Russia. A History полностью

Nationalist movements also proliferated throughout the Soviet bloc. The critical turning point came in East Germany in the autumn of 1989, when Gorbachev—convinced that the regime was on the verge of collapse—refused to intercede and prop up an unpopular, faltering communist regime. Demolition of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 not only marked the end of the Soviet bloc but also demonstrated to nationalists inside the Soviet Union that the unthinkable had now become possible.

Crisis and Dissolution

The year 1991 was a watershed in modern Russian history: it marked the dissolution of the USSR into fifteen sovereign republics, the largest of which was the Russian Federation. This process, while under way before Gorbachev, accelerated sharply in the late 1980s and encouraged republic leaders to demand total sovereignty and independence, not mere autonomy.

Determined to resist this process, Gorbachev desperately sought to preserve the Soviet Union as a federal state. He first arranged a national referendum in April 1991, where a majority voted for preserving the USSR, but that could not stem the tidal wave of nationalist movements that had emerged throughout the Soviet Union. In a last attempt to save some semblance of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev laboured to win adoption of a ‘New Union Treaty’, which would transform the unitary Soviet state into a loose confederation with a common presidency, foreign policy, and military. Gorbachev persuaded a majority of republic leaders to accept the treaty and scheduled a formal signing ceremony in Moscow on 20 August 1991.

The very prospect of such a treaty precipitated a last-ditch attempt by conservative élites, including his own vice-president, the chief of the KGB, and some military officers, to attempt a coup d’état. When Gorbachev left Moscow to take a holiday at his summer retreat at Foros in the Crimea (with plans to return to Moscow in time for the signing ceremony on 20 August), that gave his adversaries (including some whom Gorbachev had appointed to bolster his power) an opportunity to launch a putsch. The scheme immediately went awry. The conspirators had expected Gorbachev to acquiesce; when they dispatched emissaries to demand that he surrender power, however, they met with a categorical refusal. Although some participants later claimed that Gorbachev acquiesced (even colluded), the preponderance of evidence shows that he categorically opposed the cabal of conspirators. Placing Gorbachev under house arrest, the conspirators declared a national emergency and established a State Emergency Committee ‘to manage the country and effectively maintain the regime in a state of emergency’. Ill prepared and poorly led, they failed to establish control over the ‘force ministries’ (including the military), lacked any semblance of a coherent plan to seize power, and within three days capitulated in ignominious defeat. The most famous, enduring legacy of the ‘putsch’ was the image of Boris Yeltsin, astride a tank in downtown Moscow, leading those opposed to the coup and emerging as the victorious hero in the whole affair. Shortly afterwards, at Yeltsin’s insistence, Gorbachev outlawed the Communist Party, thereby dismantling the institutional bastion of the Soviet political system. The putsch also gave the republics an easy opportunity to declare independence, and within days, at most weeks, they hastened to do so, a process that culminated in a Ukrainian referendum of 1 December 1991, when over 90 per cent of the electorate voted in favour of independence.

Formal dissolution of the USSR came a week later. On 8 December 1991 the leaders of the three main Slavic republics—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—gathered at a Belorussian natural reserve called Belavezhskaia pushcha to consider the future of the USSR. The three parties, without consulting the other twelve republics, agreed to dissolve the USSR and signed what became known as the Belavezh Accord. Later that month, representatives from most republics (except Georgia and the Baltic states) convened in Alma-Ata and agreed to create the ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’. On 25 December 1991 Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR; the Soviet Union had ceased, even nominally, to exist.

Constructing the Russian Federation