The Last Empire (67 page)

Back in 1922 the USSR was created with an eye to accommodating Ukraine. The Union emerged as a state with a powerful center whose goal in the first decade of its history was to keep the Ukrainians in and the Russians, the formerly dominant ethnic group, down. Decimated in the wake of the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933, the Ukrainian communist elites bounced back after World War II, becoming Russia's de facto (but not de jure) junior partner in running the Soviet empire. Influential if not dominant in Moscow during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, Ukrainian elites were removed from the center of power under Gorbachev.

Despite their grudges against the new leader and his policies, the Ukrainian party apparatchiks remained loyal to the idea of the Union until the August coup, and some of them did so even afterward. Yeltsin's attempt to take over the center in the wake of the failed putsch threatened the Ukrainian elites with a situation in which the imploded center would leave them one-on-one with a powerful Russia no longer subject to any restraint. While Gorbachev was still trying to co-opt Ukrainians into all-Union structures, offering the second position in the party to a Ukrainian apparatchik before the coup and the office of prime minister in the future Union to a Ukrainian government official afterward, Yeltsin had no plans of that nature. And the Ukrainians were no longer interested in them anyway. It was the Ukrainian elites' insistence on the independence of their country and the unwillingness and inability of the Russian elites to offer the Ukrainian leadership an attractive integrationist alternative short of
a Russia-dominated confederation that led to the fall of the Soviet Union.

There was little hope for Russo-Ukrainian accommodation after the coup. The Aleksandr Rutskoi mission sent to Kyiv by Yeltsin in late August 1991 failed to achieve its objectives and stop Ukraine's drive toward independence. By October, Kravchuk stopped coming to Moscow, and his fateful meeting with Yeltsin in Belavezha in December had to be organized by Belarusian intermediaries.

The Soviet Union never turned into an analogue of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which extended its life in the nineteenth century by obliging the Austro-German elites to share the spoils and responsibilities of running the empire with their Hungarian counterparts. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's vision of a Slavic Union that some believed could materialize after Belavezha was in fact a blueprint for the creation of a greater Russia, not a recognition of the differences between Russia and Ukraine or a proposal of partnership. As the Ukrainian population voted for independence with astounding unanimity, Kravchuk presented not only Gorbachev but also Yeltsin with a fait accompli—Ukraine was leaving the Soviet Union. At Belavezha the Russian and Ukrainian presidents negotiated the exit conditions and a new modus vivendi.

Gorbachev's inability to regain power after the coup, Yeltsin's clumsiness in his original attempt to take over the Union center, his subsequent decision to go ahead with Russian economic reform without the other republics, and, finally, Kravchuk's dogged insistence on independence left most of the republics that had not yet declared their desire to leave the Union in a difficult position. The Belarusian leaders hosting the Belavezha summit told Yeltsin and Kravchuk that they would support whatever decision the two reached. Privately they knew that under any circumstances they would have to stick with Russia, if only because of their republic's dependence on Russian energy supplies. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan and host of the Almaty meeting on December 21, shared that position. It was not Russian resources that were on his mind but the Russian and Slavic population of his republic, which outnumbered its titular nationality, the Kazakhs. The leaders of the other Central Asian republics also could not imagine the Union proposed by Gorbachev if it did not include Russia. There was a chain reaction: Ukraine did not
want to be in the Union, Russia could not imagine the Union without Ukraine, and the rest of the republics that still wanted to be in the Union could not imagine it without Russia. The Central Asian leaders were all but expelled from the empire by their imperial masters and now had no choice but to join the Commonwealth.

Unlike the Soviet Union, the Commonwealth structure allowed much more flexibility in defining the level of political, economic, and social integration between the republics. It was varied levels of integration of the non-Russian territories into the imperial center that distinguished the former Romanov empire from the Soviet Union. Whereas in the Russian Empire Finland or the Kingdom of Poland could have special rights and privileges not accorded to the Russian or Ukrainian provinces, in the Soviet Union all republics, from tiny Estonia to huge Russia, were equal in constitutional terms. Giving certain rights to Estonia was impossible without giving the same rights to Russia. It was this characteristic of Soviet federalism that made the disintegration of the Soviet Union all but inevitable once the movement for independence gathered speed in the Baltics, western Ukraine, Caucasus, and Moldova.

THE INABILITY
of the Soviet leaders to discriminate between the Union republics in constitutional terms was one of the realities of Soviet political life that George H. W. Bush and his advisers in Washington never fully grasped. They kept pushing for the independence of the Baltic republics, convinced that the Soviet Union could not only survive but do very well without them. Their argument was about fairness and legality: the United States had never recognized the annexation of the Baltic states after 1939, and they should now be set free. The rest of the republics should stay as they were. That was a difficult proposition to sell to other republics. George Bush tried in vain to do so in his “Chicken Kiev” speech in the Ukrainian parliament, whereas he succeeded in making it difficult, if not impossible, for Gorbachev to employ the coercive power of the state still at his disposal to establish martial law in the Baltics for a lengthy period. And surgical applications of force were no longer effective. With the price for prolonged use of force made prohibitive by Western pressure, Gorbachev had no choice but to play according to the constitutional rules.

In the final analysis, George Bush's policies contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, but they often did so irrespective of the desires of his administration, or even contrary to them. The push for Baltic independence is only one example of the unforeseen consequences of American actions. There is little doubt that by helping to save Gorbachev after the coup and pushing Yeltsin to cooperate with him, the United States prevented Yeltsin from either completely taking over the Union center or forcing Gorbachev to negotiate a confederation agreement in September or October 1991, when Kravchuk and the Ukrainian leaders were still attending gatherings of republican leaders convened by Gorbachev. In November, a few weeks before the Ukrainian referendum, the Bush administration continued to apply pressure on Yeltsin, trying to keep him from doing away with the Union government, especially its foreign policy branch, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was only in late November that the Bush administration allowed the leak of news about the coming recognition of Ukrainian independence, pushing the dying Soviet Union over the brink. This time the administration knew the consequences of its action.

Why did George H. W. Bush and his advisers do as they did? Bush's personal attachment to Gorbachev, whom he respected as a man and a politician, is of course part of the explanation, but much more important was the administration's desire to keep Gorbachev and the Soviet Union afloat as long as possible. The immediate goal, as formulated by James Baker in early 1991, was to extract maximum concessions from the dying Soviet behemoth in the realm of arms control and international relations. The strategy worked exceptionally well. The withdrawal of Soviet assistance from Moscow-backed governments in Cuba and Afghanistan, Moscow's agreement to make deep cuts in its nuclear arsenals, and Gorbachev's support for the US-proposed peace settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict were among the accomplishments of Bush's Soviet policy in the fall of 1991.

But the most important American concern was the safety of the Soviet nuclear arsenals, which, it was believed in Washington, were much safer under the central control of the Soviet military, with whom the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and other American commanders had worked in the years of Gorbachev's
rule. Here the administration's policies also met with success. One of the first points made by Yeltsin when he called Bush from Belavezha in December 1991 was to inform him of the agreement of the Slavic presidents on joint but centralized control over Soviet nuclear arms. Last but not least, there was a related concern about the peaceful dissolution of the USSR, especially when it came to the nuclear-armed republics of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Despite Gorbachev's concerns and grim predictions, the Soviet Union never turned into Yugoslavia with nukes. Russia never became Serbia, and Yeltsin, unlike Slobodan Milošević, never tried to gather what many in Russia considered historical Russian lands, now in the possession of other republics, by force.

The main credit for the peaceful dissolution of the Union should go to the policies of Boris Yeltsin and the cautious stand on Russian minorities taken by Leonid Kravchuk and Nursultan Nazarbayev. But the American contribution to that process was by no means insignificant. By coordinating his position with the leaders of Western Europe, Bush managed to avoid a situation akin to the one that occurred in Yugoslavia, when Germany encouraged the drive for independence by Slovenia and Croatia, while the rest of the Western powers remained undecided on the issue. In the case of the Soviet Union, Bush was able to get all the Western leaders on board and served as spokesman for their common position. To be accepted in the West, the leaders of the republics had to do what Bush wanted them to do with regard to nuclear arms, borders, and minorities. American expectations were spelled out in the early fall of 1991 by James Baker and followed in spirit, if not to the letter, by the leaders of the Soviet republics.

While losing the battle to save the Soviet Union as a junior partner in the international arena, the Bush administration helped orchestrate its peaceful dissolution. This was no small accomplishment, especially if one thinks of the bloody ends of other empires. On a certain level, history had indeed come to an end—not in the sense of a final victory of liberalism, as declared by the leading American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his best-selling book
The End of History and the Last Man
(1990), but in the disappearance of the old European empires. The United States, born of rebellion against an empire and an archenemy of colonialism throughout the world, unexpectedly
found itself presiding over the dissolution of a country often labeled the last world empire. The Americans thus accomplished their anti-imperial purpose without really wishing to do so.
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THERE IS EVERY REASON
to see 1991 as a major turning point in world history, and nowhere does this seem more obvious than in the former post-Soviet space, where many present-day trends in international relations, domestic politics, and economic relations continue to develop in the shadow of the year that some call an
annus mirabilis
, while others, including President Vladimir Putin of Russia, associate it with the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
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It was in 1991 that the Russian leadership set a policy on the use of military force by which it abided until the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. While the Union republics were allowed to go without a fight, autonomous republics such as Chechnia were not. The Russian leaders learned a lesson from the Soviet collapse and established a new federal system in which some members of the Russian Federation, such as Chechnia or Tatarstan, could have more rights than others. That helped preserve a semblance of unity in the Russian state during the first difficult post-Soviet decade. Coercion and flexibility, the latter having been in short supply in the Soviet Union, became the hallmarks of the new Russian policy of dealing with rebellious autonomies. While crushing the drives of their own autonomies for independence, the Russian leaders took a page from Gorbachev's book of 1990 and 1991 when he played the leaders of the Russian autonomies against Boris Yeltsin and tried to support rebellious autonomies in other post-Soviet states, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and Transnistria in Moldova.

What is now considered Vladimir Putin's invention—an aggressive policy of integrating former Soviet republics into common institutions and opposing Ukraine's and Georgia's membership in NATO and structures affiliated with the European Union—also harks back to the events of 1991. Many of Yeltsin's advisers regarded the Commonwealth not as an instrument of divorce but rather as a means of Russian control over the post-Soviet space. They believed that Russia needed to free itself from the burden of supporting a traditional empire, but in twenty years, once it recovered from its
economic and political problems, the republics would come back to Russia of their own free will. Some republics, such as Belarus, did come back and joined Russian-led political, economic, and military organizations. But others did not, and a semblance of a new Cold War between Russia and the West all but materialized in the wake of the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, which resulted in the coming to power of the Western-educated president Mikheil Saakashvili, and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which saw the election of the pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko over his Russian-backed and -funded competitor. Today, as in 1991, the former republics most politically distant from Russia are the Baltic states, while the country on which prospects for the reintegration of post-Soviet space under Moscow's auspices most depend is Ukraine.
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