Britannica Guide to Russia

When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned on December 25, 1991, and the Soviet flag was lowered over tlie Kremlin for the last time, the West feared a catastrophe of epic proportions. Contingency plans were in place to prevent already severe food shortages escalating into famine and to cope with perhaps hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing west in the depths of winter. There were fears, too, of a replay of the 1918-20 civil war, if local Communist Party officials and their opponents tried to make a grab for power, even as the national leadership conceded that the game was up.

In the event, the break-up of the Soviet Union was mostly peaceful. The republics that had made up the USSR either seized their independence ahead of time, through leaders who successfully challenged ebbing Soviet power, or - as in much of Central Asia - reluctantly accepted the independence that was thrust upon them. What violence there was erupted at long- tense ethnic fault-lines inside the newly independent states - Georgia, for one - but the main frontiers held.

That the Soviet Union ended less with a bang than a whimper was not due to good fortune alone. It also owed much to measured leadership. As Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev understood that neither the Eastern European Warsaw Pact nor the Soviet Union could be held together by force; he did not fight the inevitable. The president of the post-Soviet Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, chose for the most part a constitutional route to power, seeking a mandate for his popular appeal through the ballot box. Outside Russia, the then US president, George H. W. Bush, and the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, grappled with the largely unforeseen and fast-moving collapse of communism across Europe with flexibility and without panic.

The formal transfer of power in Russia, when it came, was also conducted for the most part with a due sense of dignity and responsibility. Those who had witnessed Yeltsin's public taunting of Gorbachev only four months before, following the aborted coup against the latter, might have anticipated an outburst of unseemly triumphalism. As president of the re­stored independent state of Russia, however, Yeltsin behaved with the modesty and generosity appropriate to a national leader in victory. There was no vicious settling of old scores.

So it was that Russia, with Yeltsin at its head, was inter­nationally recognized as the Soviet Union's successor state, inheriting - on the positive side - its permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and its considerable nuclear arsenal. Russia also gained a place at the top table of the world's economies when it formally joined the Group of Seven (making it the Group of Eight) in 1997. But on the negative side it fell heir to the USSR's international debts and heavily subsidized export obligations to its former allies and constituent republics in Europe and Central Asia.

The reasons for the Soviet Union's decline and eventual fall will long be debated, but they surely include the extensive central planning system, the suspicions harboured by the state towards its citizens, and the inability of the political system to renew itself. Greater exposure to the outside world, as modern communications forced open borders, and the cost of trying to match the US military challenge are also part of the equation.

But an equally significant factor, often underestimated, was the aspiration of Russians to reclaim their national sovereignty. As the countries of east and central Europe, the Baltic states, and the Caucasus sought to retrieve their independent national identities through the 1980s, so Russians, too, started to ques­tion the balance sheet left by 70 years of communism. To the rest of the world, the Soviet Union and Russia might have seemed synonymous, but many Russians saw themselves as powerless within their own country, overburdened by imperial power.

Unlike other constituent republics of the Soviet Union, Russia - or the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic as it was then - had no parliament or Communist Party organization to call its own, (In this respect, its position was somewhat analo­gous to that of England in the devolved United Kingdom.) Of course, ethnic Russians held the lion's share of leadership posts in the Soviet Union's central party and government apparatus. But there were no institutional mechanisms through which Russians could express their Russianness. In this respect, Boris Yeltsin's epic struggle against Mikhail Gorbachev in the last years and months of the Soviet Union was not just political and personal, although undoubtedly it was both of these: it was a duel between a declining Soviet Union and a resurgent Russia. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was Russia's victory and marked its rebirth as a nation.