The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In June 1989, during the first Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, as the entire country watched, glued to the television, the recently elected Sakharov called for the abolition of Article 6. If the country failed to distribute power, he warned, perestroika would fail.²¹ What he was proposing sounded impossible even to Sakharov's allies at the Congress. But in just six months, when the pro- democracy faction formed a movement they called Democratic Russia, they proclaimed the fight against the Communist Party's monopoly their top goal.²² Sakharov had died a week earlier. Yeltsin became the singular leader of Democratic Russia. He had come up through the Party's hierarchy, but his views were changing faster than those of any other top-level Communist.

In the spring of 1990, Estonia and Latvia declared null and void all documents that made them a part of the USSR. In June, the Russian Republic, which now had its own parliament—chaired by Yeltsin— voted to assert "state sovereignty," though no one knew what that might mean. The following month, Yeltsin resigned from the Communist Party, and this meant that the largest Soviet republic, the first among equals, now had a leader who was not a member of the Party.

Alexander Nikolaevich disliked Yeltsin, his naked populism and his unabashed ambition. Alexander Nikolaevich was committed to reforming the system rather than destroying it, but as perestroika progressed, the distinction proved increasingly fuzzy. Sometimes, reform, as opposed to destruction, looked simply impossible. By late 1989, Alexander Nikolaevich came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union needed to be transformed into a federation, each of whose members would have tangible legislative independence and economic responsibility.²³ But he expected patience and trust from the republics. In October 1989, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born former national security adviser and scholar of totalitarianism who had counseled a succession of American presidents, came to Moscow and, among other questions, asked Alexander Nikolaevich what would happen if the Baltics ratcheted up their calls for independence. Alexander Nikolaevich said that this would be the end of perestroika because Gorbachev needed everyone to try to ride things out as a union.²⁴ Brzezinski was unimpressed. He titled his next book The Grand Failure, and in it he condemned not only the Soviet experiment but also Gorbachev's efforts at reform. He predicted that only Poland and Hungary might have a shot at a peaceful transition and a post-Communist future. For the Soviet Union, he laid out five pessimistic scenarios, two of which involved coups, either by the military or by the KGB, and one, the outright collapse of the regime.²⁵

Alexander Nikolaevich feared the failure of perestroika perhaps more than anything else. He kept lashing out at the Party's conservatives for holding the process back, and at times it seemed like Gorbachev had stopped listening to him altogether: all he was doing at any given point was looking for a stopgap measure, a way to balance the teetering union at the edge of a precipice. In the summer of 1990, following Russia's declaration of sovereignty (whatever it meant), the conservative wing pressured Gorbachev to introduce a state of emergency. He went halfway: he abolished the deliberative top government bodies of the USSR in favor of a cabinet and a security council under direct presidential control, but he refused to declare a state of emergency. But in January 1991, without any formal declaration, he allowed his ministers of defense and of the interior and the head of the KGB to try to retake the Baltics. This was exactly two years after the bloodshed in Baku, on a different edge of the empire. This time, nineteen people died: fifteen in Vilnius and four in Riga.²⁶ This was why Masha's mother told her they would never be welcome in Lithuania again.

Alexander Nikolaevich had known nothing of the planned intervention, and he did not know what to say to journalists who questioned him about the killings in Vilnius. He had not spoken to Gorbachev in days. He was not even sure he had a job any longer. One thing he knew for certain now, though, was that he had changed his mind about the nature of the Union: he decided that "friendship of the peoples" had been, at best, a delusion.²⁷