Chapter 9: Disintegration of the Soviet Union
On the evening of 23 August 1989, traffic stopped along the road running from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. These are the capitals of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, three Soviet republics on the Baltic coast of north-eastern Europe. People stepped out of buses, factories and farms, took the hand of the person beside them, and stood still. The chain they formed stretched about six hundred kilometres across the three republics. Roughly two million people joined it.
The date was chosen with care. Fifty years earlier, on 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact. A secret protocol attached to it placed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the Soviet sphere. In 1940 all three were absorbed into the Soviet Union. For decades Moscow had denied that any such secret protocol existed.
On paper the demonstrators asked for very little: admit that the document had been signed. But the demand struck at the root of Soviet authority in the Baltic. If the republics had been taken through a bargain between two dictatorships, then the Union’s claim to them rested on force rather than on consent.
Moscow’s Communist Party leadership condemned the chain within days. Yet four months later, in December 1989, the Soviet Union’s own parliament, elected earlier that year, voted to declare the secret protocols invalid from the day they were signed.
No shot had been fired. A state that had matched the United States in military power had conceded an argument about its own legitimacy. Two years later it no longer existed.
Map
Map 9.1 Caption: The human chain of 23 August 1989 ran from Tallinn to Vilnius, across the three Baltic republics of the Soviet Union. Brief: Political map of the north-western Soviet Union as it stood in 1989. Show the Union boundary and the internal boundaries of the constituent republics; shade Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in one tone and label each with its capital — Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius. Mark the Baltic Sea, and mark Moscow with a dot for reference. Draw the route of the human chain as a continuous line linking the three capitals. Do not show later post-1991 international boundaries, and do not show any territory outside this region. All boundaries shown must follow those officially recognised by the Government of India.
9.1 The Soviet Union And The Cold War Order
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, usually shortened to the Soviet Union or the USSR, was created in 1922. It grew out of the Russian empire, whose monarchy had been overthrown in the revolution of 1917. By the 1950s the Union was made up of fifteen union republics and stretched from the Baltic Sea in Europe to the Pacific Ocean in Asia.
It was the largest country in the world by land area, and one of the most diverse. Each of the fifteen republics was named after a major nationality living there — Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Lithuania and so on. More than a hundred smaller nationalities lived inside these republics, each with its own language and history.
One republic was far larger than the rest. The Russian republic covered roughly three-quarters of the Union’s territory and held about half of its people. Its capital, Moscow, was also the capital of the whole Union, which mattered a great deal later.
A Federation On Paper
On paper, the Soviet Union was a federation of equal republics. Every Soviet constitution granted each union republic the right to leave the Union. The last of these constitutions was adopted in 1977, and its wording on this point was blunt.
The words are plain, and they are not a mistranslation or an accident. The Soviet state genuinely presented itself as a voluntary union that any member could leave.
But a right written into a constitution is not the same as a right anyone can exercise. No law explained how a republic might actually go about seceding; the Union parliament passed such a law only in 1990, and it laid down a slow and demanding procedure. Until the late 1980s, a leader who proposed using Article 72 would have been removed and probably imprisoned.
This is the first limit worth noticing about constitutional documents. A constitutional text tells you what a state promises; it cannot tell you what the state permits in practice. To learn that, we have to look at how power was actually organised.
One Party, One Plan
The Soviet Union was a one-party state — a state in which only one political party is allowed to exist and to hold office. That party was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, usually abbreviated to the CPSU. Opposition parties were banned.
Real decisions were not taken by the state’s own institutions. Formally, the Supreme Soviet was the legislature and the Council of Ministers was the government. In practice, both carried out decisions already taken inside the Party, by its small ruling committee, the Politburo, and above all by its General Secretary.
Diagram
Fig. 9.1-1 Caption: In the Soviet system the party structure ran parallel to the state structure, and directed it. Brief: Two vertical columns side by side. Left column, labelled ‘The State’: Supreme Soviet → Council of Ministers → governments of the fifteen republics. Right column, labelled ‘The Communist Party’: Party Congress → Central Committee → Politburo → General Secretary. Draw bold arrows running from each party body across to the state body at the same level, all pointing from right to left, to show the direction of control. Add a single line at the foot: appointments to important posts required Party approval.
The economy was organised on the same principle. The Soviet Union ran a command economy — an economy in which the state owns the factories, mines and farms, and officials, rather than buyers and sellers, decide what is produced and at what price. Planners in Moscow set targets for the whole Union in five-year plans.
For several decades this system delivered striking results. A largely agricultural country was industrialised within a generation, mass literacy was achieved, and the Soviet Union bore the heaviest fighting of the Second World War in Europe. It launched the first artificial satellite in 1957 and put the first human being into space in 1961.
Superpower And Rival
These achievements made the Soviet Union a superpower — a state whose military strength, economic size and political reach allow it to shape events across the whole world. After 1945 there were two such states, the Soviet Union and the United States.
Their rivalry is known as the Cold War: a prolonged confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought through alliances, arms, ideology, propaganda and support for opposing sides in other countries, but never through direct war between the two. It ran from the late 1940s until 1991.
Each side built a military alliance. The United States led NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, formed in 1949. The Soviet Union led the Warsaw Pact, formed in 1955 out of the communist states of Eastern Europe.
Because power was concentrated in these two camps, the period is described as one of bipolarity — an international order in which two states, and the blocs around them, hold most of the world’s power. Smaller states either joined a bloc or worked to stay outside both. India chose the second course, following a policy of non-alignment, which meant refusing to join either military bloc while keeping working relations with both.
The two rivals never fought each other directly. Both held large nuclear arsenals, and each knew that a direct war risked destroying both. Instead they competed by building weapons, funding allies, and backing opposite sides in conflicts elsewhere.
The Puzzle This Chapter Solves
In December 1991 this superpower ceased to exist. That is a genuinely strange fact, and it is worth stating clearly before we explain it.
The Soviet Union was not invaded. It lost no war. Its army was intact, its nuclear weapons were in place, and no foreign power occupied its territory. States usually disappear because they are conquered; this one dissolved itself.
Three causes explain how that happened, and this chapter takes them in turn: political and economic stagnation, the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the rise of nationalism. None of the three is sufficient on its own. The Union came apart because a decaying system was opened up at the very moment its republics found their voice.
9.2 Political And Economic Stagnation
By the 1980s, observers inside and outside the Soviet Union used one word for its condition: stagnation — a long period in which a system stops growing, stops changing, and stops solving the problems it already has.
Stagnation was not a single event with a date. It was a slow accumulation of unsolved difficulties in politics and in the economy, and the two reinforced each other. A political system that punished criticism could not learn that its economy was failing; an economy that was failing steadily removed the reason people had to believe in that political system.
9.2.1 Political Stagnation
Rule Without Competition
We have seen that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held a monopoly of political power. The consequence of that monopoly was not only that citizens could not choose between parties. It was that the leadership faced no organised force capable of telling it that a policy had failed.
In a competitive system, an opposition, a free press and a court can each raise an alarm. The Soviet system had removed all three. Errors therefore travelled upward only when officials chose to report them, and officials had strong reasons not to.
Decisions were also highly centralised. Targets and instructions were drawn up in Moscow and applied across eleven time zones, from Estonia to the Pacific coast. A local official who saw that an instruction made no sense in local conditions had no authority to change it and little to gain by saying so.
Silencing Dissent
Criticism of the system was treated as a crime rather than as information. Newspapers, books, films and broadcasts were censored before publication. The security service, the KGB, watched citizens who were thought to be politically unreliable.
Writers who could not publish legally circulated typed copies of their work by hand, a practice known as samizdat, literally ‘self-publishing’. Those who were caught faced dismissal, prison, confinement in a psychiatric hospital, or exile. The novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had documented the Soviet labour camp system, was expelled from the country in 1974.
Elections, as we saw, confirmed choices already made. Ordinary citizens had no lawful channel through which to press a grievance, and no way to remove an official who ignored them. Frustration therefore built up without any outlet — until an outlet appeared in the late 1980s.
The Era Of Stagnation
The period is most closely associated with Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Party from 1964 until his death in 1982. Under him the leadership grew old in office and increasingly resistant to any change that might threaten its position.
Senior posts were held for life, and the men who held them had built their careers under an earlier order. Three leaders died in quick succession — Brezhnev in 1982, Yuri Andropov in 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. In under three years the Soviet Union buried three heads of its ruling party.
Meanwhile a large administrative class had grown up around the Party. Its members enjoyed advantages ordinary citizens did not have: better housing, special shops, foreign travel. Corruption and favouritism spread, and the gap between the equality the state preached and the privilege it practised became impossible to miss.
The Loss Of Belief
This gap did the deepest damage, because it attacked the state’s legitimacy — the belief among the people that those who rule have the right to rule, and that their commands ought to be obeyed.
A state can be obeyed out of fear alone, but only at a very high cost, and never for long. The Soviet state had also claimed a moral right to obedience: it argued that its system was building a fairer society than capitalism could. That claim rested on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which held that communism was the direction in which history itself was moving.
By the 1980s fewer and fewer people believed it, and the disbelief was sharpest among the educated and the young. Officials themselves repeated the doctrine as a formula rather than a conviction. When a state loses the argument for its own existence, it can still command; but it can no longer ask its citizens to sacrifice anything.
9.2.2 Economic Stagnation
Growth That Slowed And Stopped
The command economy had performed impressively while the task was simple: move workers off the land, build steel plants, dig mines, produce more of a small number of standard goods.
It performed badly once the task became complex. From the 1970s, productivity growth fell steadily. Planners could order a factory to make more tractors; they could not order it to invent a better tractor, and there was no competitor waiting to take its customers if it did not.
Innovation carried risk for a manager and no reward. A factory that met its target was safe, whatever the quality of what it made. So Soviet industry kept producing to yesterday’s design while Western and Japanese industry was reorganised around computers and electronics.
Diagram
Fig. 9.2-1 Caption: Stagnation worked as a loop, in which each problem strengthened the conditions that produced it. Brief: A circular flow diagram with five boxes joined by arrows running clockwise: ‘Central planning fixes targets’ → ‘Managers avoid risk; productivity falls’ → ‘Shortages of food, housing and consumer goods’ → ‘Public discontent and cynicism’ → ‘Leadership tightens control and avoids reform’ → back to the first box. Place a small arrow labelled ‘criticism blocked’ cutting across the circle and stopping at a barrier, to show that information about failure could not reach the top.
Shortages People Lived With
Planning decided what would be produced, and it consistently favoured heavy industry and defence over the goods households actually wanted. The result was familiar to every Soviet citizen: empty shelves, poor quality, and long queues for ordinary things.
Agriculture performed worst of all. Farms were state-owned or collective, work was poorly rewarded, and much of each harvest was lost between the field and the shop. A country with some of the most fertile soil on earth was buying grain from the United States and Canada — from the very states it claimed to be overtaking.
Guns Before Butter
A large share of the Union’s best resources — steel, fuel, laboratories and its ablest engineers — was reserved for the armed forces. Keeping level with the United States in an arms race was expensive for both sides, but the Soviet economy was much the smaller of the two, so the same effort cost it far more.
The burden grew heavier in the 1980s. The United States expanded military spending, and in 1983 announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan for missile defences in space that the press nicknamed ‘Star Wars’. Whether or not the plan would ever work, Soviet planners had to assume they might need to answer it.
At the same time Soviet forces were fighting a long and costly war in Afghanistan, entered in 1979 and abandoned only in 1989, with heavy casualties and no victory.
The Comparison Nobody Could Hide
One more pressure was building. Export earnings depended heavily on oil and gas, and world oil prices collapsed in 1986, cutting the government’s income exactly when it most needed money.
And Soviet citizens could now see how others lived. Television, films, foreign travel and returning soldiers and students carried the comparison home. A system that had promised a better life than capitalism was being judged against capitalism, and its own people were doing the judging.
A cartoonist’s way of putting this is worth examining, because it captures the contrast in a single image.
Cartoon
Cartoon 9.1 Caption: A queue outside an empty state shop winds past a completed space rocket. Brief: Draw a long, patient queue of ordinary shoppers with empty bags outside a shop whose window shelves are bare. The queue curves around the base of a gleaming, finished rocket standing ready for launch, with technicians in white coats saluting it. A small sign on the shop reads ‘bread’. Exaggerate the contrast between the polished rocket and the shabby shopfront. Discuss: What claim about Soviet priorities is the cartoonist making, and what evidence would you need to test it?
The cartoon sets two real achievements of the same state against each other. The rocket stands for genuine scientific success; the queue stands for the daily experience of ordinary households. The exaggeration lies in placing them side by side, which no photograph would do.
The claim is that the Soviet system was extremely good at what the leadership counted and poor at what people needed, and that the first was purchased with the second.
Its limit matters just as much. A cartoon states one opinion in one image; it cannot draw the counter-argument, and it cannot show scale. It does not tell us how much of the Union’s output went to defence, nor whether shortages were as severe in one republic as in another. For that we would need production figures, and for many years such figures were not published honestly.
9.3 The Reforms Of Mikhail Gorbachev
In March 1985 the Communist Party chose Mikhail Gorbachev as its General Secretary. He was fifty-four, a generation younger than the men he replaced, and he took charge of a state whose difficulties he understood clearly.
Gorbachev’s diagnosis was not that communism had failed. It was that the Soviet system had grown rigid, dishonest and inefficient, and that it could be repaired. He therefore set out to modernise the Union in order to save it, not to end it.
That intention matters. The reforms examined below were rescue measures, and their author remained a committed communist throughout. The question this section must answer is why a rescue attempt hastened the collapse it was meant to prevent.
Diagram
Fig. 9.3-1 Caption: The two great reforms attacked two different problems, and each produced an effect its author had not planned. Brief: Two parallel horizontal tracks. Upper track labelled ‘Perestroika — the economy’: three linked boxes reading ‘Problem: falling output, no incentive to improve’ → ‘Reform: enterprises given autonomy; small private cooperatives allowed’ → ‘Result: planning weakened, markets not yet working, shortages worse’. Lower track labelled ‘Glasnost — information and politics’: three linked boxes reading ‘Problem: failure could not be discussed’ → ‘Reform: censorship relaxed, criticism permitted, contested elections held’ → ‘Result: grievances long suppressed became public and organised’. Draw one arrow from the lower track’s third box up into the upper track, labelled ‘demands the economy could not meet’.
9.3.1 Perestroika: Economic Restructuring
Gorbachev’s first answer to the economic crisis was perestroika, a Russian word meaning ‘restructuring’. It was a programme to rebuild the Soviet economy from within, by loosening the grip of central planning without abandoning state ownership.
The early measures were cautious. Officials were told to raise discipline and speed up production, and a campaign was launched against heavy drinking. The campaign did reduce alcohol consumption, but it also removed a large source of government revenue, since the state sold the alcohol.
The serious changes came next. A law in 1987 gave state enterprises greater control over their own output, contracts and wages. A law in 1988 permitted small cooperatives, which allowed limited private business in services and light industry for the first time in decades.
Half A Reform
The trouble was that these steps dismantled one system without building another. Enterprises were freed from many plan targets, yet prices were still fixed by the state, supplies were still allocated by officials, and loss-making factories were still not allowed to close.
Managers thus gained freedom from instructions but faced no market discipline. Many used their new autonomy to raise wages and cut unprofitable lines, which put more money in people’s hands while fewer goods reached the shops.
The result, by 1990, was worse than before: deeper shortages, rising prices, a growing government deficit and a spreading black market. Citizens were experiencing the disruption of change without any of its promised benefits, and their patience with the reformer began to run out.
9.3.2 Glasnost: Political Openness
The second reform was glasnost, usually translated as ‘openness’. It meant allowing citizens, journalists and scholars to discuss the country’s problems publicly, including the failures of the state and the crimes of its past.
Gorbachev’s reasoning was practical. Officials had grown expert at concealing bad news, so the leadership could not find out what was actually happening. Public criticism, he judged, would expose incompetence and force the bureaucracy to reform.
One disaster demonstrated both the need for openness and how far the habits of secrecy went.
What Openness Released
Glasnost changed public life quickly. Censorship was relaxed, newspapers printed criticism of officials, and banned books and films appeared. The physicist Andrei Sakharov, who had been sent into internal exile for his criticism of the state, was allowed to return to Moscow in December 1986.
Historians and journalists then turned to the past. Readers learned in detail about the terror of the Stalin years, the labour camps, the deportation of whole nationalities and the famine of the early 1930s. Each revelation weakened the moral claim on which the state’s authority rested.
Political change followed. In 1989 the Soviet Union held its first partly contested national elections, and the new parliament’s debates were broadcast on television. Millions watched deputies criticise the government openly, which would have been unthinkable five years earlier.
In March 1990 the parliament went further and amended the constitutional article that gave the Communist Party its monopoly.
9.3.3 Why The Reforms Weakened The Union
Three consequences turned a rescue attempt into a crisis.
Fear Removed, Grievances Released
The first was that glasnost released demands the state could not satisfy. Once criticism was permitted, citizens raised the grievances of decades — shortages, corruption, environmental damage, and above all the treatment of their own nationalities.
Fear had been holding these grievances down. When it was withdrawn, they did not disappear; they organised. Popular fronts, cultural associations and unofficial newspapers appeared across the republics, and they had far more support than the local Party did.
A Leadership Pulled Two Ways
The second was political polarisation. Conservatives inside the Party believed Gorbachev had gone dangerously far and wanted the reforms halted. Radicals believed he had not gone nearly far enough and wanted markets, multi-party elections and republican self-rule.
Gorbachev tried to hold the middle, and steadily lost both sides. His authority also came from Party office rather than from a popular vote, and that difference grew important as elections spread.
Into the gap stepped Boris Yeltsin, once a Gorbachev ally and by now his sharpest critic. Yeltsin became head of the Russian republic’s parliament in 1990, and in June 1991 he was elected President of Russia in a direct popular vote. He could therefore claim something Gorbachev could not: a mandate given directly by voters.
The Signal From Eastern Europe
The third consequence came from outside the Union. In 1989 communist governments across Eastern Europe were swept away by protest, and in November the Berlin Wall was opened. Earlier Soviet leaders had used force in such situations; Gorbachev decided not to.
He was applauded abroad for that restraint. Inside the Soviet Union, its meaning was different. If Moscow would not send tanks to hold Eastern Europe, the republics could reasonably ask whether it would send tanks to hold them.
9.4 The Rise Of Nationalism
Stagnation explains why the Soviet system was weak. The reforms explain why the weakness became visible. Neither explains why the Union broke into fifteen pieces rather than simply changing its government.
The answer lies in nationalism — the belief that a people sharing a language, history and culture forms a nation, and that a nation is entitled to govern itself. Once the centre weakened, nationalism supplied both the demand for separation and the ready-made units into which the Union could separate.
9.4.1 A Union Of Many Nations
The Soviet Union was among the most diverse states in modern history. More than a hundred nationalities lived within it, speaking well over a hundred languages, and following several religious traditions.
What made this diversity politically explosive was the way the Soviet state itself had organised it. Each union republic was defined as the homeland of a particular nationality and named after it, with its own capital, its own language, its own writers’ unions and academies.
Map
Map 9.2 Caption: The fifteen union republics of the Soviet Union as they stood in 1990. Brief: Political map of the Soviet Union showing all fifteen union republics with their internal boundaries and names: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Mark Moscow. Use light shading to group the three Baltic republics, the three republics of the Caucasus, and the five republics of Central Asia, with a key naming each group. Show the Union’s external boundary clearly. Do not show any territory beyond the Union other than unnamed neighbouring landmass. All boundaries shown must follow those officially recognised by the Government of India.
The Map repays a moment’s study. Notice that the republics are not administrative divisions drawn for convenience, like the districts of a state. Each is a national territory with a name, a border and a capital, and each was already equipped with the institutions a country needs.
The state also recorded nationality on every citizen’s internal passport. A person was officially Estonian, Uzbek, Georgian or Russian for life, whatever they themselves felt.
Soviet doctrine held that these identities would gradually fade as socialism advanced, leaving a single Soviet people. In practice the state preserved and even sharpened them, while denying the republics any real power to act on them.
Alongside this formal equality ran an informal hierarchy. Russian was the language of the Party, the army, science and advancement, and Russians frequently held the key posts in other republics. Formal equality and everyday inequality sat side by side for seventy years.
9.4.2 Grievances Behind Nationalist Demands
Nationalism does not grow out of difference alone; many diverse states hold together. It grows where difference is joined to grievance, and the Soviet Union had accumulated three kinds.
The Memory Of Force
The first was historical. Several republics had been brought into the Union by conquest or annexation rather than by any act of consent, and their populations had never accepted the arrangement as legitimate.
Others carried the memory of violence used against whole peoples. Farmers had been forced into collective farms in the early 1930s, and a catastrophic famine followed, most severely in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. During the Second World War entire nationalities, among them the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens and the Ingush, were deported from their homelands by order of the state.
These events had been unmentionable for decades. Glasnost made them discussable, and what had been private family memory became public political argument almost overnight.
Who Pays And Who Gains
The second grievance was economic, and it ran in opposite directions.
The Baltic republics and Ukraine, with relatively advanced economies, argued that they produced more than they received and were subsidising the rest of the Union. Central Asian republics argued the reverse: that they were kept as suppliers of raw materials and left underdeveloped.
Both complaints pointed at the same target. Because the plan was written in Moscow, every economic disappointment anywhere could be blamed on Moscow, and increasingly was.
Environmental damage sharpened the point, because it was visible and local. Vast irrigation schemes for cotton in Central Asia drained the rivers feeding the Aral Sea, which shrank drastically and left fishing towns stranded far from water. In Kazakhstan, a popular movement grew in 1989 against the nuclear testing ground at Semipalatinsk, where hundreds of tests had been conducted over four decades; the site was closed in 1991.
Notice what those campaigns had in common. Each began as a protest about land, water or health, and each ended as an argument about who should be allowed to decide such things.
Language And Culture
The third grievance concerned language and culture. Republican languages had been pushed out of higher education, science and administration in favour of Russian.
From 1988 one republic after another passed laws making its own language the official language of the republic. These laws were popular with the titular nationality and alarming to Russian-speakers living there, which shows how quickly a demand for recognition can produce a new minority problem.
9.4.3 From The Baltic Republics Outward
The Baltic Lead
The three Baltic republics moved first and moved furthest. Popular fronts were formed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1988, and became mass organisations within months.
Their methods were deliberately peaceful and highly public. In Estonia, hundreds of thousands gathered at song festivals to sing national songs that had been discouraged for decades, and the movement came to be called the Singing Revolution. Peaceful protest was also strategic: it made repression look indefensible and attracted sympathy abroad.
Their central demand was self-determination — the claim that a people should decide its own political status, including whether to form a separate state. On 11 March 1990 Lithuania acted on it, declaring the restoration of its independence and becoming the first republic to break with the Union.
Moscow refused to accept the declaration and imposed an economic blockade on Lithuania. In January 1991 Soviet troops seized the television tower in Vilnius, and fourteen civilians were killed. The use of force did not restore obedience; it hardened opinion in all three republics and damaged Gorbachev’s standing abroad.
The Movement Spreads
Nationalist movements followed elsewhere, and they did not all take a peaceful form. In the Caucasus, a dispute over the mainly Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh, situated within Azerbaijan, turned violent from 1988 and became a war between two Soviet republics while the Union still formally existed.
Movements grew in Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Ukraine and across Central Asia. In the elections held in the republics in 1990, nationalist and reformist candidates defeated official Party candidates in several of them, giving these movements something they had lacked: elected office.
The Decisive Defection
The most serious blow came from Russia itself. In June 1990 the Russian republic declared its sovereignty — supreme authority to make and enforce law within its territory, with no higher authority above it.
The declaration stated that Russian laws would prevail over Soviet laws within Russia. Other republics said the same, and the result was what contemporaries called a war of laws: two governments issuing contradictory orders to the same officials, the same factories and the same taxpayers.
This is what made the Union unworkable. As long as the largest republic held with the centre, a smaller republic’s departure was a problem to be managed. Once Russia’s own government was competing with the Union government for authority — and had a President elected by popular vote, which Gorbachev did not — the centre had no reliable base left anywhere.
9.5 The Final Stages Of Disintegration
By early 1991 the Union faced two incompatible demands. Most republics wanted authority transferred to themselves; Gorbachev wanted a Union that survived, even in a weaker form.
His answer was a new treaty of union, negotiated through the first half of 1991. It would have converted the Soviet Union into a loose federation, leaving defence and foreign policy at the centre while giving the republics control of most other matters.
He also sought a direct mandate for the idea. In March 1991 a referendum — a vote in which the electorate decides a specific question rather than choosing representatives — was held across the Union on preserving it as a renewed federation of equal republics.
About three-quarters of those who voted said yes. But six republics, including the three Baltic republics and Georgia, refused to hold the vote at all, and a large yes vote for a ‘renewed federation’ told nobody what powers such a federation would actually have.
The new treaty was to be signed on 20 August 1991. It was never signed.
9.5.1 The Failed Coup Of August 1991
Three Days In Moscow
On 18 August Gorbachev was at his holiday residence at Foros, in Crimea. A group of the Union’s most senior officials, including the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister and the head of the KGB, cut his communications and confined him there.
The next morning they announced that Gorbachev was unwell and that a state of emergency committee had assumed power. This was a coup — a sudden seizure of state power by a small group, usually from within the state itself and usually relying on the armed forces.
The plotters were not enemies of the Soviet system; they were its guardians. Their stated purpose was to stop the treaty, restore order and preserve the Union. Tanks entered Moscow.
Their central assumption was that the machinery of the state would obey them, as it always had. It did not.
Boris Yeltsin, as the elected President of Russia, went to the Russian parliament building in Moscow, climbed onto a tank outside it and declared the takeover unconstitutional. Crowds gathered around the building and built barricades. Three people were killed in the city during the confrontation.
Commanders then had to decide whether to order troops to clear a crowd defending an elected president. Several refused. Without that willingness, the committee had no way to enforce its authority, and by 21 August the attempt had collapsed. Its leaders were arrested and Gorbachev returned to Moscow.
What The Coup Settled
Gorbachev came back as President of a state that had changed underneath him. Yeltsin, not he, had faced down the tanks, and Yeltsin acted at once: the Communist Party’s activities were suspended and then banned in Russia, and the Party’s property was taken over.
The effect on the republics was immediate. Estonia and Latvia declared full independence within days. On 24 August the Ukrainian parliament declared independence, and in a referendum on 1 December about nine out of ten Ukrainian voters confirmed it. Republic after republic followed.
The coup was intended to preserve the Union. It destroyed the two institutions — the Party and the security apparatus — that had actually been holding the Union together, and it removed any remaining reason for a republic to wait.
9.5.2 Formal Dissolution In December 1991
The Meeting At Belavezha
Through the autumn of 1991 the Union government still existed on paper, but it could not collect taxes reliably, command the republics, or supply the shops.
On 8 December the leaders of three republics met at a hunting lodge in the Belavezha forest in Belarus: Boris Yeltsin for Russia, Leonid Kravchuk for Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich for Belarus. They signed an agreement whose opening statement was blunt.
Their answer to that question was historical. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus had been among the republics that founded the Union in 1922, and they argued that founders could undo what they had made.
The argument was contestable, and it was contested. One of the original founding republics no longer existed in that form, no provision of the Soviet constitution described such a procedure, and the Union’s President had not agreed. Gorbachev denounced the agreement as unlawful.
What decided the matter was not the legal argument. It was that no institution — army, ministry or court — was willing to act on Gorbachev’s side. Authority had already moved to the republican capitals; the agreement recorded a fact rather than creating one.
On 21 December, at a meeting in Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, eleven republics joined the new Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose association for coordination with no common government.
Diagram
Fig. 9.5-1 Caption: Between June and December 1991 the powers of the Union centre passed to the republics. Brief: Two panels side by side. Left panel, headed ‘Mid-1991’: a large central circle labelled ‘Union government — army, currency, foreign policy, planning’ with fifteen small circles around it joined by arrows pointing inward. Right panel, headed ‘December 1991’: the central circle has shrunk to a faint dotted outline labelled ‘Commonwealth of Independent States — coordination only’, while the fifteen circles are now large, separate and unconnected, each labelled ‘independent state’. Keep both panels schematic, not to scale, and add no map outlines.
The Twenty-Fifth Of December
On 25 December 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union in a televised address. That evening the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin and the Russian flag was raised in its place. The following day the Union’s remaining chamber of parliament formally declared the Soviet Union dissolved.
There was no battle for the capital and no foreign army at the border. A state that had held nuclear weapons and eleven time zones ended with a signature, a broadcast and a change of flag.
9.6 The Impact Of The Disintegration
The end of the Soviet Union changed two things at once. It ended the confrontation that had shaped world politics since 1945, and it added fifteen new states to the map. This section takes each in turn, in outline.
9.6.1 The End Of The Cold War
The Cold War required two superpowers. When one of them dissolved, the rivalry ended not by treaty or by victory in battle, but because one side ceased to exist.
Several changes followed quickly. The Warsaw Pact was wound up in 1991, leaving NATO without the rival alliance it had been built to face. The arms race slowed, and the two sides continued the work of reducing nuclear stockpiles that had begun in Gorbachev’s years. The risk of a direct nuclear exchange between the two largest arsenals fell sharply.
The ideological contest ended too. The Soviet Union had claimed to represent an alternative future to capitalism, and its collapse was widely read as proof that the alternative had failed. Through the 1990s, many states adopted competitive elections, opened their economies, or both.
With no rival left, the United States was the only state with global military reach — a position often described as unipolar, meaning that power was concentrated in a single centre rather than two. Studying what that came to mean in practice is the work of the next chapter.
Two cautions are worth holding on to. First, the end of superpower rivalry did not bring an end to war; conflicts that the rivalry had frozen or contained, in the Balkans and the Caucasus, broke out in the 1990s. Second, the concentration of power in one state proved temporary rather than permanent.
For India, the change was substantial. It lost a dependable partner in a difficult neighbourhood at the very moment it opened its own economy in 1991, and it began building a wider set of relationships, including a much closer one with the United States.
9.6.2 The Emergence Of New States
Fifteen states took the place of one, each one a former union republic within its existing borders. Look again at Map 9.2 and the point becomes clear: the new international boundaries of 1992 were the internal administrative boundaries of the Soviet Union.
Grouped by region, they were: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova in the west; Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on the Baltic; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia.
Russia As Successor
They did not all begin equal. Russia was recognised as the successor state — the state that inherits the international rights and obligations of a state that has ceased to exist.
In practice this meant that Russia took over the Soviet Union’s permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, its embassies and treaty commitments, its foreign debts, and its nuclear arsenal. Nuclear weapons stationed in Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan were transferred to Russia in the years that followed, so that one nuclear state replaced one nuclear state rather than four.
Russia’s weight was not only legal. The census taken in 1989, two years before the dissolution, shows how uneven the Union had been.
Read the table one step at a time. The first row gives the whole Union. The second gives Russia alone. Subtracting the second from the first gives the third row: \(286.7 - 147.4 = 139.3\) million people in the other fourteen republics combined.
Russia’s share of the Union’s population was therefore \(\frac{147.4}{286.7} \times 100 \approx 51.4\) per cent. One republic held slightly more than half the people, and about three-quarters of the territory.
That is the arithmetic behind Russia’s claim to be the continuing state. But notice what a census cannot tell us. It counts people, not their loyalties, their languages or their wishes, and population size is not the same as political weight — a small republic determined to leave could not be outvoted into staying.
The Difficulties Of Independence
Independence brought problems as well as freedom. Most of the new states had never governed themselves in the modern era, and each had to write a constitution, build a foreign policy, raise an army and issue a currency, all at once.
The economic transition was the harshest part. Moving from a command economy to a market economy meant ending fixed prices and state subsidies, and the immediate results were steep inflation, closed factories and lost savings. Trade links built over decades were cut by new borders.
The political paths then diverged sharply. The three Baltic states turned firmly westward and joined both the European Union and NATO in 2004. Several Central Asian states retained highly centralised rule under long-serving leaders. Others moved between the two, with contested elections and periodic crises.
Old disputes also reopened where borders and populations did not match. The war over Nagorno-Karabakh continued past independence, and conflicts followed in Georgia and in Moldova.
9.7 Summary
The Soviet Union, created in 1922, was a union of fifteen republics stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific. It was one of two superpowers, and its rivalry with the United States, the Cold War, made the international order bipolar.
On paper the Union was a federation whose republics could secede. In practice a single party, the CPSU, controlled every republic, so the constitutional right to leave could not be used. A constitutional text records what a state promises, not what it permits.
Political power lay with the Party rather than with the state’s own institutions, and the economy was a command economy directed by planners in Moscow. This system industrialised the country rapidly and won early scientific successes.
By the 1970s the same system had entered stagnation. Politically, there was no competition, no free press and no lawful dissent, so failure could not be reported upward; leaders aged in office and a privileged administrative class grew up around the Party.
The deepest political damage was the loss of legitimacy. A state that claimed to be building a fairer society than capitalism was judged against capitalism by its own citizens, and fewer and fewer of them believed the claim.
Economically, productivity growth fell, consumer goods and food remained scarce, and agriculture was so weak that grain had to be imported. A large share of the best resources went to the armed forces, and the collapse of oil prices in 1986 removed a vital source of revenue.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who took charge in 1985, intended to save the system rather than end it. Perestroika restructured the economy but dismantled planning without building a working market, so shortages and inflation grew worse.
Glasnost permitted open discussion of present failures and past crimes. It exposed the state’s record, ended the Party’s constitutional monopoly in 1990, and gave organised public voice to grievances that the weakened state could not satisfy.
The reforms also split the leadership between conservatives and radicals, and produced a rival with a popular mandate in Boris Yeltsin. Moscow’s refusal to use force in Eastern Europe in 1989 signalled to the republics that force might not be used against them either.
Nationalism turned a weak state into a divided one. Each republic was a national homeland with its own language, institutions and border, so ready-made units existed the moment the centre lost control.
Nationalist demands drew on historical grievance, economic complaint and the defence of language and culture. The Baltic republics led with peaceful mass mobilisation; Lithuania declared independence in March 1990; elsewhere, as in Nagorno-Karabakh, nationalism took a violent form.
The decisive defection was Russia’s. When the largest republic claimed sovereignty in June 1990 and asserted that its laws outranked Union laws, the centre lost its base and a war of laws began.
The coup of August 1991, launched to preserve the Union, destroyed the two institutions that had held it together. Once troops would not enforce the takeover, the Party and the security services were discredited and the republics stopped waiting.
In December 1991 Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared the Union at an end, eleven republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, and Gorbachev resigned on 25 December. The state ended without a battle and without foreign invasion.
The impact was twofold. The Cold War ended, the Warsaw Pact was wound up, the ideological contest closed, and the United States was left without a rival — though conflict itself did not end.
Fifteen states emerged within the Union’s former internal boundaries. Russia was recognised as the successor state, taking the Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council, the treaties, the debts and the nuclear weapons, while all fifteen faced hard economic transitions and took sharply different political paths.
No single cause explains 1991. A decaying system was opened up at the moment its republics found their voice, and each of the three causes made the others harder to contain.
9.8 Key Terms
Bipolarity: An international order in which two states, and the blocs gathered around them, hold most of the world’s power.
Cold War: The prolonged confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought through alliances, arms, ideology and support for opposing sides elsewhere, but never through direct war between the two.
Command economy: An economy in which the state owns the factories, mines and farms, and officials rather than buyers and sellers decide what is produced and at what price.
Coup: A sudden seizure of state power by a small group, usually from within the state itself and usually relying on the armed forces.
Glasnost: ‘Openness’ — Gorbachev’s policy of allowing public discussion and criticism of the state’s failures, past and present.
Legitimacy: The belief among the people that those who rule have the right to rule, and that their commands ought to be obeyed.
Nationalism: The belief that a people sharing a language, history and culture forms a nation, and that a nation is entitled to govern itself.
One-party state: A state in which only one political party is permitted to exist and to hold office.
Perestroika: ‘Restructuring’ — Gorbachev’s policy of rebuilding the Soviet economy by loosening the grip of central planning while keeping state ownership.
Referendum: A vote in which the electorate decides a specific question directly, rather than choosing representatives.
Self-determination: The claim that a people should decide its own political status, including whether to form a separate state.
Sovereignty: Supreme authority to make and enforce law within a territory, with no higher authority above it.
Stagnation: A long period in which a system stops growing, stops changing and stops solving the problems it already has.
Successor state: The state that inherits the international rights and obligations of a state that has ceased to exist.
Superpower: A state whose military strength, economic size and political reach allow it to shape events across the whole world.
9.9 Points to Ponder
If a constitution grants a right that no one can safely use, in what sense does that right exist at all?
The Soviet state itself organised its people into national republics with their own languages and institutions. Can a state strengthen national identities and still expect them never to become political demands?
A government that permits criticism learns what is going wrong, but also loses some of the fear that secured obedience. Is there any way to gain the first without paying the second?
The Union was ended by an agreement between three of its republics rather than by any procedure written into its constitution. Does that make the dissolution lawful, or only unopposed?
Legitimacy is hard to see until it has gone. What signs might tell us that a state has lost the belief of its citizens before it actually breaks down?
If the right of a nation to determine its own future is accepted, who is entitled to decide where one nation ends and another begins?
9.10 Objective Questions
- The policy through which Mikhail Gorbachev sought to restructure the Soviet economy was called
- Glasnost
- Perestroika
- Bipolarity
- Self-determination [1 mark]
- The first union republic to declare its independence from the Soviet Union was
- Estonia
- Ukraine
- Lithuania
- Georgia [1 mark]
- The Soviet Union’s permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council was inherited by
- Ukraine
- Belarus
- The Commonwealth of Independent States
- Russia [1 mark]
- The number of independent states that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991 was
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Fifteen
- Sixteen [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): Glasnost weakened the Soviet state instead of strengthening it. Reason (R): It allowed grievances that had been suppressed for decades to be expressed and organised openly.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): The Soviet constitution granted every union republic the right to secede from the Union. Reason (R): Any republic was therefore politically free to leave the Union whenever it chose.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
- Match each year in Column A with the event in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. 1985 | i. The Chernobyl accident |
| b. 1986 | ii. Lithuania declares independence |
| c. 1990 | iii. Gorbachev becomes General Secretary |
| d. December 1991 | iv. The Belavezha agreement is signed |
Fill in the blank: The state that inherits the international rights and obligations of a state that has ceased to exist is called its ______. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: The Soviet Union was dissolved after being defeated in a war with the United States. [1 mark]
9.11 Check Your Concepts
Define a superpower. [2 marks]
State any two features of a command economy. [2 marks]
What is meant by legitimacy? Give one example from the Soviet experience of its loss. [2 marks]
Differentiate between perestroika and glasnost. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why Soviet agriculture failed to feed the Union adequately. [3 marks]
Explain, with one example, how the policy of openness encouraged nationalist movements in the republics. [4 marks]
Describe how the failed coup of August 1991 changed the authority of the Communist Party and of the republics. [4 marks]
Discuss political and economic stagnation as causes of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. [6 marks]
Describe the rise of nationalism as a cause of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, with examples from at least two regions. [6 marks]
‘Gorbachev’s reforms, and not the weaknesses of the Soviet system, brought the Union to an end.’ Evaluate this claim, giving the strongest argument on each side. [6 marks]
9.12 Source & Passage-Based Questions
- Read the following account and answer the questions that follow. A factory in a Soviet republic met its annual target for producing shoes and its manager received an award. The shoes were made in only two sizes, because changing the machinery would have risked missing the target. Shops in the republic sold out of the two sizes within days, and then had no shoes at all for months. Citizens queued anyway, in case a delivery arrived.
- Identify the feature of the Soviet economic system that this account illustrates. [1 mark]
- Explain why a manager in this system had little reason to improve the product. [2 marks]
- State what this account cannot tell us about the Soviet economy as a whole. [2 marks]
- Study the description of the cartoon given below and answer the questions that follow. A cartoonist draws a huge stone statue labelled ‘The Plan’, standing on a cracked base. Fifteen small figures, each carrying a different flag, are walking away from the statue in fifteen different directions. One figure, larger than the rest and labelled ‘the largest republic’, is walking away first, and the others are following it.
- What claim is the cartoonist making about the way the Soviet Union came apart? [2 marks]
- Why does the cartoonist show the largest republic leading the others away? [2 marks]
- State one thing this cartoon cannot show about the disintegration. [1 mark]
- Read the following situation and answer the questions that follow. In 1989 a citizens’ movement in one Soviet republic began by protesting against a scheme that had polluted a river used by local farmers. Within a year the same movement was demanding that the republic’s own language be used in schools and offices, and that decisions about the river be taken in the republic’s capital rather than in Moscow.
- Explain how a protest about the environment became a political demand. [2 marks]
- Which idea about the right of a people to decide its own future is at work here? Define it. [2 marks]
- Suggest one reason why such movements appeared only in the late 1980s and not earlier. [2 marks]
- Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow. When a large federal state dissolved, one of its former units was recognised as continuing its international personality. It kept the dissolved state’s seat in international organisations, accepted its treaty obligations and its debts, and took charge of its weapons. The other new states were admitted separately as members in their own right.
- Name the concept described in the passage and identify the state that played this role in 1991. [2 marks]
- Why might other new states have accepted such an arrangement? [2 marks]
- State one difficulty that the newly independent states faced immediately after independence. [2 marks]
9.13 Practice With Data
- The 1989 census recorded the population of the Soviet Union as 286.7 million, of which the Russian republic accounted for 147.4 million.
- Calculate the combined population of the other fourteen republics. Show your working. [2 marks]
- Express the population of the other fourteen republics as a percentage of the Union total, correct to one decimal place. [2 marks]
- State one thing about the republics that these figures cannot tell us. [1 mark]
- Study the map of the fifteen union republics of the Soviet Union and answer the following.
- Name the three Baltic republics and the five republics of Central Asia. [2 marks]
- Which republic shared a border with the largest number of other republics, and why did this matter politically? [2 marks]
- Explain why the international boundaries of 1992 needed no fresh negotiation. [2 marks]
- In the referendum of March 1991, about three-quarters of those who voted supported the preservation of a renewed Union, but six republics did not hold the vote at all. Explain why this result was a weak guide to what would happen to the Union. [3 marks]