The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy

in 1991 the Union’s greatest riches, especially its vast mineral resources, were on the territory of the Russian Federation, not in the republics. The death of the Soviet Union differed from that of other empires in that the resource-rich metropolis cut off its former colonial possessions from easy access to those resources. Russia stood to benefit from the loss of its imperial possessions more than any other empire of the past. Yeltsin and his people not only knew that but counted on

For all his dislike of Gorbachev, Yeltsin consulted with him before his trip to Belavezha and began negotiations with Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine by offering him the Gorbachev-approved plan for a reformed Soviet Union. It was the position of the Ukrainian leader backed by the December 1 referendum on the independence of Ukraine that turned out to be crucial in deciding the fate of the Soviet Union.

WHEN IT COMES TO ASSIGNING either blame or credit for the disintegration of the USSR, fingers are usually pointed at Russia and its revolt against the center.

It was Russia’s relations with Ukraine, the second-largest Soviet republic, and not those with the anemic Union center, that would prove crucial to the future of the Soviet empire in the last weeks of its existence.

It was the Ukrainian elites’ insistence on the independence of their country and the unwillingness and inability of the Russian elites to offer the Ukrainian leadership an attractive integrationist alternative short of a Russia-dominated confederation that led to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s inability to regain power after the coup, Yeltsin’s clumsiness in his original attempt to take over the Union center, his subsequent decision to go ahead with Russian economic reform without the other republics, and, finally, Kravchuk’s dogged insistence on independence left most of the republics that had not yet declared their desire to leave the Union in a difficult position.

In the final analysis, George Bush’s policies contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, but they often did so irrespective of the desires of his administration, or even contrary to them.

The immediate goal, as formulated by James Baker in early 1991, was to extract maximum concessions from the dying Soviet behemoth in the realm of arms control and international relations.

But the most important American concern was the safety of the Soviet nuclear arsenals, which, it was believed in Washington, were much safer under the central control of the Soviet military, with whom the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and other American commanders had worked in the years of Gorbachev’s rule.

The main credit for the peaceful dissolution of the Union should go to the policies of Boris Yeltsin and the cautious stand on Russian minorities taken by Leonid Kravchuk and Nursultan Nazarbayev. But the American contribution to that process was by no means insignificant.

While losing the battle to save the Soviet Union as a junior partner in the international arena, the Bush administration helped orchestrate its peaceful dissolution.

On a certain level, history had indeed come to an end—not in the sense of a final victory of liberalism, as declared by the leading American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man (1990), but in the disappearance of the old European empires.