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Contemporary European History
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Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism
MARK R. BEISSINGER
Contemporary European History / Volume 18 / Special Issue 03
/ August 2009, pp 331 - 347
DOI: 10.1017/S0960777309005074, Published online: 06 July 2
009
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S096
0777309005074
How to cite this article:
MARK R. BEISSINGER (2009). Nationalism and the Collapse o
f Soviet Communism.
Contemporary European History, 18, pp 331-347 doi:10.1017/S0
960777309005074
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Nationalism and the Collapse
of Soviet Communism
M A R K R . B E I S S I N G E R
Abstract
This article examines the role of nationalism in the collapse of
communism in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, arguing that nationalism (both in its presence and
its absence, and in the various

conflicts and disorders that it unleashed) played an important
role in structuring the way in which
communism collapsed. Two institutions of international and
cultural control in particular –
the Warsaw Pact and ethnofederalism – played key roles in
determining which communist
regimes failed and which survived. The article argues that the
collapse of communism was not
a series of isolated, individual national stories of resistance but
a set of interrelated streams of
activity in which action in one context profoundly affected
action in other contexts – part of a
larger tide of assertions of national sovereignty that swept
through the Soviet empire during this
period.
That nationalism should be considered among the causes of the
collapse of
communism is not a view shared by everyone. A number of
works on the end
of communism in the Soviet Union have argued, for instance,
that nationalism
played only a minor role in the process – that the main events
took place within
official institutions in Moscow and had relatively little to do
with society, or that
nationalism was a marginal motivation or influence on the
actions of those involved
in key decision-making. Failed institutions and ideologies, an
economy in decline,
the burden of military competition with the United States and
instrumental goals
of self-enrichment among the nomenklatura instead loom large
in these accounts.1
In many narratives of the end of communism, nationalism is

portrayed merely as a
consequence of communism’s demise, as a phase after
communism disintegrated –
not as an autonomous or contributing force within the process
of collapse itself.
237 Corwin Hall, Department of Politics, Princeton University,
Princeton, NJ 08544, USA;
[email protected]
1 See, for instance, Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and
Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution, 1997); Steven Solnick, Stealing the
State: Control and Collapse in Soviet
Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted:
The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001)
Contemporary European History, 18, 3 (2009), pp. 331–347 C©
2009 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0960777309005074 Printed in the United
Kingdom
332 Contemporary European History
Such a story, however, leaves a number of critical issues
unaddressed. For one
thing, it completely ignores the critical mobilisational
dimension of politics during
the 1987–92 period. Within the Soviet Union enormous
mobilisations involving
millions of people occurred during these years, with nationalist
demands being
the most prominent among the banners under which people

mobilised. Indeed,
in the Soviet case regime change and the break-up of the Soviet
state were not
entirely separable phases in the unfolding events that brought
about the end of
communism, but were rather more overlapping and interrelated
than many analyses
portray them to be. In 1988 and 1989 institutional opening
politicised nationalism
across multiple contexts in the Soviet Union. These conflicts in
turn magnified
divisions within the Communist Party over how to deal with
them, encouraged the
spread of contention to other groups, created enormous disorder
within institutions
and eventually led to the splintering of the Soviet state into
national pieces. This
was an outcome that seemed utterly unimaginable to the vast
majority of Soviet
citizens (and even most Soviet dissidents) when glasnost began
in late 1986. It was
the unintended result of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies – one that
was made possible
not just by the widening political space that glasnost afforded,
but also by the social
forces that moved into that space and utilised it to reconfigure
regime and state.
Agency and contingency, not just structural determination, were
important elements
of communism’s demise. Moreover, where nationalist
mobilisation was weak (as in
Central Asia), communist elites survived the end of the Soviet
Union, even while
the Soviet state collapsed around them. Indeed, to say that
communism ended in
these cases begs the question, ‘in what respects?’ None of the

post-Soviet states were
entirely new. They were all fragments of pre-independence state
authority, and the
extent to which governing elites and bureaucracies were
reconfigured in the post-
communist period ultimately depended on the degree to which
they were challenged
from below by society during the glasnost period, principally
through nationalist
mobilisation.2
But the argument that nationalism was marginal to
communism’s demise also
provides an inadequate answer to the question of why some
communist regimes
(China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Cuba)
survived the 1987–92
period. Many of these communist regimes also experienced
ideological crises and
failed economies, were moving decisively toward market reform
or were facing the
threat of increased military competition with the United States
in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. Their economies were just as irrational, their
governments just as
repressive and their bureaucracies just as corrupt as those
European and Eurasian
communist regimes that failed. Yet Asian and Latin American
communist regimes
survived while European and Eurasian communist regimes did
not. Of course,
the chief reason why Asian and Latin American communist
regimes survived is
that they never initiated the kind of political liberalisation
undertaken inside the
Soviet Union, unleashing political forces that eventually

overwhelmed the state.
2 Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse, ‘The Great Divide:
Literacy, Nationalism, and the
Communist Collapse’, World Politics 59, 1 (October 2006), 83–
115.
Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism 333
But another important difference has been the ability of Asian
and Latin American
communist regimes to harness the nationalism of dominant
national groups as a core
legitimating force, enabling these communist regimes to
stigmatise foreign influences,
to marginalise more easily the oppositional challenges they
have confronted and to
maintain their legitimacy within key sectors of society.3
By contrast, within European and Eurasian communist regimes
in the late 1980s
nationalism largely failed as a legitimating force for communist
regimes and served
instead as a major source for delegitimation and opposition.4
Whereas Russian
nationalism was long considered the linchpin of Soviet power,
sustaining the Soviet
regime since the 1930s and mobilising critical support within
Soviet society for
Soviet political domination throughout eastern Europe and
Eurasia,5 for the most
part Russian nationalism failed to come to the defence of either
communism or
the Soviet empire in the late 1980s. Instead, many Russians

joined in the attacks,
ironically coming to identify themselves as victims of Soviet
‘imperial’ domination
and declaring Russian sovereignty vis-à-vis the Soviet
government. In this sense,
Soviet communism was brought down in part by what Roman
Szporluk perceptively
termed the ‘de-Sovietisation of Russia’6 – that is, the growing
dissociation of Russians
and of Russian national identity from a state with which they
had been routinely
identified in the past.
But it was not only the weakening Russian identification with
the Soviet state
and its imperial project that facilitated communism’s collapse.
The struggle against
what were widely viewed as repressive alien regimes imposed
from without by Soviet
power was also a central animus underlying the events of 1989–
91, both within
the Soviet Union and among its east European satellites.
Communism in Europe
and Eurasia was more than just tyrannical rule, an idiotic
economic system and a
ritualised ideology. It was also an international and
multinational hierarchy of such
polities established and managed by Moscow – an interrelated
structure of control that
replicated patterns of politics, economics and social
organisation across geopolitical
space. Within Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, calls for
popular sovereignty could
not easily be disentangled from those for independence from
Muscovite tutelage,

3 See Martin K. Dimitrov, ‘Why Communism Didn’t Collapse:
Exploring Regime Resilience in China,
Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba’, paper presented at a
conference on ‘Why Communism
Didn’t Collapse: Understanding Regime Resilience in China,
Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and
Cuba’, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 25–26 May 2007.
4 The major exception was Yugoslavia. Minority nationalisms
obviously played a major delegitimating
role in the collapse of Yugoslav communism and in the
unmaking of the Yugoslav state. But Serbian
commitment to maintaining Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity
and to Serbian communists who peddled
such an undertaking remained considerably stronger than the
commitment of Russians to maintaining
the territorial integrity of the USSR, accounting for the
outbreak of ethnic civil war in Yugoslavia
persistence of communist control in Serbia (in the guise of the
Socialist Party) over the decade of the
1990s. See Veljko Vujačić, ‘Historical Legacies, Nationalist
Mobilization, and Political Outcomes in
Russia and Serbia: A Weberian View’, Theory and Society 25, 6
(December 1996), 763–801.
5 David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass
Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian
National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
6 See, in particular, Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the
Break-up of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA:
Hoover Institution Press, 2000).

since these regimes had largely been imposed and maintained
through intervention
and externally imposed controls. Thus behind the desire in 1989
for freedom stood
the desire for national sovereignty. In this sense, 1989 in
eastern Europe was not merely
a series of revolts against communism as a repressive political
and social system; it was
also a series of national revolts against Soviet domination, and
as such closely related
to the same revolt that, by autumn 1989, had already become
widespread within
Soviet society itself.
Precisely because nationalism was an underlying factor in the
demise of
communism, the process of collapse largely spread along the
two institutional forms
that were used to structure multinational and international
control: ethnofederalism
and the Warsaw Pact. Both of these institutions utilised faux
forms of sovereignty
to mask centralised control, so that the collapse of communism
revolved in
significant part around making genuine the bogus sovereignties
of communist-style
ethnofederalism and the Warsaw Pact. With the exception of
Albania (explicable as
a simple case of regional spillover effects, and in fact the last of
the east European
communist regimes to collapse), the other nine communist
regimes that collapsed
in the late 1980s and early 1990s were either members of the
Warsaw Pact, were

under the strong political domination of the USSR (Mongolia)
or like the USSR
were ethnofederal states (Yugoslavia). By contrast, the six
Asian and Latin American
communist regimes that survived stood outside the system of
Soviet institutional
control, had established themselves independently from Soviet
power and did not
employ ethnofederalism as an institutional form for mediating
relations with their
own internal minorities.
In what follows I develop three arguments related to the role of
nationalism in
the collapse of communism.7 First, nationalism (both in its
presence, in its absence
and in the various conflicts and disorders it unleashed) played
an important role
in structuring the way in which the collapse of communism
unfolded. Of course,
to argue that nationalism was an important factor in structuring
the collapse of
communism should not be interpreted as saying that nationalism
‘caused’ the collapse
of communism. History involves complex causation, and we
would be fools to
constrain a series of events as complex as the collapse of
communism within the
confines of any single causal factor. But, as we shall see, we
would also be foolish
to ignore the national dimension to communism’s demise, not
only because it was
central to the dynamic by which this demise materialised, but
also because we would
seriously misunderstand post-communist politics and societies
without elucidating

its national dimension. Second, nationalist mobilisation during
this period was not
a series of individual nationalist stories. Rather, it was a set of
interrelated streams
of activity in which action in one context exercised a profound
effect on action
in other contexts – what I have called the ‘tidal’ context of
nationalism. Indeed,
neither the Soviet state nor east European communism would
likely have collapsed
7 These arguments are drawn from or are elaborations on my
own work on the Soviet collapse. See
Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilisation and the Collapse
of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
had these nationalist revolts occurred in isolation from one
another, so that these
interconnections were critical to the production of the collapse
itself. Third, while
clearly structured, acts of nationalist mobilisation did not
simply reflect a pre-existing
logic of institutions, structures and identities. Rather, acts of
mobilisation also played
independent roles in transforming institutions, structures and
identities, so that while
the collapse of communism is often portrayed as a structurally
overdetermined drama8
(some would even say that communism’s collapse was
predetermined from its very

establishment), its manifestation depended on myriad acts of
defiance and contention
whose outcomes themselves were hardly predetermined.
Nationalism’s extraordinary appeal under glasnost
Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost and the political liberalisation
that it produced were
obviously the critical institutional conditions that allowed the
collapse of communism
to occur. Without glasnost, the forces that most directly brought
about the collapse
could never have materialised or been able to act. But despite
the absolute importance
of the Gorbachev factor and the broader factors that led
Gorbachev to choose this
path, we should also remember that the collapse of communism
was in fact the
unintended result of Gorbachev’s policies, not its conscious
goal, and that the collapse
occurred precisely because other social forces moved into the
widening political space
that glasnost afforded. Gorbachev sought to reform communism
both domestically
and internationally, not to dismantle it. As Gorbachev recalled
about the early years
of perestroika, ‘We talked not about revolution, but about
improving the system. Then
we believed in such a possibility.’9 Gorbachev’s disavowal of
the Brezhnev doctrine
in late 1988 similarly was not aimed at dismantling socialism in
eastern Europe or
undoing the division of Germany, but rather at remaking Soviet
relations with its
allies while undoing the cold war division of Europe. Of course,
there was a great

deal about Gorbachev that was naive. But communism collapsed
not only because
of Gorbachev’s policies, but also because social forces (in some
places but not others)
utilised the opportunities that Gorbachev’s policies produced in
order to mobilise
oppositions, transform institutions and identities, and
appropriate power.
There is an unfortunate tendency in the literature on the
collapse of communism
to draw a sharp line between events within the Soviet Union and
those in eastern
Europe. Scholars of the Soviet collapse tend not to speak about
a single annus
mirabilis,10 but of a five-year intense and protracted period in
which new revelations
filled the newspapers every day, a dizzying array of
institutional changes were enacted
and dozens (at times hundreds) of protests were mounted daily –
many of them
spectacular events. From this perspective, the east European
revolutions were but one
set of episodes (though a very critical set) in the events that
constituted communism’s
8 For a critique of the heavy determinism in the literature on the
breakdown of communism, see Stathis
N. Kalyvas, ‘The Decay and Breakdown of Communist One-
Party Systems’, Annual Review of Political
Science, 2 (1999), 323–43.
9 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, Vol. 1 (Moscow:
Novosti, 1995), 203 (emphasis in original).
10 Michael Howard, ‘The Springtime of Nations’, Foreign
Affairs, 69, 1 (1990), 17–32.

collapse. An accurate understanding of the collapse of
communism needs to view its
Soviet and east European dimensions as interrelated rather than
separate processes.
What stood beneath this interrelationship was the ability of
oppositions to draw
analogies across a wide expanse of political and cultural space,
due to subjection
to common modes of domination and a shared sense of alien
rule. It is here that
nationalism played a critical role in providing a frame through
which analogies across
cultural and political boundaries were drawn.
The issues that effectively mobilised populations within the
Soviet Union
during these years revolved precisely around nationalism. To be
sure, issues
of democratisation, labour unrest and consumer shortages, and
environmental
justice constituted autonomous vectors of mobilisation, at times
intersecting with
nationalism and at times diverging from it. But as my own study
of thousands of protest
demonstrations throughout the Soviet Union during the glasnost
period showed,
nationalism gained a particular force and appeal not enjoyed by
these other streams
of contention. For example, not only were demonstrations that
voiced nationalist
demands but not democratising demands almost three times

more frequent than those
that voiced democratising demands but not nationalist demands,
but demonstrations
that voiced nationalist demands and did not raise democratising
demands mobilised
ten times more participants than those voicing democratising
demands but not raising
nationalist demands. The patterns are quite striking. Moreover,
demonstrations that
combined both democratising and nationalist demands mobilised
five times more
participants than those voicing democratising demands but not
raising nationalist
demands. In other words, the strongest pressures from society
for democratisation
came precisely from those movements that also pulled on
nationalist tropes, and
without nationalism to underpin them demands for liberalisation
on their own had
relatively weak resonance within Soviet society. A similar but
even more pronounced
difference occurred between mobilisation over nationalist
demands and mobilisation
over economic demands – in spite of the enormous decline in
living standards that
occurred during this period.11 In short, nationalism exercised
an unusual force of
attraction within the Soviet society during these years that was
unparalleled by any
other set of issues.
The deeper causes for this were rooted in Soviet history and in
the institutional
crisis of the Soviet state. Significant grievances revolving
around the brutality of
the Stalinist past and the struggle for historical truth played

prominent roles in
motivating nationalist mobilisation during glasnost. The
Brezhnev era, lasting from
the accession of Leonid Brezhnev to the post of general
secretary of the Communist
Party in October 1964 until Gorbachev’s selection as general
secretary in March
1985, bred a sclerotic political system, a declining economy,
widespread corruption,
and a deepening malaise and cynicism within society – all of
which contributed
to a growing identification of the Soviet ruling elite as an alien
other, even among
many ordinary Russians. The Soviet state and communist
regime were closely fused,
since the multinational state had been founded by the
communist regime, and the
11 Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 75–9.
regime sought to legitimate itself primarily as an
internationalist revolution. Yet
beneath the veneer of formal equality the reality of Russian
dominance persisted,
reinforced in particular during Stalin’s rule, when a once multi-
ethnic political elite
tipped towards disproportionate Russian representation, and a
discourse of cultural
and political stratification came to be embraced. As a result of
the fusion of state
and regime, any political opening that led to challenges against
the regime was also

bound to politicise issues of stateness,12 particularly for groups
like the Balts, who had
been incorporated forcefully into the USSR as a result of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact of 1939. And because the state had been the creation of the
regime, widespread
separatist challenges also necessarily assumed the form of anti-
regime activity and were
unambiguous challenges to communist rule. Thus, regime
change and the break-up
of the Soviet state were not easily separable phases in the
demise of communism, but
were interrelated and partially concurrent phenomena.
As number of scholars have pointed out, many of the everyday
institutional
practices of the Soviet state in the nationalities sphere (the
ethnofederal system,
the primordialised passport system of ethnic identification and
its use as a source
of discrimination in everyday life, the promotion of minority
cultures within the
framework of the socialist state, and official personnel policies
that promoted cadres in
part on the basis of nationality) also reinforced ethnicity over
other (specifically, class)
modes of identity.13 Class identities had, of course, provided
the initial underpinning
for communist ideology. But as modernisation and upward
mobility proceeded, the
class basis of communism receded and the ethnic dimension of
everyday life grew
more prominent.
Still, until glasnost, secessionist sentiments remained very much
on the margins of

Soviet society – even in regions like the Baltic, where Soviet
rule had come to be
seen as an unalterable fact of life and ‘a permanent state of
affairs’.14 When glasnost
first began in late 1986 and early 1987, it contained no strong
nationalist component,
and as an Estonian sociologist later observed, ‘neither its chief
architects nor the
broad public were prepared for the possible rise of national
movements’.15 Glasnost
initially manifested itself almost entirely in the operation of
official institutions –
in the press, movie theatres and government offices. But already
by spring 1987
glasnost began to escape official control, as small groups of
hippies, Crimean Tatars,
ecologists, Jewish refuseniks, Russian nationalists and Baltic
dissidents tested the
boundaries of the permissible by taking politics to the street,
engaging in small-scale
demonstrations. The new atmosphere of press freedom, growing
factionalism within
12 Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the
Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
13 Philip G. Roeder, Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993); Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past:
Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993);
Rogers Brubaker, ‘Nationhood and the
National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia:
An Institutionalist Account’, Theory
and Society, 23 (1994), 47–78.

14 Andrejs Plakans, The Latvians: A Short History (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 162.
15 K. S. Hallik, quoted in Pravda, 7 June 1989, 2.
the Politburo and toleration of small-scale protest encouraged
deeper politicisation. In
the early years of glasnost nationalist mobilisation followed
closely upon the heels of
institutional reform, with key periods of institutional reform
precipitating thickenings
of nationalist activity: the October 1987 Central Committee
Plenum; the Nineteenth
Party Conference in June 1988; the March 1989 elections; and
meetings of the First
Congress of People’s Deputies in July 1989. But by spring and
summer 1989, large-
scale nationalist demonstrations involving hundreds of
thousands of participants had
spread across multiple republics and had become a relatively
frequent affair. By this
time the effect of institutional constraints on nationalist action
had largely faded, and
nationalist mobilisation had increasingly become its own
autonomous progenitor of
events, influencing the character of political institutions instead
of being contained
by them.
Just how rapidly this transformation occurred is one of the
astounding features
of the collapse of communism. It was not until February 1988 –

over a year after
the initiation of glasnost – that the first major eruptions of
nationalism occurred
in the Soviet Union: the massive Armenian protests over
Karabakh, involving up
to a million people in Yerevan alone. Over the following
nineteen months – from
February 1988 to August 1989 – the USSR experienced a
veritable explosion of
nationalist mobilisation in the Baltic, the Transcaucasus,
Ukraine and Moldova. By the
end of 1988 and the beginning of 1989, the coherence of Soviet
control over its own
territory had been compromised by the rise to dominance of
nationalist movements
within the Baltic republics and the veritable loss of control by
the Soviet state over
events in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The massive mobilisations in
Tbilisi in April 1989
that incited violent suppression by the Soviet army and the
political backlash that this
evoked not only had undermined completely communist control
in that republic,
but also convinced many throughout the Soviet Union and in the
Soviet government
itself to question the utility of the deployment of the army as a
means for containing
nationalist revolt. By summer 1989 the tide of nationalist
contention spread to the
point that the Soviet regime appeared highly unstable.
Enormous demonstrations
(involving hundreds of thousands of people, and sometimes up
to a million) racked
all the republics of the Baltic and Transcaucasus at the time,
spreading as well to
Western Ukraine and Moldova. During summer 1989, multiple

violent inter-ethnic
conflicts also broke out across the southern tier of the USSR:
between Uzbeks
and Meskhetian Turks, Kazakhs and Lezgins, Abkhaz and
Georgians, Armenians
and Azerbaijanis, and Kyrgyz and Tajiks. Massive miner strikes
in eastern Ukraine,
western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan – though non-national
in character –
reflected the spread of large-scale protest to the Russian
community, as well as the
growing disaffection of Russians from the Soviet state.
This mounting domestic incoherence and instability of the
Soviet state was an
important part of the political opportunity structure that
presented itself to east
Europeans in autumn 1989. If Balts could get away with
declaring sovereignty vis-
à-vis the Soviet state at the end of 1988 and early 1989, and up
to a million of
them could hold hands across the Baltic in August 1989 in
favour of independence
from the USSR, why should Poles and Czechs not be expected
to press their own
claims for popular sovereignty against their repressive,
Kremlin-controlled regimes?
Why should Russians be afforded a greater degree of press
freedom than Bulgarians
or East Germans (particularly when Soviet newspapers were
readily available for

purchase throughout eastern Europe)? And if the Soviet state
could not contain mass
revolts within its own borders, why should its client states in
eastern Europe be
expected to contain them, even if they had been able to rely on
Soviet help (which
Gorbachev had privately indicated would not be forthcoming)?
Until early 1989
the pace of political change inside the Soviet Union outstripped
the pace of change
within the Soviet Union’s Eastern Bloc allies, so that the
example of political change
within the Soviet Union emboldened political reformers
throughout the communist
world (and not only in eastern Europe, as the Chinese example
illustrates). By
early 1989 reform efforts were already under way in Poland and
Hungary, leading
to free elections in Poland in June 1989 and to the opening of
borders and the
transition to political pluralism in Hungary. This in turn led to a
dizzying three-
month cascade of events in late 1989: massive demonstrations
in East Germany,
the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia, unrest and the
removal of Zhivkov in Bulgaria, and the violent overthrow of
the Ceauşescu regime in
Romania.
In turn, the collapse of communism in eastern Europe
enormously accelerated and
radicalised processes of nationalist revolt within the Soviet
Union itself, leading to a
sense that a momentum had built up against the Soviet state that
could no longer be

contained. The Ukrainian nationalist movement Rukh, for
instance, actively utilised
the east European example to mobilise support for its cause.
‘The peoples of Poland,
Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia have said no to
communist dictatorship’,
its banners at a demonstration read. ‘The next word is ours,
citizens!’16 The first half
of 1990 saw a sharp rise in the number of groups pressing
separatist demands inside
the Soviet Union, spurred on in particular by republican
elections, which brought to
power nationalist movements in many republics and led to a
bifurcation of authority
(dvoevlastie) and increasingly bitter disputes over sovereignty.
It was at this time as
well that Gorbachev’s popularity plummeted among Russians
and nomenklatura
elites began to defect from the centre in significant numbers,
reinventing themselves
as nationalists in anticipation that Soviet power would not last
much longer. The
classic example was Leonid Kravchuk. A party propagandist
who once had been an
implacable enemy of Rukh, Kravchuk came, in the course of
1990, to embrace the
cause of Ukrainian sovereignty and independence. That once
loyal nomenklatura like
Kravchuk could reconfigure themselves as ‘father’ of their
respective nations was not
a plausible outcome outside these cross-case influences, for
there would be no reason
why, in isolation from what had occurred elsewhere, these elites
would have ever
considered defection.

The transnationalism of nationalism
Thus nationalist mobilisation during the collapse of communism
was not a collection
of separate stories, but a series of interrelated streams of
activity in which action
16 Ekspress khronika, no. 51, 17 December 1989, 1.
in one context exercised a profound effect on action in other
contexts – what I
have called elsewhere a ‘tide’ of nationalism. This tidal
dimension is often lost in
the literature on the collapse that focuses on a single country or
on national cases.
The interconnectedness produced by common targets of
mobilisation, common
institutional characteristics, common ideologies and common
modes of domination
meant that oppositions also perceived a linkage of political
opportunities, feeding
the spread of contention across cultural and political
boundaries. The upsurge of
mobilisation across multiple contexts was produced not by a
single shock, but rather
by the way in which agents forged connections with the
challenging actions of others
through analogy and emulation. Institutional arrangements like
ethnofederalism
or the Warsaw Pact became lightning rods for the lateral spread
of contention,
because they connected populations in analogous ways. When

such analogies
cohered, the example of successful contention in one context
weakened political
order in other contexts by raising expectations among
challengers that authority could
be successfully challenged. Challengers looked towards each
other for inspiration
and ideas, widely borrowing tactics, frames and even
programmes from those who
demonstrated prior successes. Nationalism is often portrayed as
parochial and inward-
looking, lacking empathy and incapable of identifying with
others. But the collapse
of communism illustrates the limits of such stereotypes. Most
nationalist movements
are actually transnational in orientation, forced by strategic
circumstances to conceive
of their fates as intertwined with others.
But the transnational spread of nationalist mobilisation was
more than just a matter
of analogy and emulation. Those movements that gained early
success also consciously
sought to spread their contention laterally so as to increase
overall chances of
consolidating their victories by gaining allies and by further
disrupting the coherence
of the state they wished to undermine. After the Nineteenth
Party Conference in June
1988, attempts to challenge the Soviet regime proliferated with
great rapidity, diffusing
across multiple groups. At this very time challenging groups
engaged in a widespread
sharing of information, pamphlets, expertise, modes of
challenge and mobilisational
frames. By June 1988 representatives of Ukrainian, Armenian,

Georgian, Latvian,
Lithuanian and Estonian dissident nationalist movements had
initiated contact with
one another and established a coordinating committee among
themselves. Indeed,
in summer and autumn 1988 popular fronts created along the
lines of the Baltic
model sprang up throughout most of the Soviet Union.
Representatives of these
groups met frequently, shared documents and ideas, and
occasionally aided each
other by providing material support or organising
demonstrations in solidarity with
each other’s demands. The tide of nationalism thus assumed
concrete form during the
collapse of communism in the ways in which nationalist
paradigms were consciously
exported and borrowed, organisational resources were shared
and challenging groups
sought inspiration from one another.
Arguably the most important mobilisational frame to emerge
within the Soviet
Union during the glasnost era was the anti-imperial sovereignty
frame that played
such an important role in the ultimate demise of the Soviet
state. In its final years
of existence the imperial persona implicit within the Soviet
state came to be openly
affirmed, as nations claimed sovereignty up to and including
their place on the political

map of the world. This anti-imperial sovereignty frame first
gained mass resonance in
the Baltic in summer 1988 and subsequently spread massively to
Georgia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine and, eventually, to Russia itself.
When Boris Yeltsin
embraced Russian sovereignty vis-à-vis the USSR in June 1990,
he was borrowing
from the tide of nationalism that had already swept across much
of the USSR (Or,
as one Politburo member put it, ‘To make Russia sovereign is
the golden daydream
of the Balts.’)17 So successful was the spread of this
sovereignty frame that over the
course of 1990 every Soviet republic (as well as autonomous
republics and even
one island in the Far East) issued their own declaration of
sovereignty vis-à-vis the
Soviet government in what came to be known as the ‘parade of
sovereignties’. The
diffusion of this anti-imperial sovereignty frame beyond the
Baltic was partly an
attempt to capitalise on the prior success of others – a process
of emulation typical of
modular phenomena like nationalism. But it was more than this.
Baltic popular fronts
consciously attempted to reproduce themselves throughout the
Soviet Union, out of
both philosophical and strategic considerations. They
vigorously organised to extend
their influence throughout the Soviet Union for aiding the
spread of the master frame
they themselves had pioneered. A conscious strategy of
spreading secessionist revolt
laterally was pursued, both as an effort to consolidate
secessionist movements through

the power of numbers and to weaken the regime by undermining
its ability to defuse
nationalist challenges.18
It is unlikely that the Soviet state or east European communism
would have ever
collapsed had these revolts occurred in isolation from one
another. Certainly, had
the Balts engaged in their struggle alone, there is little doubt
that they would easily
have been repressed. By contrast, the fact that claims of
sovereignty against the centre
had spread broadly throughout the fabric of Soviet society made
rebellion difficult to
contain. Part of the dilemma that had confronted opponents of
Soviet communism
throughout its history was that past east European revolts
against Soviet control had
exerted only limited influence inside the Soviet Union19 and
had been repeatedly cut
short by Soviet intervention and pressure. In 1989, however,
extensive revolt inside
the Soviet Union was occurring at the same time as east
Europeans pressed for their
own freedom, so that the Kremlin for the first time faced a
situation of multiple,
simultaneous revolts both within and outside the country. The
modular spread of
revolt across the Soviet Union and eastern Europe represented
an unusual period
of heightened contention that transcended cultural and
international borders and in
which challenges to the state multiplied and fed off one another,
overwhelming the
capacity of the state to contain them and evoking large-scale
tectonic change in the

character of the state system.
17 Vadim Medvedev, quoted in Soiuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’
(Moscow: Aprel’-85, 1995), 64.
18 Nils R. Muiznieks, ‘The Influence of the Baltic Popular
Movements on the Process of Soviet
Disintegration’, Europe-Asia Studies, 47, 1 (1995), 3–25.
19 See Roman Szporluk, ed., The Influence of East Europe and
the Soviet West on the USSR (New York:
Praeger, 1975).
The weakness of Russian defence of the Soviet state
Nationalism was conspicuous in the collapse of communism not
only by its presence,
but also by its absence. By all measures of conventional
wisdom, Russians should
have been expected to come to the defence of Soviet
communism and the Soviet
empire. Soviet communism was widely viewed as Russian
communism, and Leninist
ideology was said to have resonated powerfully with embedded
elements of Russian
political culture.20 Indeed, one of the reasons why earlier
waves of revolt against Soviet
control had failed was precisely the way in which Russians had
come to the defence
of the realm. Yet, in the late 1980s, at a time when the Soviet
state liberalised and
Russian dominance was under attack, this did not happen.

Instead, large numbers
of Russians protested against the Soviet state and acquiesced in
its forfeiture of
empire.
How does one explain the weakness of Russian imperial
nationalism in the
context of glasnost? To be sure, glasnost itself is to a large
extent responsible, for
its constant revelations of Soviet abuses and atrocities drove a
wedge between many
ordinary Russians and the Soviet state. But part of the
explanation is also to be
found in the multiple political roles that Russians could and did
assume during
these years. Russians were the dominant nationality of the
Soviet Union and had
the most to lose from attempts to undermine the Soviet empire.
But Russians also
constituted a disproportionate share of the Soviet intelligentsia
and working class
relative to most other nationalities.21 The former were strongly
attracted to ideas of
liberalisation, while the latter (due to their vulnerable position
at a time of growing
economic shortage and insecurity) were most likely to protest
against the regime’s
economic policies. This split structural position in relation to
the changes introduced
by perestroika in fact led to a trifurcation of Russian
mobilisation into nationalist-
conservative, liberal and labour-economic streams, each of
which comprehended its
relationship to the Soviet state in different terms.
In this respect Russian mobilisation differed substantially from

that of other groups
in the USSR, for it was unusually divided. Not only was there a
plethora of Russian
movements by 1988–89, but these movements stood for quite
distinct, and in some
instances opposing, frames. Rather than generating a nationalist
backlash among
Russians, as many observers had expected, the tide of
nationalism instead drove a
wedge more deeply between Russians, politicising and
polarising cleavages among
them. Russian liberals eventually forged an alliance with non-
Russian separatists
against the Soviet regime, borrowing their sovereignty and anti-
colonial frames. They
did not define themselves as nationalists. They saw themselves
as struggling primarily
against the communist regime, not for the nation. Yet in the
first half of 1990 they
adopted many of the tropes of national liberation then extant
elsewhere in the USSR,
coming to advocate a brand of liberal nationalism in which
Russian sovereignty
20 Nikolai Berdyaev, The Origins of Russian Communism (Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
1960).
21 Darrell Slider, ‘A Note on the Class Structure of Soviet
Nationalities’, Soviet Studies, 37, 4 (October
1985), pp. 535–540.

and self-determination were seen as necessary parts of the
democratisation process.
In 1990 and 1991 this defence of Russian sovereignty against an
overbearing and
imperial all-union government became the dominant theme of
Russian mobilisation.
Similarly, as the economy deteriorated and the Soviet state
disintegrated, labour
activism radicalised, coming in many cases to embrace the
dismantlement of central
planning and the sovereignty paradigm.
Conservative-nationalists, by contrast, remained highly divided.
Some distanced
themselves from the communist regime; indeed, demands for
Russian sovereignty
initially emerged not from liberals, but from Russian
nationalists, who, seeking
to counter the ‘Russophobia’ prevalent at the time, noted that
Russians also
had been discriminated against and victimised by communism.
Others embraced
a conservative communism that emphasised the defence of the
party and the
state. But nationalist-conservatives failed to find a mass base
for themselves within
Russia. Their attempts to court the coalminers of Ukraine,
Siberia and northern
Kazakhstan also came to nought. Their support proved to be
greatest within the
Russian-speaking communities of the Baltic and Moldova, but
even here much of
their capacity to mobilise opposition to nationalist movements
weakened in 1990
and 1991, as the break-up of the Soviet state grew imminent. In
short, Russian

nationalism fizzled out as a force for defending the Soviet
empire because glasnost
significantly undermined Russian support for the communist
regime, Russians
were deeply divided politically and Russians increasingly
embraced the sovereignty
paradigm championed by nationalist oppositions under the
influence of the tide of
nationalism.
Structure and agency within ‘thickened history’
While the events in eastern Europe in 1989 are widely referred
to as revolutions,
with the exception of the Baltic states it is not fashionable
today to talk about the
collapse of the Soviet Union in these same terms. After all, in
some Soviet republics
political power ultimately remained in the hands of communist
officials, while in other
republics nationalist revolts descended into intra-ethnic
violence and even civil war.
But the disintegration of the Soviet Union unambiguously
deserves to be understood
as revolutionary. It easily falls within Tilly’s minimalist,
processual understanding of
revolution (a situation of dual sovereignty in which non-ruling
contenders mobilise
large numbers of citizens for the purpose of gaining control
over the state).22 Even if
we assume a more robust, outcome-oriented definition such as
that used by Skocpol
(the rapid transformation of a country’s state and class
structures and its dominant
ideology),23 there is little doubt that the collapse of
communism was revolutionary. In

most (though not all) Soviet republics, property relations were
totally reconfigured in
the wake of communism’s collapse, longstanding social
institutions were dismantled,
22 Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993).
23 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A
Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
(Cambridge University Press, 1979).
new ideologies and new classes came to the fore and new forms
of social behaviour
sprang into existence.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union was accompanied by
immense
transformations in political discourse and in public perceptions
of politics. A
population that could barely imagine the break-up of their
country came, within
a compressed period of time, to view its disintegration as
inevitable. The record of
public opinion polling during these years demonstrates massive
transformations in
attitudes toward the Soviet state – even for groups like the
Balts, among whom the
notion of independence, once considered the pipe-dream of
dissidents, came to be
almost unanimously embraced under the shifting boundaries of
the possible. In the

case of the Ukrainians the transformation in attitudes under the
influence of external
events was stark – to the point that 90 per cent of the Ukrainian
population voted
in December 1991 for independent statehood in a national
referendum. As Bohdan
Nahaylo described it,
What appears to have happened is that swiftly and almost
imperceptibly . . . a revolution occurred
in the minds of Ukraine’s inhabitants. Somehow, during a
remarkably short period, the idea of
Ukrainian independence, for so long depicted in the Soviet
press as the hopeless cause of diehard
nationalists in Western Ukraine, took hold throughout the
republic.24
Even large numbers of Russians, under the influence of events
elsewhere, by
December 1991 came to support the dissolution of the USSR, as
public opinion polls
at the time showed (although nostalgia for the USSR quickly
developed thereafter).25
This enormous transformation in outlooks was of course
facilitated by specific
structural conditions: the institutional and ideological crisis of
the Soviet state, the
fusion between state and regime, the submerged sense of ethnic
grievance across
multiple groups and the Soviet state’s overreach abroad.
Moreover, patterns of
nationalist mobilisation broadly reflected such factors as the
degree of urbanisation of a
nationality, the size of an ethnic group, its ethnofederal status
and the degree to which

it had been assimilated to the dominant Russian culture. But the
specific events that
transformed institutions and brought movements to power also
contained a heavy dose
of contingency, and their outcomes were hardly predetermined.
Repression could
have easily shut down challengers in 1988 and early 1989. At
other moments the
backlash effects of repression, the outrage that erupted from
intergroup violence and
the anger that materialised out of callous government responses
to popular demands
played an important role in transforming the opinion climate of
politics and affecting
the prisms through which individuals related to the state and to
others. Indeed, those
who organised challenges often sought to provoke responses
from states or other
groups that heightened a sense of conflict and identity, so as to
drive the engine
of history more quickly, while other movements sought to ride
the momentum
24 Bohdan Nahaylo, ‘The Birth of an Independent Ukraine’,
Report on the USSR, 3, 50 (13 December
1991), 1–2.
25 See Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist
Russia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997),
166.
generated from the successful prior actions of others. In short,

the agency of ordinary
people needs to be placed squarely in the centre of any accurate
understanding of
communism’s collapse.
As E. H. Carr noted, in real life there is no contradiction
between the influence of
structure and the role of agency, because structure exercises its
effects not by rendering
outcomes inevitable, but rather by making action possible, more
probable and more
likely to meet with success.26 But it is also true that, as actions
accumulate, they can
also exercise a structure-like effect, as having the capacity to
render subsequent action
possible, more probable and more likely to meet with success.
Rather than simply
being a manifestation of structurally predetermined conditions,
the collapse of Soviet
communism materialised over a five-year period of what I have
called ‘thickened
history’ – in which events acquired a sense of momentum,
transformed identities
and political institutions and increasingly assumed the
characteristics of their own
causal structure. As one Soviet journalist put it in autumn 1989,
‘We are living in
an extremely condensed historical period. Social processes
which earlier required
decades now develop in a matter of months.’27 This heightened
pace of contention
affected both governing and governed – the former primarily in
the state’s growing
incoherence and inability to fashion relevant policies, the latter
by introducing
an intensified sense of contingency, possibility and influence

from the example of
others.
One of the characteristic features of ‘thickened’ history is that
the pace of events
outstrips the movement of institutions and the understanding of
leaders. In the
collapse of communism the pace of events was itself a causal
factor in the outcome,
as events simply moved far faster than institutions were capable
of reacting. This
was most glaringly evident with regard to nationalities issues,
in which formulas
embraced by Gorbachev in 1988, 1989 and 1990 soon grew
outdated as a result
of shifting events on the ground. The tide of nationalism also
produced enormous
confusion and division within Soviet institutions, making it
even more difficult to
find institutional solutions to the challenge of holding the
Soviet state together. The
pull of alternative movements within the Communist rank-and-
file was particularly
strong in many parts of the country. In the course of 1989
nationalist movements came
to dominate republican politics in the Baltic republics, Georgia
and Armenia, so that
party organisations largely went ‘underground’, as one
communist official put it. In
the 1990 republican elections nationalist movements or those
sympathetic with them
came to power in practically every republic with the exception
of Azerbaijan and
those in Central Asia, institutionalising the waves of
nationalism that had swept across
the country. This was soon followed by what came to be known

as the ‘war of the
laws’ – a struggle between the centre and the republics over
whose laws actually were
sovereign. Gorbachev insisted that the central government’s
laws had precedent over
republics and localities, and declared invalid a whole series of
laws that contradicted
26 Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Alfred A
Knopf, 1962), 124.
27 Literaturnaia gazeta, 13 September 1989.
all-union laws. In turn many republics refused to recognise the
authority of the centre
over them. The conservative reaction to this disorder pushed the
Soviet state towards
its final, tumultuous demise in the failed August 1991 coup.
Nationalist mobilisation not only undermined the authority of
state institutions;
it also helped to dissipate the state’s capacity to repress. In the
wake of the April 1989
Tbilisi events, the use of the Soviet army as a tool to contain
ethnic revolt grew
heavily politicised, and as authority shifted to the republics,
actions by the central
government’s institutions of order to quell the nationalist unrest
became embroiled
in controversy. The constant deployment of the military and
special police units to
nationalist ‘hot spots’ around the country bred a sense of
exhaustion among them. The

declining morale of those charged with keeping order was a
constant theme during
these years, and over the course of 1990–1 discipline within the
armed forces began to
unravel in a serious way. Most of the officers who commanded
key units during the
August 1991 coup had been intimately involved in putting down
nationalist unrest
in various parts of the country. Given the effect that many of
these earlier actions had
on morale within the police and the military, it hardly seems
accidental that these
same officers, when called on to use force against a civilian
population of their own
nationality on an even larger scale for the sake of preserving the
USSR, refused to
carry out their superiors’ orders.
Nationalism within and beyond the collapse
It would be impossible to understand post-communist politics
today without
reference to the national dimension of the communist collapse –
one of the reasons
why any serious discussion of communism’s demise needs to
explicate nationalism’s
role in this process rather than treat it merely as a consequence
of the collapse. A
glance at the front page of a randomly chosen Russian
newspaper almost two decades
after the collapse included stories about continuing conflicts
between Estonia and
Russia over demarcation of their borders, claims by Moscow
mayor Yuri Luzhkov that
Ukrainian authorities were discriminating against the Russian-
speaking population

of Ukraine, and the opening of regular passenger ship routes
between Russia and
Abkhazia despite Georgian objections that this was a gross
violation of Georgian
sovereignty.28 The collapse of Soviet communism remains a
fundamental reference
point, both positive and negative, for populations throughout
the region. It is either
mourned as, in Putin’s words, ‘the greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the century’29
or celebrated as the foundation of a national political
community and marked as
a national holiday by fireworks and military parades (as in
Ukraine). These identity
narratives are woven into the fabric of new national histories
and continue to manifest
themselves politically in issues such as NATO and EU
expansion, the geopolitics of
28 Vremia, 2 July 2008, 1.
29 Poslanie Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii V. V. Putina
Federal’nomu Sobraniiu Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 25
April 2005, available at
www.kremlin.ru/appears/2005/04/25/1223_type63372type63374
type82634_
87049.shtml.
energy, policies toward Russians and Russophones living in the
post-Soviet republics
and desires for and fear of a resuscitation of Russian power in

the region. Thus
not only did nationalism occupy a central role in way in which
the collapse of
communism unfolded, but the fundamental identity conflicts
that gave structure to
the collapse remain with us, manifested now more in the realm
of interstate relations,
but nevertheless still central to the ways in which individuals
understand themselves
and their relationship to political authority.
Wedn esday, J an uar y 16, 2013 Follow
Everything You Think You Know About the
Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong
*And why it matters today in a new age of revolution.
BY LEON ARON | JULY/AUGUST 2011
Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian
Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In
the
years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar,
official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the
Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-
owned economy, and the Kremlin's control over its domestic
and Eastern European empires. Neither, with one exception, did
Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future
revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became

general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985,
none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis.
Although there were disagreements over the size and depth
of the Soviet system's problems, no one thought them to be life-
threatening, at least not anytime soon.
Whence such strangely universal shortsightedness? The failure
of Western experts to anticipate the Soviet Union's
collapse may in part be attributed to a sort of historical
revisionism -- call it anti-anti-communism -- that tended to
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exaggerate the Soviet regime's stability and legitimacy. Yet
others who could hardly be considered soft on communism
were just as puzzled by its demise. One of the architects of the
U.S. strategy in the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote that,
in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the
modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more
strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the
sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the
great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then
the Soviet Union." Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading

American historian of Russia as well as an advisor to U.S.
President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution "unexpected." A
collection of essays about the Soviet Union's demise in a special
1993 issue of the conservative National Interest magazine
was titled "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism."
Were it easier to understand, this collective lapse in judgment
could have been safely consigned to a mental file containing
other oddities and caprices of the social sciences, and then
forgotten. Yet even today, at a 20-year remove, the assumption
that the Soviet Union would continue in its current state, or at
most that it would eventually begin a long, drawn-out
decline, seems just as rational a conclusion.
Indeed, the Soviet Union in 1985 possessed much of the same
natural and human resources that it had 10 years before.
Certainly, the standard of living was much lower than in most
of Eastern Europe, let alone the West. Shortages, food
rationing, long lines in stores, and acute poverty were endemic.
But the Soviet Union had known far greater calamities
and coped without sacrificing an iota of the state's grip on
society and economy, much less surrendering it.
Nor did any key parameter of economic performance prior to
1985 point to a rapidly advancing disaster. From 1981 to
1985 the growth of the country's GDP, though slowing down

compared with the 1960s and 1970s, averaged 1.9 percent a
year. The same lackadaisical but hardly catastrophic pattern
continued through 1989. Budget deficits, which since the
French Revolution have been considered among the prominent
portents of a coming revolutionary crisis, equaled less
than 2 percent of GDP in 1985. Although growing rapidly, the
gap remained under 9 percent through 1989 -- a size most
economists would find quite manageable.
The sharp drop in oil prices, from $66 a barrel in 1980 to $20 a
barrel in 1986 (in 2000 prices) certainly was a heavy blow
to Soviet finances. Still, adjusted for inflation, oil was more
expensive in the world markets in 1985 than in 1972, and only
one-third lower than throughout the 1970s. And at the same
time, Soviet incomes increased more than 2 percent in 1985,
and inflation-adjusted wages continued to rise in the next five
years through 1990 at an average of over 7 percent.
Yes, the stagnation was obvious and worrisome. But as
Wesleyan University professor Peter Rutland has pointed out,
"Chronic ailments, after all, are not necessarily fatal." Even the
leading student of the revolution's economic causes,
Anders Åslund, notes that from 1985 to 1987, the situation "was
not at all dramatic."
From the regime's point of view, the political circumstances
were even less troublesome. After 20 years of relentless

suppression of political opposition, virtually all the prominent
dissidents had been imprisoned, exiled (as Andrei
Sakharov had been since 1980), forced to emigrate, or had died
in camps and jails.
There did not seem to be any other signs of a pre-revolutionary
crisis either, including the other traditionally assigned
cause of state failure -- external pressure. On the contrary, the
previous decade was correctly judged to amount "to the
realization of all major Soviet military and diplomatic
desiderata," as American historian and diplomat Stephen
Sestanovich has written. Of course, Afghanistan increasingly
looked like a long war, but for a 5-million-strong Soviet
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/pg_3/?tag=content;col1

military force the losses there were negligible. Indeed, though
the enormous financial burden of maintaining an empire
was to become a major issue in the post-1987 debates, the cost
of the Afghan war itself was hardly crushing: Estimated at
$4 billion to $5 billion in 1985, it was an insignificant portion
of the Soviet GDP.
Nor was America the catalyzing force. The "Reagan Doctrine"
of resisting and, if possible, reversing the Soviet Union's
advances in the Third World did put considerable pressure on
the perimeter of the empire, in places like Afghanistan,
Angola, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia. Yet Soviet difficulties there,
too, were far from fatal.
As a precursor to a potentially very costly competition,
Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative indeed was
crucial -
- but it was far from heralding a military defeat, given that the
Kremlin knew very well that effective deployment of space-
based defenses was decades away. Similarly, though the 1980
peaceful anti-communist uprising of the Polish workers had
been a very disturbing development for Soviet leaders,
underscoring the precariousness of their European empire, by
1985
Solidarity looked exhausted. The Soviet Union seemed to have
adjusted to undertaking bloody "pacifications" in Eastern
Europe every 12 years -- Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in

1968, Poland in 1980 -- without much regard for the world's
opinion.
This, in other words, was a Soviet Union at the height of its
global power and influence, both in its own view and in the
view of the rest of the world. "We tend to forget," historian
Adam Ulam would note later, "that in 1985, no
government of a major state appeared to be as firmly in power,
its policies as clearly set in their course, as that of the
USSR."
Certainly, there were plenty of structural reasons -- economic,
political, social -- why the Soviet Union should have
collapsed as it did, yet they fail to explain fully how it
happened when it happened. How, that is, between 1985 and
1989,
in the absence of sharply worsening economic, political,
demographic, and other structural conditions, did the state and
its economic system suddenly begin to be seen as shameful,
illegitimate, and intolerable by enough men and women to
become doomed?
LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL modern revolutions, the latest Russian
one was started by a hesitant liberalization "from
above" -- and its rationale extended well beyond the necessity
to correct the economy or make the international

environment more benign. The core of Gorbachev's enterprise
was undeniably idealistic: He wanted to build a more moral
Soviet Union.
For though economic betterment was their banner, there is little
doubt that Gorbachev and his supporters first set out to
right moral, rather than economic, wrongs. Most of what they
said publicly in the early days of perestroika now seems no
more than an expression of their anguish over the spiritual
decline and corrosive effects of the Stalinist past. It was the
beginning of a desperate search for answers to the big questions
with which every great revolution starts: What is a good,
dignified life? What constitutes a just social and economic
order? What is a decent and legitimate state? What should such
a state's relationship with civil society be?
"A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country,"
Gorbachev told the Central Committee at the January 1987
meeting where he declared glasnost -- openness -- and
democratization to be the foundation of his perestroika, or
restructuring, of Soviet society. "A reappraisal of values and
their creative rethinking is under way." Later, recalling his
feeling that "we couldn't go on like that any longer, and we had
to change life radically, break away from the past
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malpractices," he called it his "moral position."
In a 1989 interview, the "godfather of glasnost," Aleksandr
Yakovlev, recalled that, returning to the Soviet Union in 1983
after 10 years as the ambassador to Canada, he felt the moment
was at hand when people would declare, "Enough! We
cannot live like this any longer. Everything must be done in a
new way. We must reconsider our concepts, our approaches,
our views of the past and our future.… There has come an
understanding that it is simply impossible to live as we lived
before -- intolerably, humiliatingly."
To Gorbachev's prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, the "moral
[nravstennoe] state of the society" in 1985 was its "most
terrifying" feature:
[We] stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the
reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed
in our lies, hung medals on one another. And all of this -- from
top to bottom and from bottom to top.
Another member of Gorbachev's very small original coterie of
liberalizers, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, was
just as pained by ubiquitous lawlessness and corruption. He
recalls telling Gorbachev in the winter of 1984-1985:

"Everything is rotten. It has to be changed."
Back in the 1950s, Gorbachev's predecessor Nikita Khrushchev
had seen firsthand how precarious was the edifice of the
house that Stalin built on terror and lies. But this fifth
generation of Soviet leaders was more confident of the regime's
resilience. Gorbachev and his group appeared to believe that
what was right was also politically manageable.
Democratization, Gorbachev declared, was "not a slogan but the
essence of perestroika." Many years later he told
interviewers:
The Soviet model was defeated not only on the economic and
social levels; it was defeated on a cultural level. Our
society, our people, the most educated, the most intellectual,
rejected that model on the cultural level because it
does not respect the man, oppresses him spiritually and
politically.
That reforms gave rise to a revolution by 1989 was due largely
to another "idealistic" cause: Gorbachev's deep and
personal aversion to violence and, hence, his stubborn refusal to
resort to mass coercion when the scale and depth of
change began to outstrip his original intent. To deploy Stalinist
repression even to "preserve the system" would have been
a betrayal of his deepest convictions. A witness recalls

Gorbachev saying in the late 1980s, "We are told that we should
pound the fist on the table," and then clenching his hand in an
illustrative fist. "Generally speaking," continued the
general secretary, "it could be done. But one does not feel like
it."
THE ROLE OF ideas and ideals in bringing about the Russian
revolution comes into even sharper relief when we look at
what was happening outside the Kremlin. A leading Soviet
journalist and later a passionate herald of glasnost, Aleksandr
Bovin, wrote in 1988 that the ideals of perestroika had
"ripened" amid people's increasing "irritation" at corruption,
brazen thievery, lies, and the obstacles in the way of honest
work. Anticipations of "substantive changes were in the air,"
another witness recalled, and they forged an appreciable
constituency for radical reforms. Indeed, the expectations that
greeted the coming to power of Gorbachev were so strong, and
growing, that they shaped his actual policy. Suddenly,
ideas themselves became a material, structural factor in the
unfolding revolution.
The credibility of official ideology, which in Yakovlev's words,
held the entire Soviet political and economic system
together "like hoops of steel," was quickly weakening. New
perceptions contributed to a change in attitudes toward the

regime and "a shift in values." Gradually, the legitimacy of the
political arrangements began to be questioned. In an
instance of Robert K. Merton's immortal "Thomas theorem" --
"If men define situations as real, they are real in their
consequence" -- the actual deterioration of the Soviet economy
became consequential only after and because of a
fundamental shift in how the regime's performance was
perceived and evaluated.
Writing to a Soviet magazine in 1987, a Russian reader called
what he saw around him a "radical break [perelom] in
consciousness." We know that he was right because Russia's is
the first great revolution whose course was charted in
public opinion polls almost from the beginning. Already at the
end of 1989, the first representative national public opinion
survey found overwhelming support for competitive elections
and the legalization of parties other than the Soviet
Communist Party -- after four generations under a one-party
dictatorship and with independent parties still illegal. By
mid-1990, more than half those surveyed in a Russian region
agreed that "a healthy economy" was more likely if "the
government allows individuals to do as they wish." Six months
later, an all-Russia poll found 56 percent supporting a
rapid or gradual transition to a market economy. Another year
passed, and the share of the pro-market respondents

increased to 64 percent.
Those who instilled this remarkable "break in consciousness"
were no different from those who touched off the other
classic revolutions of modern times: writers, journalists, artists.
As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, such men and women
"help to create that general awareness of dissatisfaction, that
solidified public opinion, which … creates effective demand
for revolutionary change." Suddenly, "the entire political
education" of the nation becomes the "work of its men of
letters."
And so it was in Soviet Russia. The lines to newspaper kiosks --
sometimes crowds around the block that formed at six in
the morning, with each daily run often sold out in two hours --
and the skyrocketing subscriptions to the leading liberal
newspapers and magazines testify to the devastating power of
the most celebrated essayists of glasnost, or in Samuel
Johnson's phrase, the "teachers of truth": the economist Nikolai
Shmelyov; the political philosophers Igor Klyamkin and
Alexander Tsypko; brilliant essayists like Vasily Selyunin, Yuri
Chernichenko, Igor Vinogradov, and Ales Adamovich; the
journalists Yegor Yakovlev, Len Karpinsky, Fedor Burlatsky,
and at least two dozen more.
To them, a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not
merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic

systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a
revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal
character of the Russian subject. As Mikhail Antonov declared
in a seminal 1987 essay, "So What Is Happening to Us?" in
the magazine Oktyabr, the people had to be "saved" -- not from
external dangers but "most of all from themselves, from
the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the
noblest human qualities." Saved how? By making the
nascent liberalization fateful, irreversible -- not Khrushchev's
short-lived "thaw," but a climate change. And what would
guarantee this irreversibility? Above all, the appearance of a
free man who would be "immune to the recurrences of
spiritual slavery." The weekly magazine Ogoniok, a key
publication of glasnost, wrote in February 1989 that only "man
incapable of being a police informer, of betraying, and of lies,
no matter in whose or what name, can save us from the re-
emergence of a totalitarian state."
The circuitous nature of this reasoning -- to save the people one
had to save perestroika, but perestroika could be saved
only if it was capable of changing man "from within" -- did not
seem to trouble anyone. Those who thought out loud about
these matters seemed to assume that the country's salvation

through perestroika and the extrication of its people from the
spiritual morass were tightly -- perhaps, inextricably --
interwoven, and left it at that. What mattered was reclaiming
the
people to citizenship from "serfdom" and "slavery." "Enough!"
declared Boris Vasiliev, the author of a popular novella of
the period about World War II, which was made into an equally
well-received film. "Enough lies, enough servility,
enough cowardice. Let's remember, finally, that we are all
citizens. Proud citizens of a proud nation!"
DELVING INTO THE causes of the French Revolution, de
Tocqueville famously noted that regimes overthrown in
revolutions tend to be less repressive than the ones preceding
them. Why? Because, de Tocqueville surmised, though
people "may suffer less," their "sensibility is exacerbated."
As usual, Tocqueville was onto something hugely important.
From the Founding Fathers to the Jacobins and Bolsheviks,
revolutionaries have fought under essentially the same banner:
advancement of human dignity. It is in the search for
dignity through liberty and citizenship that glasnost's
subversive sensibility lives -- and will continue to live. Just as
the
pages of Ogoniok and Moskovskie Novosti must take pride of
place next to Boris Yeltsin on the tank as symbols of the

latest Russian revolution, so should Internet pages in Arabic
stand as emblems of the present revolution next to the
images of rebellious multitudes in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the
Casbah plaza in Tunis, the streets of Benghazi, and the
blasted towns of Syria. Languages and political cultures aside,
their messages and the feelings they inspired were
remarkably similar.
The fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation set
off the Tunisian uprising that began the Arab Spring of
2011, did so "not because he was jobless," a demonstrator in
Tunis told an American reporter, but "because he … went
to talk to the [local authorities] responsible for his problem and
he was beaten -- it was about the government." In
Benghazi, the Libyan revolt started with the crowd chanting,
"The people want an end to corruption!" In Egypt, the
crowds were "all about the self-empowerment of a long-
repressed people no longer willing to be afraid, no longer
willing
to be deprived of their freedom, and no longer willing to be
humiliated by their own leaders," New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman reported from Cairo this February. He could
have been reporting from Moscow in 1991.
"Dignity Before Bread!" was the slogan of the Tunisian
revolution. The Tunisian economy had grown between 2 and 8

percent a year in the two decades preceding the revolt. With
high oil prices, Libya on the brink of uprising also enjoyed an
economic boom of sorts. Both are reminders that in the modern
world, economic progress is not a substitute for the pride
and self-respect of citizenship. Unless we remember this well,
we will continue to be surprised -- by the "color revolutions"
in the post-Soviet world, the Arab Spring, and, sooner or later,
an inevitable democratic upheaval in China -- just as we
were in Soviet Russia. "The Almighty provided us with such a
powerful sense of dignity that we cannot tolerate the denial
of our inalienable rights and freedoms, no matter what real or
supposed benefits are provided by 'stable' authoritarian
regimes," the president of Kyrgyzstan, Roza Otunbayeva, wrote
this March. "It is the magic of people, young and old,
men and women of different religions and political beliefs, who
come together in city squares and announce that enough
is enough."
Of course, the magnificent moral impulse, the search for truth
and goodness, is only a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for the successful remaking of a country. It may be
enough to bring down the ancien regime, but not to
overcome, in one fell swoop, a deep-seated authoritarian
national political culture. The roots of the democratic
institutions spawned by morally charged revolutions may prove

too shallow to sustain a functioning democracy in a
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society with precious little tradition of grassroots self-
organization and self-rule. This is something that is likely to
prove a
huge obstacle to the carrying out of the promise of the Arab
Spring -- as it has proved in Russia. The Russian moral
renaissance was thwarted by the atomization and mistrust bred
by 70 years of totalitarianism. And though Gorbachev and
Yeltsin dismantled an empire, the legacy of imperial thinking
for millions of Russians has since made them receptive to
neo-authoritarian Putinism, with its propaganda leitmotifs of
"hostile encirclement" and "Russia rising off its knees."
Moreover, the enormous national tragedy (and national guilt) of
Stalinism has never been fully explored and atoned for,
corrupting the entire moral enterprise, just as the glasnost
troubadours so passionately warned.
Which is why today's Russia appears once again to be inching
toward another perestroika moment. Although the market

reforms of the 1990s and today's oil prices have combined to
produce historically unprecedented prosperity for millions,
the brazen corruption of the ruling elite, new-style censorship,
and open disdain for public opinion have spawned
alienation and cynicism that are beginning to reach (if not
indeed surpass) the level of the early 1980s.
One needs only to spend a few days in Moscow talking to the
intelligentsia or, better yet, to take a quick look at the blogs
on LiveJournal (Zhivoy Zhurnal), Russia's most popular Internet
platform, or at the sites of the top independent and
opposition groups to see that the motto of the 1980s -- "We
cannot live like this any longer!" -- is becoming an article of
faith again. The moral imperative of freedom is reasserting
itself, and not just among the limited circles of pro-democracy
activists and intellectuals. This February, the Institute of
Contemporary Development, a liberal think tank chaired by
President Dmitry Medvedev, published what looked like a
platform for the 2012 Russian presidential election:
In the past Russia needed liberty to live [better]; it must now
have it in order to survive.… The challenge of our
times is an overhaul of the system of values, the forging of new
consciousness. We cannot build a new country
with the old thinking.… The best investment [the state can make
in man] is Liberty and the Rule of Law. And

respect for man's Dignity.
It was the same intellectual and moral quest for self-respect and
pride that, beginning with a merciless moral scrutiny of
the country's past and present, within a few short years
hollowed out the mighty Soviet state, deprived it of legitimacy,
and
turned it into a burned-out shell that crumbled in August 1991.
The tale of this intellectual and moral journey is an
absolutely central story of the 20th century's last great
revolution.
Save big when you subscribe to FP.
Stephen Ferry/Liaison/Getty Images
Leon Aron is director of Russian studies at the American
Enterprise Institute and
author of the forthcoming Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory,
Ideas, and Ideals
in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991.
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Michael Yared
Uni: May2125
Politics in Russia
Spring 2013

Please type your answers in 12 point font.
Be sure to answer each part of every question. You should cite
the authors assigned this semester when relevant using the
following format: (author’s name). Also, be creative and open
in offering your opinion when relevant. These questions are
designed to get you to think, not necessarily to look for a
single, “correct” answer. Each question is worth 10 points.
______
1.) Briefly describe two of the causes of the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991. Describe one proximate cause of the
collapse, as well as one structural cause -- i.e. a process or
phenomenon that began years before 1991 and is connected to
the Soviet system. (The causes you identify may combine both
proximate and structural elements; if so, state that this is the
case.) (The answer to this question may be relatively brief.)
As newly appointed general secretary in 1985, Gorbatchev set
out to “bridge the gap between socialism’s ideals and it’s
disappointing realities within the context of the superpower
competition” S. Kotkin, Armageddon Averted.
As the soviet economy stagnated Gorbatchev decided to
reallocate a rapidly shrinking budget & political resources from
the military to the economy by enacting “Perestroika”. He went
a step further by introducing “Glasnost” so as to increase
transparency & reduce the authority of the state. Glasnost
offered a substantial part of the population unprecedented
access to commercial culture and the values of capitalism. The
credibility of the regime started to weaken as “new perceptions
contributed to a change in attitudes toward the regime and “a
shift in values” ” L. Aaron, Everything you know about the
Soviet Union Collapse in wrong.

This “ideology of reformism” lead to growing calls from the
apparat to reign back the pace of liberalization. In response,
Gorbatchev tried to democratize the party with competitive
elections & reorganize the party secretariat: Gorbatchev “was
exchanging a unitary structure for a federalized one” S. Kotkin,
Armageddon Averted.”
M. Beissinger argues in his piece: Nationalism and the Collapse
of Soviet Communism that Glasnost allowed for the emergence
of “political nationalism across multiple contexts in the Soviet
Union” which in turn lead to dispersion amongst the Communist
Party as to how to best respond to it thereby further weakening
the central control mechanism.
In summary, by disrupting the planned economy through
“Perestroika” and discrediting the party’s ideology through
“Glasnost”, Gorbatchev wary of an internal power struggle
destroyed the party’s central control mechanism which in turn
lead to the ultimate collapse of the Union.
2.) President Yeltsin’s decision to use force against the Russian
parliament in 1993 was a fateful one. Explain the nature of the
conflict between the executive and legislative branches of the
new Russian state. What was it about? (hint: it was about more
than one thing). Second, what were some consequences of
Yeltsin’s decision to use force, in particular for his
government’s ability to pass laws and make policy in the
several year aftermath of his decision in 1993?
3.) Yeltsin’s inheritance of the Soviet system with its myriad
problems influenced the initial path that Yeltsin’s government
chose in constructing the new Russian state. Choose one of
Yeltsin government’s early policies or reforms and describe
how it was informed by the experience of the Soviet era. How
did either: the need to definitively end certain aspects of the
Soviet system; curtail the power of certain actors from the

Soviet era; or the fear of returning to Soviet era shape Yeltsin’s
policies. (For example, you may discuss the sequencing of
political and economic reforms; some aspect of economic
policy; his reform of state structures; relations with the ethnic
republics, etc.) Relevant authors: Stephen Kotkin, Mike
McFaul, Neil Robnison; Ron Suny.
4.) How did the effects of privatization reduce Yeltsin’s
popularity? To answer this, think about how the economic and
social effects of voucher privatization (Phase I of privatization)
negatively affected certain categories of the population. Also,
think about how certain categories of the population benefitted
from privatization (both Phase I and Phase II) and how this
reduced Yeltsin’s popularity.
5.) Briefly explain how the two wars in Chechnya weakened the
Russian state. Provide at least two reasons. (You may answer
this briefly).
6.) How did the accountability of regional leaders shift (1) from
the Soviet era to the Y eltsin presidency, and then (2) from
Yeltsin to Putin? What is the relationship between
accountability and democracy?
(Hint: To answer this, identify who the relevant actors (or types
of institutions) were in each period in both the regions and in
Moscow.
7.) Elections are an important indicator of democracy. Describe
how elections to the Duma have changed from the Yeltsin
period in the 1990s, to the Putin era in the 2000s. Why have

certain parties been able to survive into the present?
8.) Describe two chronic problems with Russia’s economy
(briefly) and their consequences for Russian politics, broadly
defined.
Politics means any political or social issue in the country. The
chronic problem can be something that occurred during the
1990s, the 2000s, or it can span all of the post-Soviet years.
You may rely on any of your assigned readings, including the
chapters by Neil Robinson, Gerald Easter, and Richard Sakwa
(and Stephen Kotkin). You are not required to describe a
problem that we discussed in class, though you may, obviously.
9.) How has the relationship between oligarchs and the state
changed from Yeltsin to Putin?
10) How has Putin strengthened the Russian state? How has he
weakened it?
You may discuss various aspects of the state: e.g., the formal
institutions of the state (i.e. parliament; federalism; the
Constitution); the state’s relationship to various actors:
minority ethnic groups; the economy/powerful economic actors;
the meaning of the war in Chechnya; etc.
This question is broad and interpretative. You can be creative.
But do not try to address subjects we have not yet covered (e.g.
relationship of the state to the legal system; civil society). And
try not to repeat your earlier answers to other questions.
What is the state? State institutions; the state provides welfare
to the population; the military and security services.

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