Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (130 page)

In the increasingly uncertain mood of the times, Soviet (and later Russian) authorities were not at all reluctant to offer patronage to a micro-state that was of necessity loyal to Moscow, wholly dependent on Russian goodwill and whose rulers were local Communist satraps who had seized control of the territory and would convert it in short order into a haven for smugglers and money-launderers. Transnistria being the source of 90 percent of Moldova’s electricity, the new rulers even had a legitimate economic resource of sorts, one that they could threaten to withhold should Chisinau refuse to cooperate.

Transnistrian independence was not recognized by Moldova or anyone else: even Moscow never went so far as to accord the breakaway region official legitimacy. But the scission in tiny Moldova offered a foretaste of more serious troubles to come a few hundred kilometers further east, in the Caucasus. There the longstanding antagonisms between Armenians and Azeris, complicated in particular by the presence in Azerbaijan of a substantial Armenian minority in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, had already resulted in violent clashes both with each other and with Soviet troops in 1988, with hundreds of casualties.
³¹⁵
In the Azerbaijan capital of Baku there were further clashes in January of the following year.

In neighbouring Georgia, twenty demonstrators were shot during clashes in the capital Tbilisi between nationalists and soldiers in April 1989, as tensions rose between crowds demanding secession from the Union and authorities still committed to preserving it. But Soviet Georgia, like the neighbouring Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, was too geographically vulnerable and ethnically complex to be able to contemplate with equanimity the insecurity that must accompany Soviet collapse. Accordingly the local authorities decided to anticipate that eventuality by precipitating it, the ruling Communist parties re-defining themselves as national independence movements and regional Party leaders—of whom by far the best known was Edvard Shevardnadze in Georgia—positioning themselves to seize power as soon as it fell into the street.

By the spring of 1991, then, everyone at the peripheries was waiting to see what would happen at the centre. The key, of course, was Russia itself—by far the dominant republic of the Union, with half the country’s population, three-fifths of its Gross National Product and three-quarters of its land mass. In a certain sense the country of ‘Russia’ as such did not exist: it had for centuries been an empire, whether in fact or in aspiration. Spread across eleven time zones and encompassing dozens of different peoples, ‘Russia’ had always been too big to be reduced to a single identity or common sense of purpose.
³¹⁶

During and after the Great Patriotic War the Soviet authorities had indeed played the Russian card, appealing to national pride and exalting the ‘victory of the Russian people’. But the Russian people had never been assigned ‘nationhood’ in the way that Kazakhs or Ukrainians or Armenians were officially ‘nations’ in Soviet parlance. There was not even a separate ‘Russian’ Communist Party. To be Russian was to be Soviet. There was a natural complementarity between the two: in a post-imperial age the Soviet Union provided cover for the Russian imperial state, while ‘Russia’ furnished the Soviet Union with historical and territorial legitimacy. The boundaries between ‘Russia’ and ‘the Soviet Union’ were thus kept (deliberately) blurred.
³¹⁷

By the time of Gorbachev there was a marked increase in the emphasis on ‘Russianness’, for some of the same reasons that the East German state had begun to take a very public pride in Frederick the Great and to exalt the properly
German
qualities of the German Democratic Republic. In the declining years of the peoples’ republics, patriotism re-emerged as a serviceable substitute for socialism. For just this reason it was also the easiest and least threatening form of political opposition. In Russia or the GDR, as in Hungary, intellectual critics might suffer persecution but muted expressions of nationalism were not necessarily repressed or even discouraged—they could be channeled to the authorities’ advantage. The revival of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ in Soviet publications and the media should be understood in this light. It was also, of course, an additional source of anxiety for vulnerable national minorities.

This was the setting for the unexpected emergence of Boris Yeltsin. A conventional Brezhnev-era
apparatchik
, specializing in industrial construction before becoming a Central Committee Secretary, Yeltsin rose steadily through the ranks of the Party—until he was summarily demoted in 1987 for over-reaching himself in his criticisms of senior colleagues. At this crucial juncture Yeltsin, who had had ample opportunity to observe just how effectively the Party and state bureaucracy could prevent any real change, had the political instinct to re-programme himself as a distinctively
Russian
politician: emerging first as a deputy for the Russian Federation after the March 1990 elections and then as Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet—i.e. the Russian Parliament.

It was from this influential and visible perch that Boris Yeltsin became the country’s leading reformist, ostentatiously quitting the Communist Party in July 1990 and using his power-base in
Russian
Moscow, as it were, to take aim at erstwhile comrades across the way in
Soviet
Moscow. His primary target was now Gorbachev himself (despite the fact that Yeltsin had initially been a firm backer of the Soviet President, in whose native Sverdlovsk region he had worked for over a decade). The Soviet leader’s failings were becoming ever more painfully evident—and his popularity was sinking fast, as Yeltsin could not fail to observe.

Gorbachev’s major tactical mistake in domestic affairs had been to encourage the emergence of a national legislature with national visibility, real powers and considerable independence. Yeltsin and his Russian supporters were much quicker than Gorbachev himself to appreciate that this new, openly-elected Soviet would be a natural forum for the expression of discontents of all sorts; and Yeltsin became particularly adept at aligning Russia’s own interests with those of the various nations and republics. Gorbachev was alert to the threat that such alliances posed to the very Union itself: but by now it was too late for him to do anything except align himself uneasily and unconvincingly with Soviet functionaries nostalgic for the old Party monopoly—the same monopoly that he had done so much to break.

Thus while Gorbachev was still ‘triangulating’ between the desirable and the possible, arguing for a ‘controlled federalism’ (a characteristically Gorbachevian compromise), Yeltsin was passionately and very publicly defending the struggles for Baltic independence. In April 1991 Gorbachev reluctantly conceded to republics the right of secession in a new Union constitution; but this bow to reality merely weakened him further, convincing his conservative foes that Gorbachev would have to be removed if order was to be restored. Meanwhile, on June 12th 1991, Yeltsin, who had long since overtaken Gorbachev in national popularity polls, was elected President of the Russian Soviet Republic—the first ever democratically chosen leader of Russia.
³¹⁸

The following month, on July 12th, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR voted in favor of a new Union: de-centralized and allowing considerable latitude for dissenting member-states. Together with the popular election of the now openly anti-Communist Yeltsin, this finally tipped the scales. Party conservatives were becoming desperate and a group of highly-placed officials—including the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, the Interior Minister and Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB—began to prepare for a coup. That something of the sort was brewing was by now an open secret in Moscow—as early as June 20th the American ambassador had actually warned Gorbachev of a conspiracy, to no avail.

The putsch itself was timed to coincide with Gorbachev’s annual vacation in the Crimea; the last Party leader to be forcibly deposed, Nikita Khrushchev, had also been relaxing in the Soviet south when his colleagues in Moscow staged his surprise removal. The 1991 plotters were thus unabashedly reverting to earlier Soviet practices. Accordingly, on August 17th Gorbachev was asked to agree to hand his Presidential powers to an ‘Emergency Committee’. When he refused, the Emergency Committee announced on August 19th that the President was unable to exercise his authority ‘for health reasons’ and that the Committee would thus assume full powers. The Soviet Vice-President Gennady Yanaev signed a decree stripping Gorbachev of his authority and a six-month ‘state of emergency’ was declared.

But although Gorbachev was helpless, for all practical purposes a prisoner in his Black Sea villa at the southern promontory of the Crimea, the plotters were not much better off. In the first place, the mere fact that they had had to declare an emergency and announce virtual martial law merely in order to replace one Communist leader with another demonstrated how far the traditional structures of the Soviet Union had unraveled. The plotters did not have the unanimous support of their own agencies—crucially a majority of senior KGB officers refused to back Kryuchkov. And while there was no doubt about what the plotters were
against
, they were never able to offer any clear indication of what it was they were
for
.

In addition, the plotters were an unintentional caricature of everything that was wrong with the Soviet past: old, grey men from the Brezhnev era, slow and wooden in speech, out of touch with changes in a country whose clock they were clumsily trying to turn back thirty years. In times past when such men as these schemed in the Kremlin they were hidden from public view, their only appearances confined to distant viewing stands at public ceremonies. Now, however, they were constrained to appear on television and to the press to explain and defend their actions—and the public was given ample opportunity to observe close-up the physiognomy of official Socialism in its dotage.

Meanwhile Boris Yeltsin seized the moment. His standing had been further elevated by a personal meeting with George Bush, during the American President’s visit to the USSR just three weeks before. Now, on August 19th, he publicly denounced the Kremlin takeover as an illegal coup d’état and placed himself at the head of the resistance to it, directing operations from his headquarters in the Russian Parliament and mobilizing the crowds surrounding it to defend democracy against the tanks. At the same time, in the full glare of the assembled international media, Yeltsin engaged in lengthy conversations and negotiations with world leaders—all but one of whom offered him their full public support and studiously withheld any recognition from the increasingly isolated conspirators.
³¹⁹

The resistance was no mere formality: on the night of August 20th-21st three demonstrators died in clashes with the army. But the leaders of the coup—having lost the public initiative—now began to lose their nerve. They did not have the broad support of the armed forces that they would have needed to secure the country, and with every hour of the stand-off in the streets of Moscow (and Leningrad) they were losing their crucial asset: fear. Instead of being intimidated by developments in the Kremlin, democrats and nationalists were emboldened by them: in the midst of the uncertainty, on August 20th, Estonia declared itself independent, with Latvia following suit the next day. On August 21st one of the coup leaders, Boris Pugo (the Interior Minister and former head of the KGB in Latvia), committed suicide; at Yeltsin’s behest his colleagues were arrested. That same day an exhausted and anxious Gorbachev was flown back to Moscow.

Formally speaking, Gorbachev resumed his powers; but in reality everything had changed for ever. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was terminally discredited—it was not until August 21st that Party spokesmen publicly condemned their colleagues’ coup, by which time the plotters were already in prison and Yeltsin had taken advantage of the Party’s fatal hesitations to ban it from operating within the Russian federation. Gorbachev, who seemed dazed and uncertain when seen in public, was understandably slow to grasp the import of these developments. Rather than praise Yeltsin, the Russian Parliament or the Russian people for their success, he spoke to the cameras about
perestroika
and the indispensable role the Party would continue to have in renewing itself, promoting reforms, etc.

This approach still played well in the West, where it was widely assumed (and hoped) that after the abortive coup things would carry on much as before. But in the Soviet Union itself Gorbachev’s anachronistic reiterations of failed goals, and his apparent ingratitude to his rescuers, were a revelation. Here was a man who had been overtaken by History and didn’t know it. For many Russians the events of August had been a true revolution, a genuinely popular uprising not
for
the reformers and their Party but
against
them: the CPSU, as the demonstrators shouted at Gorbachev on his belated arrival at the Russian Parliament, was ‘a criminal enterprise’ whose own government ministers had tried to overthrow the constitution. By the time a chastened Gorbachev got the point, suspended the CPSU and (on August 24th) resigned as its General Secretary, it was too late. Communism was now irrelevant, and so too was Mikhail Gorbachev.

Of course, the former General Secretary was still President of the Soviet Union. But the relevance of the Union itself was now directly in question. The failed putsch had been the last and greatest impulse to secession. Between August 24th and September 21st Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Tajikistan and Armenia followed the Baltic republics and declared themselves independent of the Soviet Union—most of them making the announcement in the confused and uncertain days that followed Gorbachev’s return.
³²⁰
Following Kravchuk’s lead in Ukraine, regional First Secretaries like Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan, Askar Akaev in Kyrgyzstan, Gaidar Aliev in Azerbaijan, Stanislav Shushkevich in Belarus and others cannily distanced themselves from their longstanding Party affiliation and re-situated themselves at the head of their new states, taking care to nationalize as quickly as possible all the local Party’s assets.