Soviet intelligence had a special way of needling those Western reporters who remained in Moscow through December. The KGB would contrive to dangle some headline-grabbing announcement for the 25th of the month, or stage some last-minute media event – a question and answer session, say, with some hard-to-get official – knowing full well that this would cause maximum inconvenience to those celebrating Western Christmas with family or friends.
In the days before the internet, social media and even mobile phones, there was little choice but to turn up in person. The day was, after all, just a normal working day in the USSR, as indeed it is in Russia today, where Orthodox Christmas is a public holiday and celebrated on 7 January. The surprise sprung on us Moscow correspondents 25 years ago this weekend, however, was no stratagem designed to ruin our festive lunch. It was a cataclysm that would disrupt the holiday for the whole of the Western world, and whose aftershocks are still being felt around the globe today.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s last television broadcast as Soviet President was delivered with all the gravitas worthy of the occasion. But there was also something disconsolate, almost truculent, about how he regretted the failure of his efforts to keep the Soviet Union together and announced the de facto dissolution of the country. The hammer and sickle that flew over the Kremlin was lowered that night, replaced by the Russian tricolour. One state became 15 and, as elected president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin became leader of the official successor state. Gorbachev’s bitter rival had won.
So ended a 74-year long old social experiment, with all its initial idealism and all its cruelty – at least some of which will be revisited next year for the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution. So ended, too, more than a year of all-embracing uncertainty, as shop shelves emptied and power seemed to swing between the Soviet and Russian authorities by the day.
In that sense, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a measure of relief. There was relief that the interminable wait for something – who knew what? – was over; relief, too, that the second superpower, as it was then, had been dissolved essentially by consent. There was no civil war, no famine and no mass refugee crisis – for all of which the West had made (probably inadequate) plans. Two pieces of paper, or so it seemed, had sufficed: the accords signed by Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia (now Belarus) on 8 December, renouncing the treaty that had established the Soviet Union, and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev.
The apparent ease with which the Soviet Union passed into history, though, was deceptive. For 25 December 1991 was not just an end; it was also the birth, or rather re-birth, of the Russian state and the start of a process that is far from complete even 25 years on. Which is where, it could be argued, lie the roots of some of the suspicion and outright hostility Russia faces in much of the Western world today. Here are three aspects that are less appreciated than they deserve to be.
First, the Soviet Union’s collapse had many causes. Its central planning system failed; it proved unable to bring either its economics or its politics into the modern world, and it was bankrupted by trying to match USA defence spending. But it died, too, because its constituent parts simply lacked the will to hold it together.
Some of the 15 republics actively strove for separation (the Baltic States and, less ardently, Ukraine). Others – the Central Asian republics – were less enthusiastic and woefully unprepared. But Russia played a big part, too, because its people had come to resent the burdens of empire. The end of the Soviet Union was as much about the reassertion of Russian identity as it was about the failure of Soviet communism. This has been a more difficult and contested task than it might have seemed.
Second, perhaps because Russia became the Soviet successor state, it is often treated as though the one simply emerged from the other and there was no rupture, such as took place elsewhere as the eastern bloc or subsequently in Georgia and Ukraine. This is to forget, however, that between 1989 and 1991, hundreds of thousands of Russians went out on to the streets each weekend to demand democratic reforms; that people power helped to defeat the August 1991 hardliners’ coup, and that Yeltsin then outlawed the Soviet communist party.
It is true that there was more continuity in Russia than in some former communist countries, also because some senior officials saw the writing on the wall and “defected” from Soviet to Russian institutions ahead of time. But to maintain there was no change of power is wrong. Gorbachev’s fate alone testifies to that. There was a real change of power along with a real rejection of Soviet communist rule. The West’s failure to recognise that today’s Russian Federation is not just the Soviet Union in flimsy disguise is something that irks Russia’s leaders and people to this day.
Third, the merciful lack of drama that attended the dissolution of the Soviet Union fuelled expectations elsewhere in the world that Russians would respond pretty much as, say, Poland had done. Of course, the historical significance of what had happened was huge, but surely Russians would acquire new passports, seize the new freedoms and creature comforts and joyfully turn their back on the bad old days.
To an extent that is often underestimated, this did indeed happen: Russians enjoy amenities and opportunities today that were unimaginable then. Vastly underestimated, too, though, is the trauma the Soviet collapse brought in its wake. For some people there was sudden material poverty. For many, many more – perhaps the country as a whole – the chief impact was psychological: a pervasive insecurity; a fear that the disintegration process was not over; a sense of national defeat and diminished status.
This is a trauma that has marked a whole generation – the generation of Vladimir Putin – with its effects doubtless lingering on well into the next. And if the prime cause of Russia’s aggrieved response to what it sees as Western encroachment – into eastern Europe and Ukraine – is not innate Russian belligerence, but the experience of loss and the birth pangs of a post-Soviet national identity, we may be looking for the remedy in the wrong place. Rather than issuing imperious demands for a change in Russia’s “behaviour” and consigning communications to the deep freeze – as Moscow recently accused the US of doing – we should perhaps borrow the advice given in another context by that wise elder statesman John Major: to “understand a little more and condemn a little less”.
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