Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

It soon became apparent, though, that the Soviet Union could not continue in anything like its present form if there were free speech and pluralist politics. As in the past, the bonds between the ruling class and the mass of people were too brittle to withstand serious strains. Besides, the ‘outer empire’ began to crumble even more quickly under the same pressures, until in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and a series of mostly peaceful revolutions brought non-Communist parties to power. The Warsaw Pact fell apart.

Inside the USSR, the strain fell first on the economy. Gorbachev launched a reform which legalized private economic enterprises. He intended that they should complement the planned state economy, but in practice they took advantage of shortages to offer higher prices to suppliers and charge customers more. As a result, they sucked goods out of the state economy; ordinary consumers could no longer afford everyday purchases. To make matters worse, the economic reforms also disrupted the informal practices by which people had received goods through their workplaces or personal networks. By 1990, it began to look as if routine food supplies might not reach the major cities.

Relations between the nationalities also suffered. The incongruity of simultaneously fostering and suppressing national consciousness now became obvious. Glasnost and political freedom brought festering enmities to the surface. Popular Fronts formed to express the ethnic grievances of the non-Russians. The Baltic republics, whose population had never fully accepted their 1940 incorporation into the USSR, began to demand autonomy, then full secession. Armenians and Azerbaijanis denounced each other, then actually went to war over Nagornyi Karabakh, a territory controlled by Azerbaijan where most of the population was Armenian. Abkhazia demanded secession from Georgia, while Georgia denounced Moscow for encouraging the Abkhazians. In April 1989, the Soviet army had to be called in to deal with massive demonstrations in Tbilisi. It killed at least twenty people, and a public enquiry was launched to investigate its actions.

These ethnic conflicts cast doubt on the viability of the Soviet Union as a federation of ethnically named republics. They also raised the question of the legality of turning the military against unarmed civilians. Commanders became nervous of using force to disperse rioters: they feared they might be held legally responsible for the resulting casualties.

These two developments came together in the Soviet Union’s final crisis, which unexpectedly turned out to be a clash between Russia and the Soviet Union. Russians had long been aware that the non-Russian republics were becoming less hospitable homelands for them. In the late 1980s, their gradual exodus turned into a flood. Russians, who had taken it for granted that they were the dominant nationality and had not needed to defend their own identity, started to form their own organizations.

They had a problem, though: it was by no means clear what their national identity consisted of. There was still no coherent narrative of ‘Russia’. Some Russians considered their country essentially an imperial state; others identified with its culture, religion, or ethnic traditions. Some Russian nationalists idolized Stalin as a great leader; others reviled him as the destroyer of the Russian peasantry and the Orthodox Church. Divided by their own heritage, Russian nationalists could not cooperate with one another, until Gorbachev’s reforms threatened the actual break-up of the Soviet Union. By then it was too late.

Russia was not only a nation. It was also an institution, albeit a powerless one, within the USSR, the RSFSR. Gorbachev’s reforms gave it real power for the first time, and Russian political movements sprang up, both liberal and nationalist-imperialist. At the liberal end, in March 1990 Democratic Russia won many seats in the RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and their spokesman, Boris Yeltsin, gained a perfect platform to denounce the CPSU and demand that Russia be allowed to run its own affairs. In June 1991, he was popularly elected President of the Russian Republic.

The nationalist-imperialists also formed their own political parties, which brought together environmental associations, cultural societies, military-patriotic organizations, and Russian ‘international fronts’ from the non-Russian republics. Their Patriotic Bloc fared poorly in the 1990 elections, but continued to warn of the dangers to which Gorbachev’s peace-loving policy had exposed the Soviet Union. The reunification of Germany and its integration into NATO especially infuriated them: everything the Soviet Union had gained by its victory in the Second World War was, they claimed, now lost or jeopardized.