we supply, I could feed ten Leningrads. If this does not change, I will forbid the shipping of tractors to Ukraine and cut off supplies to the republics that do not carry out their obligations.” Vladimir Putin, then Sobchak’s aide in charge of foreign relations, later recalled Sobchak’s anger at what was going on in Moscow. “What are they doing? Why are they destroying the country?” he said to Putin.

Boris Pankin, the Soviet foreign minister

Ayaz Mutalibov, the leader of Azerbaijan,

Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan

Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan,

the Burbulis Memorandum, which set Russia on the path of economic reform irrespective of the wishes and economic needs of other republics,

There would have been no Madrid conference without the new spirit of cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two Cold War superpowers that had competed in the Middle East for decades, funding and arming opposing sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict. George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev served as official cosponsors of the conference.

The roots of the Russo-Chechen conflict that flared up in November 1991 and subsequently engulfed the entire North Caucasus went back to the Russian conquest of the region in the nineteenth century.

The new Russia’s first show of force had ended in an embarrassing public display of the limits of Yeltsin’s power.

This was the program presented to Shakhnazarov by Gennadii Burbulis, Sergei Shakhrai, and the other Russian negotiators. It would eventually become the basis for Russian policy vis-à-vis the former Soviet republics.

The first sign of the coming change was the behavior of the presidents of the republics who gathered in Novo-Ogarevo on November 25 to discuss the new union treaty proposed by Gorbachev. On that day, they were supposed to endorse the text of the union treaty that they had debated and agreed upon at the previous meeting of the State Council. Problems began, as always, with Yeltsin, who again raised the question of the nature of the future union. He claimed that the term agreed on last time, “confederative state,” was meaningless. The treaty should stipulate instead the creation of a union or confederation of sovereign states: otherwise the Russian parliament would not ratify it.

Using the ethnic card to derail the referendum was an idea proposed to Gorbachev by his adviser Georgii Shakhnazarov in a memo of October 10, 1991. Shakhnazarov was disappointed that after the disintegration of the Communist Party there was no political force in Ukraine prepared to stop what he called the “Galician nationalists.” He was also unhappy that the Russian leadership decided not to press territorial claims against Ukraine. Shakhnazarov proposed that Gorbachev “not only publicly repeat but also lend an official tone to Russia’s position with regard to the Crimea, the Donbas, and southern Ukraine.” He wrote, “It should be stated plainly and clearly, without constraint, that those regions are historical parts of Russia, and it does not intend to renounce them if Ukraine should wish to cease being part of the Union.”

Kravchuk and his supporters in Ukraine believed that by constantly expressing concern about the fate of the eastern regions of Ukraine, Gorbachev was in fact trying to stir up interethnic conflict in the republic and exploit it to save the Union. But the question of what would happen to the Russian minority in Ukraine was more than a propaganda ploy on Gorbachev’s part. Even those in his entourage who had already given up on the Union were concerned about the prospect of partitioning what was regarded as Russia’s historical territory. “In general there would be nothing amiss if it were not for Ukraine and for the Crimea, which cannot be given up,” noted Cherniaev in his diary.27 The answer to Gorbachev’s and Cherniaev’s concerns would be given by the forthcoming Ukrainian referendum. Those around Gorbachev did not believe that the Crimea and other regions of Ukraine with a sizable Russian population would vote for independence. It was a paradoxical situation. The future of the Russia-dominated Union depended on the Ukrainian vote, which in turn depended on the ethnic Russian vote in eastern and southern Ukraine.

But the Ukrainian leaders’ problems with the Crimea in the fall of 1991 were not all of Gorbachev’s making. In February 1991, the Kyiv authorities agreed to grant the Crimea autonomous status partly because it was the only region of the country where ethnic Ukrainians were a minority (a quarter of the population). More than 67 percent of the population consisted of ethnic Russians, who dominated Crimean politics and culture. There were no Ukrainian-language schools in the Crimea, few ethnic Ukrainians used the Ukrainian language in everyday life, and only half claimed Ukrainian as their native tongue—an indication that their Ukrainian identity was anything but strong.

The Crimea, which had gained autonomy in early 1991 and was now given special consideration by Kyiv, was envied by local elites in the Transcarpathian oblast of Ukraine, which had belonged to Czechoslovakia before the war. They, too, wanted autonomy. Odesa in the south and the Donbas coal region in the east were prime candidates for similar status. With federalism becoming a dirty word in the Ukrainian presidential election, Viacheslav Chornovil promised the Odesa elites a free economic zone.

Centrifugal tendencies in the regions were one of the challenges facing Kyiv in the run-up to the December referendum. The impact that those tendencies would have on Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors, Soviet and non-Soviet, was another. After the statement made in late August by Yeltsin’s spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, it had become clear that, depending on the results of the referendum, Russia was prepared to make claims on the Crimea and possibly on eastern regions of the country. Hungarians in Transcarpathia looked to their ethnic brethren across the border, and a Romanian movement was gaining strength in northern Bukovyna, a largely Ukrainian-populated region that had belonged to Romania during the interwar period. And if the Czechoslovak and Hungarian elites were not making any claims on current Ukrainian territories, the Romanian parliament was much less accommodating.

Yeltsin issued a statement recognizing Ukrainian independence on December 2, when the initial results of the referendum were made public. Russia became the third country to do so, after Poland and Canada.

The Agreement on the Establishment of a Commonwealth of Independent States consisted of fourteen articles.

Gorbachev did not attempt to arrest Yeltsin, but neither was he giving up. He believed that the newly created Commonwealth was illegitimate and would not last, while the Union could and should be saved. The next two weeks in Moscow would witness the highest human and political drama since the failure of the August coup, with Gorbachev and Yeltsin contending for the support of the republican leaders, their parliaments, top military commanders, and the international community in a struggle whose stakes were the future of the Soviet Union and the world political order.

By mid-December it had become obvious to all the political actors that there would be no new union. Even Gorbachev realized that the project was dead. Its place would be taken by the Commonwealth.

While most of the Central Asian presidents, including the leaders of the two largest republics, Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, did not welcome the creation of the Slavic Commonwealth, they saw no benefit in antagonizing Russia. They bore enough grudges against the former Union and had enough ambition to become independent rulers to throw their full support behind the idea of a Commonwealth that included their republics.

The participants in the Almaty summit focused on two big subjects: the dissolution of the USSR and the creation of a new Commonwealth that would now include not three but eleven republics.

On the following day, Gorbachev’s aide Anatolii Cherniaev noted in his diary, “Yesterday was the day of the Alma-Ata slaughter. A turning point, evidently, comparable to October 25, 1917, and with equally undetermined consequences.” Cherniaev was referring to the Bolshevik takeover in St. Petersburg seventy-four years earlier—an event that had changed the fate of his country and the history of the world. He and his boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, were about to enter the final, and probably the most dramatic, if not tragic, stage of their political careers.

Until the last weeks of the existence of the USSR, Bush had resisted its disintegration and tried to keep Gorbachev in power at all costs. But now that Gorbachev had resigned, Bush and his team were ready to take the credit for something they had worked hard to avoid—the loss of a reliable junior partner in the shaping of the post–Cold War world.

after the Soviet collapse.8 Whether the Soviet Union was an empire or not—the debate on this still continues—it died the death of an empire, splitting along lines roughly defined by ethnic and linguistic boundaries.

Despite Gorbachev’s best efforts to prove otherwise, electoral democracy turned out to be incompatible with the continuing existence of the Soviet state.

The Soviet colossus fell less than three years after the introduction of semi-free elections in the former realm of the Romanovs for the first time since 1917, the year of the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg.

The fall of the Soviet Union took place as a direct outcome of the Ukrainian referendum of December 1, 1991, in which more than 90 percent of those taking part voted for independence.

By contrast, the attempt to save the Soviet Union in its old form was made not through democratic channels but in the form of a coup that failed on the steps of the Russian parliament building three days after its launch.

As the elites in the Russian regions and the non-Russian republics found themselves dealing with nationalist revolts and democratic challenges to their power, they came to depend more on the ballot box than on the supreme boss in the Kremlin.

The fact that until the August coup Gorbachev was not only president of the USSR but also general secretary of the Communist Party made it difficult to distinguish the collapse of communism from the fall of the USSR. It has been argued that after the banning of the party, which allegedly served as a glue binding the republics, there was nothing else to hold the Union together.

Yeltsin’s ban on the Communist Party did not cut the ties linking Moscow to the republics, which barely mattered any more outside the Soviet army and the KGB, but provoked a revolt of former party elites against what they regarded as a new coup in Moscow aimed at them.

Yeltsin, who had prevented the coup plotters from saving the USSR, now adopted that mission himself. With the central bureaucracy defeated and its leader, Gorbachev, weakened, the Yeltsin supporters launched a hostile takeover of Union structures. The ones they could not or did not want to take over, such as the Communist Party, were destroyed. This hostile takeover of the center by a leader much more powerful and dynamic than Gorbachev caused the other republics to rebel, declaring their independence. Yeltsin had to back down. The attempt to take over the Union gave way to negotiations on a confederative structure that would give Russia enough power to implement economic and social reform on its own, free of any restraints on the part of the conservative elites of the non-Russian republics.