The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

It did not work. About a month after Alexander Nikolaevich wrote the letter, the Nagorny Karabakh regional council, until then a ceremonial body, resolved to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia. Two days later, fighting broke out. The Politburo attempted to intervene by removing the head of the Nagorny Karabakh Party organization. Anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in Azerbaijan. Moscow removed Party bosses of both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Each republic voted to consider Nagorny Karabakh its own. Moscow sided with Azerbaijan. More anti-Armenian pogroms followed. Armenia expelled ethnic Azeris. Gorbachev had the Nagorny Karabakh secessionist movement leaders arrested (they were released six months later). Azerbaijan's Supreme Soviet voted to secede from the USSR. Anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, a large, opulent city—one of the world's first oil capitals, where Azeris, Armenians, Jews, and assorted others had thrived for over a century. Now ninety Armenians were dead and the rest of the Armenians of Baku became refugees. Chess champion Garry Kasparov, a Baku native of Armenian-Jewish descent, chartered a plane to evacuate his family and as many other Armenians as the vessel could fit. Soviet troops entered Baku a week after the pogroms began and killed about 130 people. Armenia voted to secede from the USSR.¹⁸ It was now August 1990—two and a half years after Alexander Nikolaevich wrote the letter urging Gorbachev to seek a way out rather than a solution.

The Soviet Union was splitting along all of its seams. Gorbachev, though he may not have followed Alexander Nikolaevich's recommendations precisely, had been doing nothing but looking for a way out instead of solutions. Organizations that called themselves "popular fronts"—a term coined in Nagorny Karabakh—appeared, one after another, in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as Ukraine and Belorussia. All proclaimed support for perestroika as their goal, but it quickly emerged that their goals did not match Gorbachev's.¹⁹ The Baltic republics, where there was still a living awareness that there had been a life before the Soviets, wanted their independence back. On August 23, 1989, as many as two million people formed a human chain connecting Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, the capitals of the three republics. If this count is correct, then one in four residents of the region participated in the peaceful protest, called the Baltic Way. The date was the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Hitler- Stalin pact that had granted the Baltics to the USSR. These people did not want to secede: they wanted an end to the occupation.

Five days earlier, Alexander Nikolaevich had given perhaps the most difficult interview of his life: he told the Pravda that the pact, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the secret protocols that divided Europe, existed. The USSR had denied the existence of the protocol for five decades. Just ten weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of the signing, Alexander Nikolaevich had hastily convened a commission to formulate a new, glasnost-appropriate stance on the pact. He was ill prepared, and he was not even entirely sure, at the start, that the secret protocol existed: the USSR had not

preserved an original copy. Still, he felt, it was essential for official Moscow to say something to distance Gorbachev from Stalin, on the one hand, and on the other, to de-escalate tensions with the Baltics.²⁰ The line he took in the Pravda interview was to acknowledge the protocols but not the occupation: Moscow would still claim that the Baltic states had voluntarily joined the empire. The hedge failed. Alexander Nikolaevich dealt a blow to the all-important myth of the infallibility of Soviet action in the Second World War, but from the point of view of the Baltics, his revelation was painfully insufficient. In a few months, Lithuania took a declaratory step toward independence: its Communist Party decided to sever ties with the Soviet Party organization. This was a double blow—to the Soviet Union and to the Party.

article 6 of the Constitution of the USSR stated, "The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the leading and directive force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system." In other words, it had the monopoly on everything. Two bureaucracies existed—the Party one and the state one—but a single career ladder fed both, and Soviet bosses moved between Party and state jobs, often combining them.