Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation

by Serhii Plokhy

THE YEAR 1961 MARKED THE HIGH POINT OF KHRUSHCHEV’S political career. His power at the top of the Soviet pyramid seemed unshakable. He had gained sufficient authority to remove Stalin’s body from the Red Square mausoleum and change the name of Stalingrad to Volgograd. In April, the Soviet Union sent the world’s first astronaut, Yurii Gagarin, into outer space.

A major ideological shift occurred in the Soviet Union with the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 by a group of his former protégés led by Leonid Brezhnev.

While the prospect of forging one Soviet nation out of Slavs and non-Slavs was clearly in trouble, the formation of a big Russian nation out of the Eastern Slavs was just as clearly under way. There appeared to be no barrier to the realization of the old dream of the imperial nation-builders—the formation of an all-Russian nation. The only thing their successors needed to complete the project was time, but by the late 1980s they had run out of it.

After Stalins death yin 1953, Nikita Khrushchev assumes power after a short power vacuum. Khrushchev is primarily focused on the internationalization of communism and has a goal of unifying the Soviet Union under one guise of communism within 20 years. As a result, he puts much less pressure on the Russification of the union and concedes certain powers to other ethnic leaders in order to gain their political support. Khrushchev focuses on de-Stalinization culturally and politically. “Khrushchev had moved away from Stalin’s view of the nation as defined mainly by a common language, culture, and territory. State, economy, class, and ideology were the main markers of the new Soviet political nation. Although the party program pledged to defend and develop the languages of the peoples of the USSR, in fact there was no alternative to building the new Soviet people on the foundations of the Russian language and culture.” Under Khrushchev the Russians sent someone to space in 1961. In 1964, a coup was led against Khrushchev by Leonid Brezhnev and other conservative politicians who were concerned that Khrushchevs decentralization of power to other Soviet republics and obsession with communism was destabilizing the Soviet Union. Under Brezhnev, ethnic nationalism aside from Great Russian nationalism was dissuaded, and the strong Russian language initiatives started by Khrushchev, began to see a strengthening of an all Russian nation in the Western Soviets.

Gorbachev assumed office in March 1985.

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the rise of Cold War rivalry between the two superpowers.

Ronald Reagan, who moved into the White House in January 1981 and stayed in office for two terms,

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.

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.

sagacity

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?

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.

preponderance

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.

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.

Gorbachev radically reforming Russia through peristroika and glasnost, which allowed politicians to come under scrutiny and public elections, caused many nations to secede from the union. Russia was left independent and turmoil filled with citizens of the Russian state that felt they didn’t belong and citizens within other territories that aligned with the Russian identity, which was now fractured.

Anatolii Chubais was the mouthpiece of the oligarchs—the new group of large business owners who had emerged out of the economic and political chaos of the post-Soviet transformation by being both more innovative and more ruthless than their competitors. They had gained control of the most lucrative parts of the Russian economy, including the oil and gas industry, in the rigged privatization of the mid-1990s. In return for preference from President Yeltsin, they had used their economic and media resources to help reelect him to office in 1996. They had also helped bring Putin to power in 2000. In return, they demanded Putin’s loyalty, which Putin was most reluctant to offer.

salvo

The plan approved by the Russian president on the last day of the Olympics was put into action in the Crimean capital of Simferopol on February 27, 2014, when a band of heavily armed men with no insignia on their uniforms took control of the Crimean parliament.

incipient

reprises