Russia

There were to be other disappointments in what had been the outer fringes of the Soviet Empire. In June 1991 COMECON was precipitately wound up, at which regional trade ground almost to a standstill. The new regimes in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia tried to reorient their commerce from the East to the West but failed. The Warsaw Treaty Organization, linchpin of the Bloc’s defences, was also to become a dead letter, allowing the United States to lead its allies towards an eastward expansion of NATO. In Yugoslavia, deteriorating economic conditions were already fostering nationalist breakaway movements in Slovenia and Croatia, setting the country on a slide to dissolution and bloody civil war, while in the Soviet Union itself the unpredictable Boris Yeltsin, who had so recently been excluded from the political arena, contrived to find a new political space for himself by posing as a Russian patriot.

He had argued that if constituent republics of the Soviet Union like Lithuania or Kazakhstan had an autonomous political life it was anomalous that Russia, the Union’s largest constituent by far, should not. Gorbachev could not challenge his logic, and so in March 1990 Yeltsin was able to stand for election to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federal Republic. He was elected, and soon chosen to be its chairman. Having created a new political platform, he proceeded to claim sovereignty for Russia and to encourage the Baltic republics and others to claim their independence too. Yeltsin contributed to the dissolution of the Union. But the sharp economic deterioration had given him and the other nationalist politicians their opportunity.

In June 1990 Estonia, one of the more prosperous Soviet republics, proclaimed itself independent in the economic sphere. Lithuania went further, claiming a right to veto all Union legislation, and Uzbekistan, one of the most populous Soviet republics, declared itself sovereign. The once stable Soviet economy was descending into chaos as social distress and inflation rose. Shopping was becoming more and more difficult, necessities of life increasingly expensive, while many employees suddenly lost employment perks and privileges which they had come to take for granted. In August 1990 Gorbachev reacted by setting up a commission of the Supreme Soviet to draft a plan for economic recovery. There were deep divisions of opinion about what should be done, and the argument soon crystallized into a struggle between radical reformers and those who wanted to revert to the old ways. Yeltsin, an instinctive politician, agreed to co-operate. He supported the radicals and was politically helpful to Gorbachev for a time. A 500-day plan for the regeneration of the country, largely the work of an economist called Stanislav Shatalin, was tabled. It called for measures to control inflation, the stabilization of the ruble, the end of price controls, and privatization of the huge state sector.

Similar to the ‘shock therapy’ advocated by the Harvard economist Jeremy Sachs in Poland, it implied a devolution of economic control which was problematical in the Soviet Union as it had not been in Poland. This was not only because it threatened the interests of powerful apparatchiki and to trigger popular discontent, but because the Soviet economy was several times larger than Poland’s as well as more complex, and its geographical spread immense. It demanded some careful co-ordination if it were not to become dysfunctional. Furthermore, the isolation of many enterprises made them as vulnerable as Canadian ‘company towns’, threatening a series of local social disasters if they should suddenly become bankrupt. The plan also threatened the disintegration of the Union. So the weight of opinion began to shift towards the conservatives. Gorbachev sent the Plan back to be redrafted in a less extreme form. This angered those who wanted the speedy implementation of radical reforms, and several ministers resigned. It also bolstered the separatist cause in some republics, especially those adjacent to the West.

Gorbachev, who had failed to grasp one nettle, now reached out to snatch at another: he sanctioned the use of force against the national movement in Lithuania. On 17 March 1991 special units of Soviet forces stormed the television tower in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, which had been occupied by separatists. There were fifteen fatalities. Intended to be a discreet and bloodless operation which would deter nationalists across the Union, the implementation had been clumsy. Gorbachev moved quickly to disown it; Yeltsin, perhaps afraid that he might be purged or eliminated if the leader’s new ‘hard line’ prevailed, ²⁰ called for a ‘declaration of war’ against the Soviet leader. On 28 March he mobilized a large crowd of demonstrators in Moscow in defiance of a ban on demonstrations.