25d: Fall of the Soviet Empire

On March 11, 1985 54 year old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The youngest man to take charge of the USSR in fifty years, he moved quickly to stabilize the Soviet state.. One of Gorbachev's two major initiatives was perestroika, or "restructuring" of the long-stagnant economy. His second initiative was glasnost, or "openness" in discussing and addressing political issues. But the entire Communist system had been abused by corrupt bureaucrats for so long that legislation and public relations alone could not help. Gorbachev promoted a group of reformers who would support his initatives, including the new Communist Party boss of Moscow, a Siberian named Boris Yeltsin. Some of his early efforts succeeded; for instance, he succesfully got Soviet troops out of Afghanistan in 1986. That same year, though, he handled the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the time-honored Soviet way: denial and lies. As Gorbachev became more aware of how shaky the USSR was, he introduced even more democratic reforms, including, in 1989, the Soviet Union's first "free" elections ever. Even though the elections were still rigged in favor of the Communists, they also brought even more seriousl reformers politicians into power, regionally and nationally. Yeltsin, now estranged from Gorbachev, won a seat in the new Congress of People's Deputies and started playing his own game for power.

Gorbachev's unwillingness to use military force sped up the disintegration of the Soviet Union. One of his spokesmen even joked about a "Sinatra doctrine," in which the client states could have whatever government they liked - doing it "their way." Hungary was the first client state to go its own way, followed by Czechoslovakia and Poland. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the former client states shed their Communist regimes, demands for serious reform grew in the Soviet Union. At the same time, non-Russian minority groups throughout the Soviet Union demanded independence, much as Stalin had foreseen nearly 70 years earlier. The Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which had been forced into the Soviet Union as a result of Stalin's 1939 treaty with Germany, began to lead the way out of the Soviet Union. Through 1990 and 1991 Gorbachev searched for a solution as his approval ratings plummeted. He finally proposed a "Union Treaty," which would somehow hold the USSR together in some way agreeable to all involved.

While Gorbachev was on vacation in August 1991, a group of old-school military and KGB leaders staged a coup in Moscow. While Gorbachev simmered under house arrest, Boris Yeltsin (now President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) stood on a tank outside the Soviet White House and rallied the common people of Moscow. Unorganized and unsupported by either the military or the people, the coup collapsed after three days. Gorbachev was freed from arrest and returned to Moscow, but his time was up. He was still the official head of the Soviet state, but Yeltsin now enjoyed much more popular support and, therefore, much more clout. Power was gravitating toward the RSFSR, and away from the Soviet Union. Gorbachev tried in vain to persuade Yeltsin and the presidents of the other Soviet republics to keep the old Soviet infrastructure together. The Muslim republics of Central Asia wanted to stay in the Soviet Union. The Communists had forced them for decades to grow nothing but cotton, and they knew they were economically unprepared for independence. Even those republics which wanted to leave the Soviet Union were less prepared than they believed. However haplessly put together it was, however poorly it worked, the Soviet Union could not just vanish without serious consequences. Still, on December 8, 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was officially replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States. Ironically, the breakaway Soviet republics were exercising a right that Vladimir Lenin (of all people) had insisted upon when the Soviet Union was formed.

On Christmas Day 1991, the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from over Kremlin and replaced with the Russian Federation's tricolor and double-headed Byzantine eagle. The Soviet Union, once thought to be immortal, had lasted a mere seventy-four years. Although it was the product of two separate revolutions, and although it rejected everything about the Tsarist regime, it wound up being a different flavor of the same old thing. The General Secretary of the Communist Party replaced the Tsar, the Communist Party leadership replaced the nobility, and the Communist Party itself replaced the Russian Orthodox Church. The only major difference was the Soviets' excessive cruelty. The Soviets executed, tortured, starved, relocated, and otherwise mistreated more people than even Ivan the Terrible himself could have imagined. It is sad indeed that the peoples of the Eastern European client states and the Baltic republics had to show the Russian people the way. But at least it happened. The sheer ineptitude of the Soviet leadership helped, no doubt, as did the Western countries' determination to hold the line against Communist encroachment. Those brave people in Communist countries who resisted against all odds also contributed. But in the end, the Soviet Union crushed itself with its own inability to provide a better life for its people, with its rampant bureaucracy and corruption, with the ridiculous amounts of money it wasted on the arms race and on trying to promote world Communism. For the number of positive achievements the Soviets could point to - space travel, literacy, defeat of the Germans in the Second World War - as a whole, its legacy is dismal indeed.