The Strange Death of the

Soviet Union
Nationalism, Democratization, and
Leadership

Henry E. Hale
Harvard University
March 1999

Deep in the primeval forests that were the cradle of Slavic civilization,
three modern heirs to this rich legacy gathered in December 1991. Boris
Yeltsin, the tall Russian leader whose shock of white hair highlighted his
famous flair for the dramatic, conspired with the freshly-elected Ukrainian
President Leonid Kravchuk and Belorussian leader Stanislav Shushkevich
to take a step that had been unthinkable less than a decade before. The
Soviet Union, they declared, now ceased to exist, and all that replaced it
was a nebulous notion called the “Commonwealth of Independent
States.” 1
Just two weeks after the news arrived from these dark woods,
Gorbachev “drew the necessary conclusions” and tendered his
resignation. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the man that ended the Cold
War, the only Soviet leader with the courage to break the back of Stalin’s
ruthless regime, had stepped down a broken man, ignominiously ousted
from his Kremlin desk by the upstart sovereigns. By the start of 1992, the

Research for this article was supported by a Peace Scholar award from the United States
Institute of Peace. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the Institute of Peace.
1 Leonid M. Kravchuk. Komsomolskaya Pravda, January 9, 1992, partially reproduced in

A.B. Veber, V.T. Loginov, G.S. Ostroumov, and A.S. Chernyaev (eds.) Soyuz Mozhno Bylo
Sokhranit’: Belaya Kniga: Dokumenty i Fakty o Politikye M.S. Gorbacheva po Reformirovaniu i
Sokhraneniu mnogonatsional’nogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Aprel’-85,” 1995)
p.307.

1
2 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the nuclear superpower that sparked

red revolution across the globe for seven decades, had vanished from the
map with just the tiniest puff of smoke. The Communist regime that had
survived over 20 million casualties in World War II, that had endured
despite massacring millions of its own finest citizens in mad fits of
paranoia, had softly dissolved in a time of relative peace.
How can we possibly comprehend these events? Why did the Soviet
Union collapse? What does this historical milestone have to tell us about
the fate of other multiethnic states?

The Puzzle of Soviet Collapse

There is little doubt that the USSR faced a grave crisis in the late 1980s.
Economic growth rates had steadily declined under Leonid Brezhnev, and
the tailspin only gathered force after his death. Wholesale
industrialization had radically raised production in the 1930s, 40s and 50s,
but Stalin’s obsession with huge and heavy industry eventually generated
more such output than the economy could usefully absorb and left the
vital consumer sector virtually barren compared to the West. The
command economy had always produced distortions, as mendacious
managers would fulfill the letter but not the spirit of the plan in the
absence of market competition. More ominously, central planners in
Moscow found themselves increasingly unable to handle the ever-
growing complexity of the modern economy. The times demanded
flexibility and on-site adjustment, while Gosplan required guidelines and
intricate multilevel channels of communication with an expanding array
of economic actors. Ironically, the Soviet system had been multiplying its
supply of educated workers throughout the post-war period, and these
ambitious sectors of society found their upward mobility blocked by the
inability of the Soviet system to expand in accordance with economic
needs.
While consumers were certainly not happy about this state of affairs,
the Soviet military complex was far more worried. The system was failing
to encourage technological innovation, which in turn threatened the very
security of the USSR. Indeed, clashes between American and Soviet proxy
states in the Middle East dramatically demonstrated the inferiority of
Soviet military equipment and highlighted the need for some kind of
change if the USSR was to compete. Ronald Reagan’s brash “Star Wars”
initiative only highlighted the importance of technology for future
security and cast light on the Soviet Union’s increasing inability to keep
up. Thus, one of the first calls for radical change emanated from the Soviet
 Henry E. Hale 3

military-industrial complex, as Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov cited Marx to

admonish that nothing depended on the economy more than the military. 2
To make things even worse, these material crises combined with a
profoundly spiritual one, as the last true believers in the Communist ideal
appeared to have died out with Brezhnev’s generation. Soviet politicians
in the late 1980s had come of age long after the 1917 revolution, and
therefore knew nothing of the idealism characteristic of many in that cadre
of officials. While some had cut their political teeth believing that
Khrushchev would put the Soviet state on the right track to prosperity,
cynicism soon became the norm and few believed that they would ever
experience the cornucopia of Communism. Technologically inspired
contacts with the West, expanding slightly under Brezhnev, only
reinforced this loss of faith. Not only did average citizens increasingly see
how their livelihoods compared to the material abundance of the West,
but even top Soviet elites, reveling in their exclusive villas and access to
special stores, came to see that their lifestyles actually paled in comparison
with the luxury lavished on their counterparts in Western Europe and the
United States.
Such factors force reform. Failing this, they force a change in
leadership, which then pursues reform. But only in unusual circumstances
do profound socioeconomic crises actually bring down the state itself, especially
one with the staying power demonstrated by the USSR over years of
isolation, internal turmoil and war. Indeed, the major continental empires
tended to collapse only in the wake of world war, and the Ottomans
remained the “Sick Man of Europe” for centuries before finally
succumbing. 3 And while the Soviet state disintegrated in 1991, the
multicultural Russian Federation within it endured despite facing the
same socioeconomic crisis. The puzzle, then, is not that the Soviet regime
embarked on a program of radical reform, including systemic economic
change as well as political liberalization. This has been well elaborated in
a number of recent volumes on the Soviet demise, notably the competing
accounts of Mark Kramer and Jerry Hough. 4 The real mystery is why the

2
See Celeste Wallander, The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy after the Cold War (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1996) p.134.
3
This point has been made by Mark Kramer.
4
Prominent books on the subject of the Soviet collapse include: John B. Dunlop, The Rise
of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of
the Soviet Union (NY: Random House, 1996); Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and
Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997); David
Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (NY: Vintage Books, 1994); and
Mark Kramer (ed.) The Collapse of the Soviet Union (Olin Seminar Series volume, Harvard
University, forthcoming 1999). Prominent articles include: Valerie Bunce, Post-Soviet
Affairs, v.14, no.4, 1998, pp. 323–354; Anatoly Khazanov, “The Collapse of the Soviet
Union: Nationalism During Perestroika and Afterwards,” Nationalities Papers v.22, no.1,
1994, pp. 157–174; George Breslauer, “Observations on Soviet Imperial Disintegration,”
4 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

Soviet crisis resulted in the epoch-making collapse of this geopolitical

giant.
Critically, we were able to say that the Soviet Union had “collapsed”
only after the central political institutions of the USSR (including its
presidency, parliament, ministries and local organs) had been liquidated.
The Soviet Union was not said to have “collapsed” when the Communist
Party relinquished its monopoly on politics in 1990, and it was already
said to have “collapsed” by the time Boris Yeltsin’s reformers smashed the
command economy with their bold program of price liberalization in
January 1992. The critical fact is that the USSR was a union state divided
into ethnically distinct territories known as “republic s” (I call such union
states “ethnofederations”), and it collapsed only when three things
happened: (1) when the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian
republics stole away to a villa near Minsk and declared that “the USSR, as
a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, ceases to exist;” (2)
when the other republic leaders agreed to this; and (3) when Gorbachev
recognized this decision and entered the ranks of the politically
unemployed. 5 The point when these three things happened was the point
at which the USSR’s most important political institutions evanesced and
was the point at which the term “former Soviet Union” entered common
parlance. 6 The Soviet collapse, therefore, is inextricably bound up with the

Post-Soviet Geography v.35, no.4, 1994, pp.216-220; Andus Park, “Gorbachev and the Role
of Personality in History,” Studies in Comparative Communism, v.25, no.1, March 1992,
pp.47-56; Nils R. Muiznieks, “The Influence of the Baltic Popular Movements on the
Process of Soviet Disintegration,” Europe-Asia Studies, v.47, no.1, 1995, pp. 3–25;
Alexander Dallin, “Causes of the Collapse of the USSR,” Post-Soviet Affairs, v.8, no.4,
1992, pp. 279–302; Paul A. Goble, “CIS, Boom, Bah: The Commonwealth of Independent
States and the Post-Soviet Successor States,” in Allen C. Lynch and Kenneth Thompson
(eds.) Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia in a World of Change (New York: University Press of
America, 1994) pp. 181–205; Rasma Karklins, “Explaining Regime Change in the Soviet
Union,” Europe-Asia Studies v.46, no.1, 1994, pp. 29–45.
5
TASS International Service in Russian, 8 December 1991, 1920 GMT, FBIS -SOV-91-236
p.47.
6
Had the republics not made these fateful decisions, there is little reason to believe that
Soviet institutions would not have continued to endure long into the future, although
they would certainly have adapted themselves to new situations as they had been doing
ever since Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The only conceivable alternative sources for
the actual overthrow of Soviet institutions would have been a hard-line coup or a true
social revolution like that which occurred in 1917. Yet the hard-liners were all aiming
precisely at preserving Soviet institutions, so a hard-line takeover could not have been
seen as the “collapse” of Soviet institutions. This leaves only the possibility of a social
revolution, which by all indications would not have occurred in the then-foreseeable
future, even in the face of the economic crisis. Indeed, in response to the attempted
August 1991 coup, Yeltsin called for a nationwide strike, but as Jerry Hough (1997) has
noted, only a tiny fraction of Russian society responded, suggesting that the potential for
anti-regime public activism was very low. In addition, economic conditions proceeded to
get much worse for the vast bulk of the Russian population in the years immediately
following the Soviet collapse, yet there has been extremely little social unrest as a result—
 Henry E. Hale 5

decisions of key republic leaders to dismantle Soviet institutions in 1991.

For this reason, a convincing explanation of the USSR’s demise must begin
by examining the behavior of the republic leaders whose willful
machinations actually brought down the USSR, as well as Gorbachev’ s
efforts to influence them in the opposite direction.

The Stability of Ethnofederal States

In these pages, I argue that the USSR collapsed when Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev sought to transform an ethnofederation preserved
primarily by coercion into one based mainly on consent. Critically, the
particular demographic and institutional structure of the Soviet Union
rendered it extremely fractious in the face of democratization, a policy
central to Gorbachev’s quest for “consent.” But despite this fragility, there
was room for creative leadership to have persuaded key republic leaders
to remain within a “renewed” Union of Sovereign States. And while it is
fashionable these days to deride Gorbachev for his failures, what is
remarkable is just how tantaliz ingly close he came to successfully pulling
off this truly titanic transformation. In fact, his failure was in no way
intrinsic to his transition strategy. He failed not because he somehow
underestimated the power of nationalism, nor because he in some way
neglected to act decisively at crucial moments, nor because he wrongly
assessed the loyalty of some of his most important ministers. Instead, his
failure lay in a largely secondary miscalculation—misjudging just how
incompetent were these ministers, who in August 1991 embarked on a
course of action that could not have been better scripted by the most
devious foreign enemies of Soviet power. Furthermore, this failure
mattered only because of the unstable constellation of incentives facing
republics in the union.
Ethnofederations endure in at least one of two ways. Most obviously,
leaders can hold them together by force. Alternatively, some
ethnofederations contain a virtual harmony of interests that requires little
if any coercion. Such harmonies of interest s are not always obvious to the
republics involved, of course. Thus in order to base a union primarily on
consent instead of coercion, leaders must often engage in a complicated
process of creating institutions, incentives or even identities such that each
republic concludes that continued integration is in its own best interests.
Because this process of trust-building is so delicate, state leaders quite

certainly nothing threatening the integrity of Russian political institutions. And this
despite the fact that many important elements of society were not even being paid at all
for long stretches of time. I thus see no plausible mechanism, other than actions taken by
republic leaders, whereby the USSR would have “collapsed” within the future that was
at all foreseeable in 1991 as a result of any of the pressures theorists have argued the
regime was under. The onus is on theorists who do not give sufficient treatment to the
republics to demonstrate a plausible mechanism whereby the “causes” they cite actually
would have led to the collapse of Soviet institutions.
6 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

commonly rely on the threat of force to hold their ethnofederations

together, as regions so diverse as Scotland and Kashmir have discovered
over the years.
The Soviet Union, like the Russian Empire before it, had won most of
its republics by conquest, rarely if ever giving them the opportunity to
decide their own fates. Gorbachev himself had little reason to doubt that
he could have kept the USSR together coercively, relying on his mighty
military to move in were any republic bold enough to actually threaten
the union’s integrity. Indeed, the Soviet regime had shown little hesitation
in responding with brutal force to even the most minor incidents of
nationally-inspired unrest. 7 By sending the troops into Baku to quash the
Azerbaijani Popular Front in early 1990, killing over a hundred people in
the process, Gorbachev revealed his willingness to resort to force if he saw
a need for it. 8 Indeed, when Jerry Hough made his unfortunate but widely
known prediction that the union would survive in the Fall of 1991, he was
largely just assuming that Gorbachev would employ military muscle to
preserve his country as Abraham Lincoln had done in the US a century
before. 9
While Gorbachev’s top priority was indeed to preserve his union, and
while there is little evidence to suggest that he was against the use of force
to do so if necessary, he preferred to restructure the union in such a way
that force would not be needed in the first place. He dreamed of
revitalizing the Soviet Union such that its member republics would no
longer feel threatened and would instead voluntarily choose to stay in it.
That is, he tried to transform an ethnofederation founded on force into one
based primarily on consent.
This task was certainly not hopeless, and quite crucially, there is no
reason to have assumed that the Soviet Union would have collapsed
simply because it contained ethnically distinct republics, as has Valerie
Bunce in recent work. 10 Two sets of empirical facts demonstrate that such a
simple reference to “nationalism” or “national-federalism” is insufficient.
First, if ethnofederations were inherently bound to fall apart, then
polyethnic Russia as we know it today would naturally have collapsed
along with the USSR in 1991, and it clearly did not. Even more compelling
is the second set of empirical facts: While the Baltic republics and Ukraine

7
For example, the regime crushed popular nationalist demonstrations that emerged in
the wake of destalinization in Georgia in 1956. See Darrell Slider, “Democratization in
Georgia,” in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott (eds.) Conflict, cleavage, and change in
Central Asia and the Caucasus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) p.158.
8
I am grateful to Mark Kramer for pointing this out.
9
Hough 1997.
10
The reason why the USSR, Yugoslavic and Czechoslovakia collapsed during the
transition from Communism while other states like Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary did
not, she argues, is that the former states all had “national-federal” institutions while the
latter did not. See Bunce 1998.
 Henry E. Hale 7

did spearhead the drive to bring down the Soviet Union in late 1991,
many other republics rallied actually to revive their union state. Indeed,
had the USSR contained only Russia and 14 Uzbekistans, it would surely
have endured. Furthermore, even Ukraine’s surge to secession was far
from foreordained, and its position evolved gradually over the course of
1990–1991 in a complicated political ballet involving the Ukrainian people,
their republic leaders and Moscow. In addition, while many in the West
largely equated Russia with the USSR, Russia itself banded together with
Ukraine and Belarus to snuff out the union’s flickering candle, a very
mysterious act indeed if one invokes nationalism to explain republic
behavior—and even more mysterious if one takes Russian imperialism to
be a historical given. These seemingly contradictory patterns demand
explanation and are pivotal to a precise understanding of the union’s
strange death.
The USSR, however, belonged to a particular class of ethnofederations
that are extremely vulnerable in the face of democratization and the
removal of centripetal coercion. The central problem for any
ethnofederation is one of commitment. By remaining in a union, each
republic takes on a risk that it will be exploited at the hands of other
republics. In authoritarian regimes, republic leaders tend not to care about
such risks since they themselves are beholden more to central authorities
than to their own constituents—and when they do decide to care, they are
swiftly swept from office. When ethnofederations democratize, however,
they radically alter the incentives of republic leaders in two ways. 11 First,
democratization forces republic leaders to pay primary attention to local
interests as opposed to those of the central leadership, since their power
now depends more on the former than on the latter. 12 Second, political
liberalization calls into serious question the prior balance of ethnic group
and republic power in the ethnofederation. Suddenly, each republic faces
the prospect of radical nationalists coming to power in other republics,
perhaps even proving able to take control of federal institutions, which
could then be used exploitatively. In addition, if democracy has not been
tried before, republics have very little idea about what will constitute
power under the new arrangements, an uncertainty that accentuates these
fears of exploitation. The fear is not so much that Hobbes’ Leviathan
would disappear, but that it might now be captured. For a hegemonic
republic like mighty Russia, this was not a concern. Its vast size and great

11
Gorbachev embarked on his policies of glasnost’’ (openness) as a means of
reinvigorating Soviet society after long years of Brezhnevian malaise. He later introduced
competitive elections as a means of outflanking conservative opponents by giving
himself a new base of authority and, even more critically, enfranchising a new and
predictably more liberal political force. These causes of Soviet democratization have been
well documented elsewhere and will not be rehashed here. See in particular the relevant
chapters in Kramer 1998 and Hough 1997. My interest is in the effects of political
liberalization on the ethnofederal institutions of the Soviet state.
12
George Breslauer made this point in his 1994 article.
8 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

population gave it every chance to be the one doing the capturing and
made it highly unlikely to become a victim. But for just these reasons, all
non-hegemonic republics find themselves facing a much higher degree of
risk in this time of transitional uncertainty.
Yet just because integration is risky does not mean that no republic will
tolerate it—were people one-hundred-percent risk-averse, humans would
certainly not be flying airplanes or eating much more than berries and
nuts. This now brings us back to the first effect of democratization: the
shift in the locus of power from center to region. The critical question
becomes: What are the specific republic interests to which leaders
respond, and how do these interests affect a republic’s willingness to
accept the risk of integration?
The pivotal republic interests in the USSR revolved around disparities
in national economic development. The Soviet ethnofederation was
structurally fragile because it contained too many republics that were as
wealthy as or wealthier than Russia. Republics that were far less
developed economically than the rest had reason to believe that they
would be much worse off as independent states. For the Central Asian
republics, therefore, secession meant sharply reducing their own access to
high-value-added goods, high-wage jobs, development investment and
direct budgetary transfers. Their remote geographic locations made a
massive influx of international capital and goods unlikely, and the only
alternative “partners” to Russia in the region were much less developed
than they themselves were: Afghanistan, China, Iran. Incentives were
strong, therefore, to accept the risks involved in dealing with Russia, at
least so long as they might use it to escape the relative poverty in which
they then wallowed. While they sought greater autonomy and actively
promoted the advancement of their own ethnic groups within their
republics, they tended to stop short of outright secession.
Those republics at least as developed as Russia, on the other hand,
were not sacrificing nearly so much hope by leaving the USSR and did not
share the perception in the late Gorbachev period that Russia’s economy
would “pull them up.” In fact, many argued at the time that they had
much more to gain than the Central Asian states by seceding, since they
could then enter world markets with their developed infrastructure
unfettered by Russia’s requirements. The Baltic states and Ukraine
therefore anticipated rapid integration into rising European institutions.
While complicating factors of course produced a few exceptions, statistical
analysis reveals a strong correlation between relative wealth and the
eagerness of each republic to secede; rich republics demonstrated a much
higher degree of separatism than did poor ones. 13
These wealth disparities were deeply rooted in modern history and
came to embed themselves in popular consciousness, even national
13
Author.
 Henry E. Hale 9

consciousness. The people and leaders of the republics did not take out
their calculators, read the latest economic statist ics and reach the
appropriate decisions in a perfectly rational way. 14 Although a few
academics may in fact have done this, I am talking primarily about
differences in wealth and development that were obvious to the vast
majority of people. While Soviet statistics did not provide an undistorted
picture, it was clear to people in the USSR which republics were the best
off and which were lagging, as will become vivid in the pages that follow.
These widespread popular impressions were based not just on reported
statistics, but on personal travel, conversations with friends and relatives,
movies, television and other common experiences of Soviet life. Thus for
most residents of the USSR, it was clear and widely known that the Baltic
states enjoyed a higher material standard of living than did Russia, which
in turn enjoyed a higher standard of living than did Central Asia. As such
differences persisted over decades or even centuries, “Uzbeks” and
“Tajiks,” for example, came to see themselves as being underdeveloped
relative to Russia (although they often simultaneously viewed themselves
as being more cultured or possessing the greater national heritage). These
perceptions also became an important part of a status hierarchy of nations
that David Laitin has recently begun to document in a very interesting
public opinion survey project in the former USSR. 15 Such status
differentials are largely based on the desire for development, putting
those who “have” in a category higher than those who “have not.” Just as
Laitin demonstrates that diaspora Russians were more likely to learn the
high-status Estonian language than the low-status Kazakh one, republics
tended to prefer integrating with high -status republics as opposed to the
low-status ones.
In this manner, then, economic factors conditioned the ways in which
people were interpreting their surroundings, their options, and by
extension drove republic policies in the early 1990s. When Gorbachev’s
democratization campaign forced republic leaders to find a local base of
political support so as to win an election and stay in power, those in the
least developed regions found it profitable to respond to this dominant
and deeply-embedded “discourse of dependency,” or at least not to
deviate from it too radically. 16 Critically, there is little to suggest that the
Central Asians were somehow more lacking in national consciousness
than were, say, Ukrainians. For example, the Kazakhs had revolted
against Russian rule many times in the past, and they had even mounted

14
Although rational choice models are a good way to model this behavior.
15
Laitin, David D. Identity in Formation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
16
If real relative economic positions are changing rapidly, however, leaders do have an
incentive to follow “reality,” although it is expected that it would take time to disabuse
the population of long-standing notions of dependency, and that lags would be
significant and would not reflect all rapid fluctuations, but would follow the general,
broader trends.
10 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

the first serious national challenge to Gorbachev in the December 1986

riots. They certainly had grounds for grievance as great as those of
Ukraine—this nomadic nation lost nearly two million people when the
Soviet regime brutally “sedentarized” it in the 1930s, and this was only
one of many accounts of victimization found in Kazakhstan’s press in the
Gorbachev era. In fact, even before gaining independence, the official
Kazakh leadership embarked on an aggressive policy designed to
“Kazakhize” its “non-native” population and to establish the Kazakh
group firmly as the dominant one in all key state institutions. Thus while
Kazakhs’ relative poverty did not keep them from vigorously pressing
culturalist claims, when talk turned to the specific option of secession, they
demurred. Those few radicals that did issue such demands found little
support amongst the population as a whole, and as a result republic
leaders never found it profitable to support them. The point here is not
that Kazakhs or Uzbeks had a strong national consciousness prepackaged
and ready to use as soon as the opportunity struck, and that Ukraine also
had this, but that it is most unclear that what the Central Asians did have
was any less potent than that possessed by Ukraine. As becomes clear
below, this claim reflects the weakness of Ukrainian national consciousness
as much as the strength of that common in Central Asia. At this point I
would venture an even bolder general claim: virtually every Soviet nation
had in its history and culture some kind of symbolism capable of galvanizing a
secession movement. 17 This means we must focus primarily on the forces
that determined why politicians found it profitable to invoke these
resources for separatist purposes in some places but not others. Many
factors affected whether leaders chose to play the many different “ethnic
cards” they held in the late Soviet period; but when talk turned from
language policy or the schools to the specific issue of secession, it was
primarily the leaders of the richest republics that found it in their own
political interest to make this high-stakes move.
The remaining pages of this article show how this logic of ethnofederal
political economy played itself out to bring down the Soviet Union,
explaining not only the fact of the collapse, but also the detailed patterns
along which the critical cracks in its structure formed. The next section
briefly examines the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev to restructure and save
his union, arguing that he came tantalizingly close to succeeding. His

17
With the probable exception of Belarus. As is reflected in linguistic assimilation
statistics, Belorussians are far more assimilated into Russian culture than even
Ukrainians, and there are few instances in Russo-Belorussian history with which
Belorussian nationalists can plausibly claim grievous victimization at the hands of
Russia. For example, the Great Famine of the early 1930s which devastated Ukraine
largely missed Belarus. Most observers therefore agree that Belorussians in fact possess
only an extremely weak sense of cultural distinctness from Russia, rendering secessionist
claims largely untenable. This would be expected to change after a period of national
independence forces people there to see themselves in important contexts as people
“other” than Russians.
 Henry E. Hale 11

failure, however, depended not only on his own efforts, but critically on
the interests and behavior of the 15 republics that constituted the USSR,
and the following sections trace the roots of the Soviet collapse into the
politics of Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia.

The Delicate Act of Crafting Commitments:

Gorbachev’s Near Triumph
The USSR was delicate, not doomed. Despite the fragility of the Soviet
ethnofederation, there was still room for creative leadership to have
crafted the kinds of credible commitments necessary to convince the
republics that their union was worth saving, that they would not bear
grave risks if they failed to secede. In fact, I argue here that Gorbachev
had embarked on just such a strategy, granting unprecedented levels of
decentralization to republics as a way of reassuring them that the “new
union” would not be an exploitative one, but would instead bring
republics together to realize mutual interests. But by far the most
important point—and this is too often overlooked—is that Gorbachev
could have mustered Moscow’s military might at any time before August
1991 to have kept the republics together by force. Indeed, Gorbachev
made the conscious choice to try and shift the foundations of federal power
from coercion to consent, and it was indeed a choice—there was nothing
involuntary or irrevocable about it. And precisely this “revocability” was
Gorbachev’s greatest cause for confidence. Each republic knew that
Gorbachev could call in the troops should it go too far, and this provided
extra impetus for all but the most radical republics to sit down at the
bargaining table. Thus, with a solid strategy of trust -building backed by
an unsavory but sound Plan B, the Soviet leader had good reason to be
optimistic.
From the 1950’s through the mid-1980s, nationalist incidents in the
Soviet Union had been few and far between, and new Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev did not anticipate that these would become a major
issue when he came to power in 1985. In fact, he initially aimed actually to
re-centralize the USSR, withdrawing much of the de facto autonomy which
republic leaders had come to enjoy under Brezhnev’s “stability of cadres”
policy and which central authorities regarded as corruption. The new
Soviet leader stressed “internationalism” (as opposed to “localism”), with
the Russian language as the lingua franca.18
Yet by February 1988, Gorbachev was forced to call nationality “the
most fundamental vital issue of our society.” 19 During this interval in time,

18
Hill, Ronald J. “Managing Ethnic Conflict,” in Stephen White, Rita Di Leo, and Ottorino
Cappelli (eds.) The Soviet Transition: From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (Portland, Oreg.: Frank
Cass, 1993), pp. 57–74, pp. 61–62.
19
Gorbachev, M.S., Izbrannye rechi i stat’i v.6 (Moscow, 1989) p. 374, reproduced in A.B.
Veber, V.T. Loginov, G.S. Ostroumov, and A.S. Chernyaev (eds.), Soyuz Mozhno Bylo
12 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

ethnic conflicts and demands had erupted onto the Soviet scene with
striking power as Gorbachev’s policies of political liberalization and
glasnost’ (opening) took hold. Ethnic Kazakhs took to the streets to protest
the replacement of their republic’s leader with an ethnic Russian in
December 1986. Cultural activists in the Baltic states, often with the help
of local governmental authorities, organized mass demonstrations to
confront Moscow with their demands for national autonomy,
compensation for past wrongs, or group privileges. Armenians launched
what became a violent movement to remove the Armenian-populated
region of Nagorno-Karabakh from the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan in 1987.
Gorbachev’s first instinct was to rely on political methods, trying to
“reason” with the nationalists, presenting them with overwhelming
evidence that they were better off staying in the union, albeit a renewed
one. “Is it rational to push for isolation (zamknutost’), for particularization
(obosobleniya),” he asked Estonians in a 1988 appeal, “when the leading
tendencies in the world have become integration, the interstate division of
labor, international cooperation and the creation of a single market?” 20
Soviet leaders worked furiously to put in place a legal framework that
would channel these demands and simultaneously allow Gorbachev
ample opportunity to persuade restive republic masses that union, not
secession, was the rationally superior option. He restructured the
Communist Party along national lines in 1990, naming a Ukrainian the
official “second secretary.” Also in 1990, the Soviet legislature passed a
law that explicitly allowed for secession, although it required not only a
referendum in support of independence, but also the agreement of the rest
of the USSR for the republic actually to realize its right to leave the union.
The central piece of legislation was the new law “on the delimitation of
powers between the USSR and the subjects of the federation.” Adopted on
April 26, 1990, it mandated substantial devolution of power to the
republics, allowing them to have direct relations with foreign states, to the
point of exchanging diplomats, and giving them substantial control over
economic policy. 21 The Soviet Congress also created a commission to
produce a new Constitution that included substantial decentralization of
power. 22
In specific cases where local nationalists had refused to be pacified by
these moderate efforts, however, Gorbachev was not unwilling to heed the

Sokhranit’: Belaya Kniga: Dokumenty i Fakty o Politikye M.S. Gorbacheva po Reformirovaniu i

Sokhraneniu mnogonatsional’nogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Aprel’-85,” 1995), p.
17.
20
Gorbachev, Mikhail, Zhizn’ i reformy (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), v.1, p. 512.
21
Bagramov, E.A. (chief editor). K soyuzy suverennykh narodov: Sbornik dokumentov
KPSS, zakonadatel’nykh aktov, deklaratsiy, obrashcheniy i prezidentskikh ukazov,
posvyashchennykh problemye natsional’no-gosudarstvennogo suvereniteta (Moscow:
Institut teorii i istorii sotsializma TsK KPSS, 1991), pp. 75–82.
22
Vedomosti SSSR 1989, pp. 112–113.
 Henry E. Hale 13

hard-liners’ advice to send in the troops. Yet since these violent

government actions were always localized and did not represent a
reversal of the regime’s liberalization policies, they backfired
calamitously, succeeding primarily in alienating the entire population of
these “hotspots.” In Georgia, for example, most early political unrest had
centered on environmental issues, opposing, for example, the Caucasian
Mountain Railway in northern Georgia. But in April 1989, about 10,000
people streamed out into Tbilisi’s streets to oppose the Abkhaz ASSR’s
recent petition to secede from Georgia. More radical demonstrators then
raised demands for Georgian independence, whereupon Soviet troops
moved in and brutally suppressed the rally, killing some 20 people,
mostly women and children. In response to popular outrage, Gorbachev
sent his trusted aide, and former Georgian Communist Party First
Secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, to the republic. Although angry crowds
of youths physically turned their backs to him en masse in a dramatic show
of defiance when he tried to address them, Shevardnadze managed to
orchestrate a change in Georgian Party leadership. 23 But the new
Communist Party head, Givi Gumbaridze, himself launched Georgia’s
intense official struggle for more autonomy. Tellingly, even he was soon
overtaken by more radical forces in the 1990 parliamentary elections. 24
Indeed, Gorbachev’s move to force local Communists to hold competitive
elections was to alter the Soviet political landscape permanently. While
Soviet intervention in Azerbaijan in January 1990 did cripple the
nationalist Azerbaijani Popular Front (APF) in the short run, 25 in the long
run the mass slaughter only deepened the APF’s support amongst the
people. Indeed, Azerbaijan remained one of the more separatist republics
throughout 1990 and 1991, and the APF actually took over the
government in early 1992.
The failure of both the government’s attempts to “reason” with the
nationalists and its initial, mal-prepared “gut reactions” forced a rethink
in the Soviet leadership. Once republic- and local-level elections in the
Spring of 1990 gave an official platform to many nationalists (especially in
the Baltic republics where they gained strong majorities), Gorbachev and
his allies realized they had to recognize the new authority of republic
leaders and to take more heed of their demands for autonomy. They
therefore embarked on a delicate process of crafting credible commitments
that the republics would not be exploited as part of a grand effort to win
the trust necessary to keep the union together peacefully. The central
effort was to forge a New Union Treaty, the successor to the old Union
Treaty of 1922 that marked the official founding of the USSR.

23
Ryzhkov, Nikolai. Perestroika: Istoriya Predatel’stv (Moscow: Novosti, 1992).
24
Jones 1992, pp. 77–79; Darrell Slider, “Democratization in Georgia,” in Karen Dawisha
and Bruce Parrott (eds.), Conflict, cleavage, and change in Central Asia and the Caucasus
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.161.
25
A point Mark Kramer has frequently raised in conversations on this subject.
14 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

The New Union treaty effort very nearly succeeded, although only
after Gorbachev had made significant adjustments in his strategy for
convincing the republics to sign it. At first, he sought not to negotiate
directly with republic leaders themselves, instead forming a working
group on July 24, 1990, to consult bilaterally with republic delegations of
lower-level officials and experts. On the basis of this, Gorbachev’s
working group published a draft New Union Treaty in November 1990.
Even the most unionist of republics lambasted this document, however,
primarily because they had not been directly involved in drafting it; thus
while most republics said they supported the idea of a New Union Treaty
in principle, they found all kinds of reasons to oppose this particular
version.
After a second draft New Union Treaty failed to make a breakthrough
in March 1991, Gorbachev launched a dramatic effort to negotiate directly
with republic leaders, building up the mutual trust necessary to find a
draft that all (or at least most) would agree on and sign. The first
breakthrough took place at the villa of Novo-Ogarevo in April 1991,
where nine top republic officials and Gorbachev (the “9 + 1”) announced
agreement on a series of economic anti-crisis measures and pledged
speedy completion of work on the New Union Treaty, conceiving of it as
merely a “union of sovereign states.”
By including top republic leaders in the negotiating process along with
promising them substantial autonomy, Gorbachev’s strategy of trust-
building appeared to be working. Yeltsin later wrote that this move of
Gorbachev’s had surprised him, especially since the Soviet president now
seemed willing to “significantly weaken the influence of the Moscow
center on the Soviet Union’s republics.” 26 Momentum for negotiated
decentralization gathered over the Summer of 1991, and in June the Novo-
Ogarevo negotiators completed the third major draft New Union Treaty,
explicitly recognizing the republics’ own declarations of sovereignty in the
first line of the preamble and neglecting to allot any state property to the
reconstituted union, although the union would still be able to manage
some property and use it to aid regions lagging in development, a clause
clearly inserted at the behest of the Central Asian republics. By the end of
the summer, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the other republics had hammered
out an agreement that seven republics (Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,
Belarus, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan) were ready to sign on
20 August 1991, and Ukraine and Azerbaijan had hinted that they, too,
might sign as early as October. 27 Reinforcing these prospects were the

26
Yeltsin, Boris. The Struggle for Russia (New York: Times Books, 1994), p.26.
27
Gorbachev and Presidential Council member Grigory Revenko (a top aide to
Gorbachev on the New Union Treaty Process) differ somewhat in their accounts.
Revenko has Azerbaijan possibly signing early and Turkmenistan declaring it would
wait to sign with Ukraine. I take Gorbachev’s published account to have more weight
 Henry E. Hale 15

results of a referendum that Gorbachev had held back in March 1991; over
70 percent of the USSR’s population (excluding the six most separatist
republics: the three Baltic states and Armenia, Georgia and Moldova)
voted to preserve the USSR as a renewed federation. The New Union
Treaty deal virtually done, Gorbachev left for vacation in Foros, a Black
Sea resort in Ukraine’s Crimea, on 4 August 1991. 28
The plotters of the August coup burst Gorbachev’s bubble with a
sledgehammer. On August 18, the Soviet vice president, prime minister
and the heads of the KGB, Interior Ministry and Defense Ministry
announced that the vacationing Gorbachev was incapacitated by illness
and that they were introducing a state of emergency in the country. They
did not, however, arrest their most prominent opponents and Russian
president Boris Yeltsin led a heroic resistance to their efforts, issuing
public appeals for people to disobey the coup-plotters and to take to the
streets. As Valery Konavalev has noted—and this is an absolutely critical
point—the military leadership grossly miscalculated in its estimation that
its officers would support it in a bloody coup attempt. 29 Importantly, in
justifying their moves, the disobedient commanders mostly cited their
unwillingness to tolerate civilian carnage in an effort to seize the White
House; few seemed to express great reservations about the act of seizure
itself, or about the illegality of the coup. Thus while only a few tens of
thousands showed up in Moscow to defend Yeltsin and democracy (just a
fraction of Moscow’s millions), this was enough to split the military and to
cause key military figures like Pavel Grachev, Aleksandr Lebed, Yevgeny
Shaposhnikov and Boris Gromov to disobey their orders. This forced
Defense Minister Yazov to call off the attack on Yeltsin’s “White House”
as reports came in that the crowd outside it was growing and that three
people had already died in a minor skirmish not far away from the
Russian parliament. 30
In one fell swoop, then, the mutinous ministers undermined
Gorbachev’s laborious efforts to build the trust of the republics and
shattered the military “stick” that he had brandished to keep his restive
regions at the negotiating table and which he had held in reserve as a plan
of last resort. Although Gorbachev furtively approached the military
leadership in late 1991 and demurely “raised the possibility” of military
intervention at this late date, by then new commanders were in place who
realized that the coup had for the time being destroyed the unity of the

than Revenko’s remarks in an interview. Interview with Revenko, 20 October 1993;

Gorbachev 1995 v.2, p. 552.
28
Gorbachev 1995 v.2, p.552.
29
Konavalev, Valery, “Marshal Yazov: Triumf i tragediya odnogo predatel’stva
(22.08.91)” in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (ed.), Radio svoboda: Avgust 19–21
(Moscow: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1992), p. 195.
30
Stepankov, V.G. and Ye.K. Lisov, Kremlyevskiy Zagovor: versiya, sledstviya (Moscow:
izdatel’stvo “Ogonyek,” 1992), p. 180.
16 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

army and therefore its ability to intervene effectively in such affairs.

Ironically, therefore, an attempted military takeover allowed the USSR to
dissolve without facing either Yugoslavia’s bloody implosion or the
tragedy of Tiananmen. But had these key “force ministers” been astute
enough to realize that their own top commanders would not shed blood
without firm orders from the Commander-in-Chief, 31 Gorbachev looked
poised to have also avoided violence, but saving his union as well.
But why was all of Gorbachev’s strategizing necessary in the first
place? Why was it that the union fell apart once the threat of coercion
evanesced? Indeed, as many as nine republics had indicated that they may
have been willing to sign the New Union Treaty at some point in the Fall
of 1991, and this would clearly have been sufficient to preserve the USSR’s
existence. Indeed, the USSR could have survived with just Russia and a
few other hangers-on. Indeed, the irreconcilable separatists, those six
republics that had refused to participate in the Novo-Ogarevo process at
all and boycotted the March 1991 referendum on the USSR, were tiny
peripheral regions that were all ultimately dispensable to the Soviet Union
(the Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia). Yet something
critically important changed in during the fall of 1991, and that something
changed in Russia. Despite the fact that Russians themselves promised to
dominate any future Soviet Union, and despite the fact that more than 70
percent of RSFSR citizens voted in a referendum to save this union, their
leaders decided in the fall of 1991 to dispense with the USSR, essentially
setting the other 13 union republics free. To provide a satisfactory
explanation of the Soviet collapse, therefore, one absolutely must
understand and account for the behavior of Russia. It is to this task that I
now turn.

Russia: Toward a Leaner Union

Why in the world would Russia deliberately destroy the union that it
dominated? This puzzle is particularly stark in light of the decade
subsequent to the Soviet collapse, since Russia is widely regarded as
harboring imperial ambitions and as being bent on restoring influence in
the territory of its former empire. Some, including the last Soviet leader
himself, have sought the answer in personality, positing that Yeltsin was
bent on destroying the USSR from the beginning, lusting for revenge
against his old Communist Party nemesis, Mikhail Gorbachev. I argue,
however, that Russia remained committed to saving the union up until the
very end. Yet, as the economic logic outlined at the beginning of this
paper suggests, Russia had good reason to “renegotiate” the union so as to
gain greater control over the resources that had been flowing liberally
from Russia into the coffers of other republics. Indeed, almost any other
Russian leader would have replicated the most important of Yeltsin’s

31
Brian Taylor, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 1997.
 Henry E. Hale 17

seemingly idiosyncratic acts of defiance had the latter leader not squeaked
into office in May 1990 on the third vote of a badly split republic
legislature. But if I am right that Russia had no interest in destroying the
union, and if I am right that we cannot simply attribute its actions to a
vengeful Boris Yeltsin, how then can we explain why this most dominant
of republics plunged its dagger into the back of the Soviet state in
December 1991 by joining Belarus and Ukraine in declaring that the USSR
“ceases to exist?” The answer is that Russia sought actually to bring down
the USSR only when it became unmistakably clear that Ukraine would no
longer truck with Gorbachev and the ilk of unions past, and that only the
most radical measures held out any hope of keeping Ukraine in Russia’s
orbit.
Russia was relatively rich compared to the Central Asian republics of
the USSR, and its people dominated the union culturally. While the three
Baltic republics were indisputably the most developed, Russia was among
the most developed of the rest in terms of key indicators. For example,
Russia’s retail commodity turnover in 1988 was 1,400 rubles per capita,
significantly higher than Central Asia’s figures, which ranged between
Kazakhstan’s 1,070 and Tajikistan’s 340. 32 The Russian Republic boasted a
population of more than 147 million, nearly triple that of Ukraine, the
second most populous republic. In addition, some 25 million ethnic
Russians lived in other Soviet republics. In terms of territory, Russia was
about six times larger than its nearest rival, Kazakhstan. 33 As if this
advantage were not already enough, the Soviet regime conducted many
“Russification” initiatives over the years and overtly favored Russians to
advance to the most sensitive posts. One listing of the 100 most powerful
Soviet officials showed that in 1986 Russians occupied 46 percent more
positions than their share of the population would have dictated. 34
Although such dominance gave it little reason to fear exploitation at the
hands of other republics, the Soviet regime had handicapped Russia in
certain key ways deriving from Lenin’s original determination to stamp
out “bourgeois” Russian chauvinism. Russia thus lacked its own branch of
the Communist Party, the Academy of Sciences and other key Soviet
institutions, unlike the remaining republics. Most significantly, however,
reliable analyses based on market valuation of transfers show that Russia
was in fact a net donor to the rest of the union despite the other republics’

32
These data come from a database available from the author. Most economic data are
from Narodnoe Khozyaistvo and demographic data are from the 1989 census as published
by Eastview Publications, Minneapolis, MN.
33
These data are from the 1989 USSR census, published by Eastview Publications.
34 Rahr, Alexander G., A Biographic Directory of 100 Leading Soviet Officials, 3rd edition,
March 1986 (Munich: Radio Liberty Research, RFE-RL). Five of the 100 listed were
categorized as “nationality unknown,” most of which had Slavic names and one of
whom was Arkady Volsky, a Russian.
18 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

claims of exploitation, primarily because it supplied oil and gas to them at

far-below-market prices. 35
Close examination of Russian actions in 1990 and 1991 reveals that
Russia was not simply following the whims of a vengeful leader and was
not seeking surreptitiously to destroy the union. Instead, Russia sought to
restructure the union to its advantage, aiming to prevent other republics
from being a burden on the Russian economy. Importantly, these policies
first appeared in 1990 with the introduction of republic-level elections,
which suddenly rendered Russian leaders accountable to their own
population. Clearly, Yeltsin himself was in no position to impose his
personal will on the new parliament; he was fortunate enough just to
squeak into office as the legislators took three rounds before voting him in
as their country’s leader by the narrowest of margins. When the Russian
parliament shocked outside observers by adopting its own “Declaration of
Sovereignty” on 12 June, most assumed that this was Yeltsin’s own
troublemaking initiative. Yet a Yeltsin with such a weak institutional
power base was simply not able to ram a radical document through
parliament, and the sovereignty declaration was in fact actively supported
even by mainstream Communist Party members, including Vitaly
Vorotnikov, Yeltsin’s conservative predecessor as Russian leader who
proposed it formally. 36 The Congress chose from several alternative drafts,
ultimately adopting a compromise version that laid claim to all resources
located on Russian territory. While it reserved Russia’s right to secede, it
explicitly stated that the purpose of the declaration was to be the basis of a
“New Union Treaty” to preserve the USSR. 37
A closer examination even of the subsequent “War of Laws” between
Yeltsin and Gorbachev reveals not an attempt to destroy the union, but a
drive to restructure it in a way that was more advantageous to Russia. In
the spring of 1990, when Gorbachev had responded to rising nationalism
in many Soviet republics by proposing to conclude a New Union Treaty,
Russia initially demanded that the republics conclude this treaty amongst

35
Bahry, Donna, “The Union Republics and Contradictions in Gorbachev’s Economic
Reform,” Soviet Economy v.7, no.3, 1991, pp. 215–255; William W. Hogan, “Oil and Gas in
the Former Soviet Union: Market Impacts and Reform Challenges,” working paper in the
series of the Center for Business and Government, John F. Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., March 1993; and Robin A. Watson,
“Interrepublic Trade in the Former Soviet Union: Structure and Implications,” Post-Soviet
Geography 1994, v. 35, no. 7, pp. 371–408. See also Oksana Genrikhovna Dmitrieva,
Regional’naya Ekonomicheskaya Diagnostika (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Sankt-
Peterburgskogo Universiteta Ekonomiki i Finansov, 1992).
36
Izvestia May 23, 1990 p. 4; May 24, 1990, p. 2.
37
For the declaration and other significant documents on the subject, see Eduard
Bagramov (ed.), K soiuzu suverrenykh narodov: Sbornik dokumentov KPSS,
zakonodatel’nykh aktov, deklaratsiy, obrashcheniy i presidentskykh ukazov,
posvyahchennykh probleme natsional’no-gosudarstvennogo suvereniteta (Moscow:
Institut Teorii i Istorii Sotsializma TsK KPSS, 1991).
 Henry E. Hale 19

themselves, without any interference from the central government,

rejecting Gorbachev’s attempts to impose a treaty after bilateral
negotiations with each republic. Russia’s proposals favored keeping most
important economic levers in the hands of the republics, although as the
largest republic by far, Russia could thereby expect to have great influence
on the policies of other republics. Its leaders generally wanted to relegate
to the union such responsibilities as defense, energy, transportation and
communications infrastructure. 38 Accordingly, Russia’s government
fought a bitter battle with the central government over how to reform the
USSR economy. Thus shortly after Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov
proposed his plan to move gradually to a “regulated market” in the
Spring of 1990, Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silaev produced the famous
alternative “500-Day Plan.” While most media focused on differences in
the envisioned pace of change, the real issue was that the 500-Day Plan
gave much more policymaking authority to the republics. Gorbachev
actually supported the Russian initiative for a time, but in the face of
Ryzhkov’s vehement opposition he resorted to a drawn-out attempt to
merge the plans somehow, ultimately ensuring that virtually no reform
was conducted in 1990–1991.
Anticipating such reluctance, the Russian leadership essentially sought
to create a situation in which the Soviet “center” had no choice but to let
the republics administer economic reform themselves by presenting
Gorbachev with a fait accompli. This became the heart of the storied “War
of Laws.” First, on July 13, 1990, Russia practically liquidated the USSR
banking system, the linchpin of the center’s capacity to appropriate
republic resources and to distribute them as it deemed fit. 39 Just one day
later, Russia reiterated its sovereignty declaration’s claim to all property
located on Russian territory, this time going so far as to declare that any
activity violating the sovereignty and “economic interests” of Russia was
null and void even if it had been ordered by top Soviet organs.
Nevertheless, even this resolution presumed that some property in Russia
would be administered by Soviet organs after the proper agreements were
reached. 40 Russia thus nullified a series of key deals with foreign investors
that had not been cleared with Yeltsin’s authorities. 41 Russia also created a
set of institutions of its own to control such activity, including a State
Bank and licensing agencies. 42 This whole time, of course, Russia was
assuming that the USSR would be preserved, only with much more

38
See, for example, Vedomosti RSFSR 1990, no. 4, pp. 81–83; and Izvestia 2 August 1990, p.
2.
39
See Vedomosti RSFSR 1990, no. 6, p. 142. For an excellent account of the implications of
this move, see Joel Hellman’s chapter in Mark Kramer’s forthcoming edited volume, The
Collapse of the Soviet Union, expected 1999.
40
Vedomosti RSFSR 1990, no. 7, pp. 147, 149.
41
Vedomosti RSFSR 1990, no. 10, pp. 173–174.
42
Izvestia August 21, 1990 p. 2; Vedomosti RSFSR 1990, no. 11, pp. 188–189.
20 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

economic autonomy granted to the republics, as envisioned by the 500-

Day Plan.
While the failure of the 500-Day Plan provoked Yeltsin into making
some vitriolic statements that many interpreted to mean that he intended
to destroy the union, his most significant actions of 1991 all suggested that
he knew public opinion did not want a breakup and that he was seeking
only to restructure the union. In the March referendum that Gorbachev
orchestrated, more than 70 percent of the Russian population voted to
preserve the USSR. This same referendum approved the creation of a
directly elected presidency, for which Yeltsin successfully campaigned in
May and early June. Significantly, in his desire to garner public support,
he did not oppose the union but instead trumpeted his ability to work
with Gorbachev to produce an agreement on a New Union Treaty. While
he said that Russia’s sovereignty drive had brought real benefits, he cited
the April 1991 Novo-Ogarevo accord’s promise of a “Union of Sovereign
States” as one of his three main achievements during his first year in
office. 43 Thus, it is no surprise that by August 1991 Yeltsin was among the
leaders that had promised to sign the New Union Treaty that Gorbachev
had long sought in order to save his teetering multiethnic state.
Even more critically, when the August 1991 coup sent Soviet
institutions reeling, Yeltsin refused to take the kind of actions that could
have easily led to a more rapid dissolution of the union. For example,
Russia is the only former Soviet republic never to have issued a declaration
of independence. 44 Yeltsin met with Gorbachev and eight other republic
leaders just two days after the coup had failed and declared that a New
Union Treaty was still necessary, an opinion supported by Ruslan
Khasbulatov, Russia’s new Congressional speaker, in his speech to the
first post-coup meeting of the USSR Supreme Soviet on August 26. 45
Russian leaders even resorted to threatening other republics not to leave
the union. In the most infamous example of this, Yeltsin’s office warned
Ukraine on August 26 that Russia might lay claim to some of its Russian-
populated territory should Ukraine decide to secede. At the same time,
Russia made clear its determination not to let any other republic interfere
with its own plans to conduct economic reform. With central shackles now
decisively broken, Yeltsin and his new Prime Minister Gaidar announced
a radical price liberalization that eventually took place in January 1992.

43
Radio Russia 1110 GMT, June 1, 1991, FBIS-SOV-91-106 p. 71.
44
Solchanyk, Roman. “Russia, Ukraine and the Imperial Legacy,” Post-Soviet Affairs v. 9,
no. 4, October–December 1993, pp. 337–365, p. 348.
45
Gorbachev, Mikhail, Zhizn’ i reformy (Moscow: Novosti, 1995) v.2, pp. 583–584;
Gorbachev, Mikhail, The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons (New York: Harper
Collins Publishers, 1991) p. 50; Byulleten’ No.1 sovmestnogo zasedaniya soveta soyuza i soveta
natsional’nostey, Verkhovnyy Sovet SSSR, Vneocherednaya Sessiya, August 26, 1991, pp.
39–40.
 Henry E. Hale 21

This economic separatism notwithstanding, it was Ukraine’s move to

secede that forced Russia essentially to follow. In a 1 December 1991
referendum, Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to become an independent
state over the objections of both Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Faced with this
fact, Yeltsin calculated that the only way to keep Ukraine in some kind of a
union was to destroy the old one and to create whatever Ukraine would
agree to. “It would have been criminal to conclude a treaty on a union of
republics without Ukraine,” he declared just days after dissolving USSR
institutions and creating the nebulous and non-binding Commonwealth of
Independent States. 46 Russia thus destroyed the union in order to save it. 47
To fully explain the Soviet collapse, therefore, we must understand
why Ukraine acted so decisively to secede in the fall of 1991. As with
Russia, Ukraine’s behavior largely follows the pattern described in the
first pages of this article, although we will see that Russia’s own behavior,
ironically, played a large part in pushing Ukraine in this direction. This
study now turns its attention to Ukraine.

Ukraine: Nationalism from Above

Even as late as 1989, only the staunchest of diaspora nationalists saw
much chance of a strong Ukrainian separatist movement. Ukrainians,
most observers wrote, were culturally very close to Russians, enjoyed
great upward mobility in the Soviet system and showed little tendency to
radicalism. 48 One reason for this misjudgment was the mistaken
impression that nationalism comes primarily “from below” (from mass
movements) more than “from above” (from political leaders). In fact,
Ukraine provides an excellent example of how electoral pressures forced
vote-hungry leaders to mobilize people for a secession drive based on
cultural and economic facts, facts that would have long remained only
latent in the political arena were it not for these leaders’ activities.
Separatism came to Ukraine from above.
Ukraine was a relatively rich republic with great reason to fear Russian
exploitation by the late 1980s. While Ukraine began the 20th century as the
“breadbasket of Europe,” the Soviet government industrialized and
urbanized the republic to levels roughly equal to Russia’s. For example,
Ukraine’s retail commodity turnover in 1988 was at 1,210 rubles per
capita, behind only the Baltic states, Belarus and Russia. Russia was only
slightly ahead of Ukraine at 1,410 rubles per capita, and both were far
ahead of most of Central Asia. In consumer goods production, Ukraine
ranked even higher than Russia, and Ukraine was the fifth most urbanized

46
Rossiiskaya Gazeta December 13, 1991, cited in Bohdan Krawchenko, “Ukraine: the
politics of independence” in Bremmer and Taras 1993, p. 91.
47
For then-Foreign Minister Kozyrev’s account of this logic, see Nezavisimaya Gazeta 8,
December 1992 p. 5.
48
Subtelny 1988/1994, p. 532.
22 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

republic in the USSR as of 1989. 49 While many Ukrainians complained of

Russian exploitation, Ukraine actually received a net subsidy from Russia
in the form of underpriced energy supplies. 50 Moscow had, however,
denied Ukraine control over allocation of these resources and virtually the
entire Ukrainian economy. 51 Ukrainians had many other historical reasons
to fear Russian exploitation, however. Ukrainian historians reached back
to 1654 to claim that Russia betrayed Ukraine by taking advantage of an
alliance concluded in this year to subsume Ukraine into its empire. 52
Others looked to the massive famine that many said Stalin intentionally
engineered in the early 1930s to cripple Ukraine, killing at least four
million in the process. 53 Furthermore, the Chernobyl tragedy of 1986 that
devastated much of this republic, both psychologically and physically,
was still prominent in the popular memory. There is evidence, therefore,
not only that Ukrainians tended to identify with their own republic in
important ways, but that this identity was largely bound up with distrust
of Moscow-based government. But as of 1989, few ever expected their
grievances to translate into a strong drive for secession.
The competitive parliamentary elections of 1990 did more than
anything else to start Ukraine along the road to secession for two main
reasons. First, they signaled the shift of true local power from the
Communist Party (and therefore Moscow) to the new legislative organs
within the republic. No longer a rubber stamp, parliament had an
independent source of authority, the electorate. Ukrainian Communist
Party leader Volodymyr Ivashko gave official sanction to this state of
affairs when he resigned as the CPU’s general secretary (ceding the post to
his second secretary, Stanislav Hurenko) in June 1990, retaining the
chairmanship of the republic’s new legislature (the Rada) as his primary
base of power. 54
Second, the elections of 1990 awakened republic leaders to the
mobilizing potential of separatist claims. The nationalist movement in
Ukraine had its origins in western Ukraine, which had the longest history
outside of Russian rule. Mass demonstrations in support of nationalist
issues, sometimes involving as many as 50,000–200,000 people, had taken
place in the city of Lviv as early as 1988, and such demonstrations became

49
Data come from Author’s database.
50
Bahry 1991; Hogan 1993; Watson 1994.
51
See Bohdan Krawchenko, “Ukraine: the politics of independence” in Ian Bremmer and
Ray Taras (eds.), Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993) pp. 75–98, p.87.
52
Alexander Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (N.Y.: Council
on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), pp. 26–28.
53
Simon, Gerhard. Nationalism and Policy Toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union:
From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
1991), p. 99.
54
Izvestia June 23, 1990, p. 2.
 Henry E. Hale 23

commonplace in the capital of Kyiv in 1989. 55 At these rallies, however,

people did not air demands for independence, as a rule, but decried the
Chernobyl disaster, called for a restoration of the Ukrainian language and
demanded investigation into the Great Famine. 56
Pulling together the disparate groups and individuals who were active
in these demonstrations, the Popular Movement for Restructuring
Ukraine held its founding congress on September 8–10, 1989. Commonly
known as Rukh (which means “movement” in Ukrainian), it initially was
not primarily a nationalist organization. At the founding congress, Rukh’s
platform pledged to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine, to promote the
Ukrainian language and culture, to voice ecological concerns, to support
democratization in society and politics and to promote solidarity among
all ethnic groups in Ukraine. 57 Indeed, Rukh succeeded in building a
reputation for ethnic moderation, reaching out to Russians and Jews in its
programs and condemning Ukrainian chauvinism. 58
The approach of the March 1990 elections sparked an upsurge in
Rukh’s activity as its leaders began campaigning to win public office. In
early 1990, Rukh made its first major foray into mass mobilization, calling
for citizens of Ukraine to form a vast “human chain” stretching from Kiev
to Lviv on January 22, 1990, the anniversary of the Ukrainian People’s
Republic’s declaration of independence in 1917. 59 Although reportedly not
so successful as similar prior efforts in the Baltic republics, this event
marked the emergence of Rukh as a formidable political force. 60 Rukh-
dominated demonstrations became commonplace, often drawing well into
the thousands. Candidates for the Rada and local councils appeared
regularly at Sunday Rukh rallies in Kiev, and cries of “we want change”
echoed at still other mass gatherings. 61 By February 1990, Rukh had finally
won official recognition by Ukrainian authorities, registering itself as a
movement with the republic council of ministers. Rukh thereby gained the
right independently to field its own candidates for elections, although
many of its supporters had, of course, already been running, nominated
by work collectives, educational institutions and the like. 62 AlthoughRukh
was denied access to the mass media during the March 1990 Rada election
campaign, it still managed to garner a quarter of the seats based on

55
Subtelny 1994, p. 576.
56
Subtelny 1994, pp. 574–575.
57
Subtelny 1994, p. 576.
58
Motyl 1993, p. 81.
59
Motyl 1993, p. 44.
60
Krasnaya Zvezda January 23, 1990, p. 3, FBIS -SOV-90-021 January 30, 1990, p. 54.
61
Kiev in Ukrainian to North America, 2200 GMT, February 5, 1990, FBIS-SOV-90-035
February 21, 1990, pp. 86–87; Kiev in Ukrainian to North America, 2200 GMT, February
11, 1990, FBIS-SOV-90-030 February 13, 1990, p. 102; Kiev in Ukrainian to North America,
2200 GMT February 18, 1990, FBIS-SOV-90-040 February 28, 1990, p. 85.
62
Izvestia February 12, 1990, p. 3.
24 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

promises of national revival and it quickly allied with likeminded

legislators outside the organization. 63
The forces of Rukh, suddenly finding themselves with an official
forum from which to make claims, pushed separatist ones the farthest. If
the movement had before been a cautious voice for increased autonomy,
many of the movement’s leaders began openly calling for outright
secession immediately after the election. Serhii Odarych, a chief campaign
organizer, put it bluntly: “The aim of Rukh is independence for
Ukraine.” 64 Leaders of the movement called Gorbachev’s plans for a
“renewed federation” hypocritical, and pressured the Communist Party of
Ukraine to break with the USSR Party organization. 65 Ivan Drach, a Rukh
leader, aimed directly at bringing down the union in order to achieve this:
“The duty of Russia is to secede first and help others. A free Ukraine is
impossible without a free Russia.” 66
Rukh was not the only political force to discover that it could cultivate
and harness its electorate’s distrust of Moscow. Even the Communists
radicalized their claims for autonomy during and after the election
campaign. When the republic’s Party leader, Ivashko, ran for the Rada
chairmanship (before December 1991 the highest state post in the country)
in May 1990, he stressed his opposition to separatism while voicing strong
support for Ukrainian sovereignty. He now asserted that sovereignty
meant the supremacy of Ukrainian law over Soviet law in Ukraine and
Ukraine’s status as an international actor in its own right. 67
The nature of the claims made by both the Communists and Rukh
reflect the essentially economic nature of Ukraine’s interests: the chief goal
was the economic development of Ukraine, and Europe was a much more
promising source of this than was Russia, which, as an imperial power,
could not be trusted (if not because of ill intent, then because of
incompetence) and which could not offer Ukraine significantly more
“goods of modernity” than it already possessed in its own relatively
advanced economy. Different Rukh leaders would cite different reasons
why independence was needed, but one of the chief among them was the
need to establish national institutions in order to protect Ukraine against
Moscow, which was portrayed as not responding to the needs of Ukraine
in making policy. Ukraine needed its own bank and its own currency as a

63
Bojcun, Marko, “The Ukrainian Parliamentary Elections in March–April 1994,” Europe-
Asia Studies v. 47, no. 2, 1995, pp. 229–249, p. 229.
64
Paris AFP in English, 1159 GMT, March 29, 1990, FBIS-SOV-90-056, March 22, 1990, p.
102.
65
Paris AFP in English, 1451 GMT, March 12, 1990, FBIS -SOV-90-049, March 13, 1990, p.
104.
66
Literaturnaya Gazeta, no. 15, April 11, 1990, p. 3, FBIS -SOV-90-081, March 26, 1990, pp.
109–111.
67
Kiev International Service in English, 2300 GMT, May 29, 1990, FBIS-SOV-90-105 May
31, 1990, pp. 92–93.
 Henry E. Hale 25

form of protection before Ukraine could move decisively to a market

economy, declared Vyacheslav Chornovil, the man becoming the most
prominent opposition figure and the most important leader of Rukh. 68 In
addition, Rukh leaders clearly had in mind integration into Western
European society as opposed to the Russian-dominated one when
considering secession from the USSR. Thus, in his run for leadership of the
newly elected Rada in May 1990, Chornovil stated his platform thus: “I
stand for the complete state independence of Ukraine as the only way out
of the economic and spiritual catastrophe.” This would entail, among
other things, the creation of a national currency in order to stop Moscow’s
uncontrolled monetary emissions, the adoption of a market economy and
the privatization of land. Critically, all of this was necessary, he said, as
preparation for joining a “common European economic system.” 69
Surprisingly similarly, when the Communist Ivashko campaigned for
the Rada presidency against Chornovil in May 1990, he reiterated the need
for Ukrainian sovereignty and added that this now meant the supremacy
of Ukrainian law over Soviet law in Ukraine (although still stressed that
he opposed separatism). In addition, he said, Ukraine should be an
international actor in its own right. 70 The Ukrainian Party’s supreme
organ, the large Central Committee, adopted a resolution after the election
outlining very similar goals. 71
Ivashko and Communist Party documents indicate that these efforts
reflected primarily economic aims. Thus, in his speech to the post-election
plenary meeting of the Party’s Central Committee, Ivashko declared:
Social and economic policy of the Communist Party of the Ukraine
should be aimed at building an effective economy, ensuring high living
standards, maximum social and economic protection of the people. The
Politburo considers that the strategic direction to achieve this goal is the
republic’s transition to economic sovereignty and independence. This
means first of all the Ukrainian people’s right of ownership of land,
natural resources, mineral resources, forests, water basins, other natural
wealth, and the main means of production, and also independence in
determining the structure of the economy; forms and methods of
economic management, and social production; the taxation policy; the
distribution of the national product, and incomes; establishment of
economic relations at the interrepublican and international levels. 72

68
Kiev International Service in Ukrainian, 1800 GMT, May 28, 1990, FBIS -SOV-90-104
May 30, 1990, p. 103.
69
Kiev International Service (English), 2300 GMT, May 30, 1990, FBIS-CHI-90-105, May
31, 1990, p. 93.
70
Kiev International Service in English, 2300 GMT, May 29, 1990, FBIS-SOV-90-105 May
31, 1990, pp. 92–93.
71
Pravda Ukrainy April 3, 1990, p. 1, FBIS -SOV-90-087 May 4, 1990, p. 97.
72
Kiev International Service in English 2330 GMT, March 31, 1990, FBIS -SOV-90-063
April 2, 1990, pp. 107–108.
26 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

Ivashko was also clearly trying to avoid specific Moscow policies that
were politically unpalatable at home. Most prominently, this meant the
price hikes that the Ryzhkov’s Soviet government had called for in the
spring of 1990. Ivashko took one of the strongest stands against this policy
among the leaders of all 15 republics. 73 Ivashko also declared that
sovereignty was a way to eliminate the heavy-industry bias in the
Ukrainian economy. 74 Far more than the nationalists, however, the
Communists publicly worried about the loss of economic ties that might
occur with separation. Thus Ivashko’s vision was of a sovereign Ukraine
in “mutually profitable relations with the other republics,” which could
only come about if the Soviet federation were turned into a real
federation. 75
Evidence strongly suggests that the Communist line was very much in
tune with public opinion in Ukraine in 1990. Despite their claims to
represent the wishes of the people, even the Rukh leaders themselves
explicitly recognized that they had outpaced public opinion in their
suggestion of eventual secession: “Seriously, the national sentiment of our
people is not on the level of, for instance, people in Lithuania,” lamented
the chief editor of Rukh’s newspaper in April 1990. 76 In the union-wide
referendum of March 1991, the Ukrainian people officially sided with their
Communist leaders, supporting a continued USSR with 70 percent of the
ballots. 77
By December, however, the same people had registered a 90 percent
vote in favor of Ukrainian independence.78 How can one explain this radical
shift? A close examination of opinion poll data and concurrent events
reveals that the change took place more at the level of elite politics than of
mass public opinion. The key to understanding Ukrainian public opinion
is its two-dimensional nature. Throughout 1990 and 1991 (and even for
some time afterwards), Ukrainian citizens perceived an economic interest
in staying in the union, but only if this union could guarantee no
exploitation of Ukraine in the future. The two key dimensions, therefore,
are perceptions of possibility and probability. The wording of Gorbachev’s
March 1991 referendum was absolutely critical in this regard:
Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in
which the rights and freedoms of the individual of any nationality are
guaranteed in full measure? Yes or No.

73
Izvestia May 30, 1990, p. 1; Pravda May 29, 1990, p. 2, FBIS-SOV-90-103 May 29, 1990, pp.
138–139.
74
Pravda May 3, 1990, p. 2, FBIS-SOV-90-087 May 4, 1990, p. 100.
75
Pravda Ukrainy May 3, 1990, p. 2, FBIS -SOV-90-087 May 4, 1990, p. 100; Pravda Ukrainy
May 10, 1990, p. 3.
76
Mlada Fronta (Prague) April 5, 1990, p. 5, FBIS-SOV-90-070, pp. 126–127.
77
Izvestia March 26, 1991, p. 3.
78
Radio Kiev in English 5 December 1991, 0100 GMT, FBIS -SOV-91-234, p. 61.
 Henry E. Hale 27

I have italicized certain words to show how the Gorbachev question

essentially asked them what kind of union they wanted, and the
hypothetical one it proposed was not the existing union but an “ideal” one
in which all fears of exploitation were allayed. If the Gorbachev question
asked people about the ideal union they would prefer, the December 1991
Ukrainian question did not explicitly build in utopian images. It merely
asked people:
Do you support the Act of the Declaration of the Independence of
Ukraine?
Gorbachev’s center could not be trusted, and that given this fact,
people had strong incentive to support secession. This argument becomes
still stronger when we recognize that there was little “absolute” in the
people’s understanding of the term “independence.” Indeed, it was
Kravchuk himself who had declared that “only unity is the true path to
independence” during the campaign for the March referenda that
produced strong pro-union votes. Thus, generally speaking, the strongest
popular support would have been found for a union in which all rights
and national freedoms could be guaranteed. But since such a union was
perceived as being highly unlikely, the population tended to support
something called “independence,” which people did not necessarily
believe would deprive them of important ties to the other Soviet republics.
This interpretation finds strong “micro-level” support in some
remarkable polling data collected by Igor Burov’s independent
sociological center Poshuk during the run-up to the referendum. In a fall
1991 survey, he asked people first whether they supported “the creation of
an independent state of Ukraine,” to which query 71 percent answered
“yes” and 15 percent said “no.” Later on, in the same questionnaire, he
added the word “democratic” to the first question, asking respondents
whether they supported “the creation of a democratic independent state
of Ukraine.” This slight change in wording produced an 11 percent leap in
support for Ukrainian independence, with 82 percent now replying “yes.”
Not stopping here, after a few other questions had been asked, Burov
proceeded to inquire whether people agreed, “It is necessary for Ukraine
to become a member of a new Union.” Strikingly, only 31 percent
disagreed. It must be stressed that this was in the same survey. Although
only 46 percent agreed with this statement, this was half again the number
of people that opposed it, and 22 percent replied that it was hard for them
to say. This question was also asked without any of the “positive spin”
language that had beautified Gorbachev’s question in March 1991. A few
calculations add to the striking quality of the results: Burov’s survey
reveals that at least 20 percent of the people were quite capable of
expressing positive support for both a “new Union” and a “democratic
independent state of Ukraine.” Put even more strongly, more than 50
percent of the people surveyed saw nothing to stop them from both
28 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

supporting an independent Ukraine and declining to oppose a new

Union. 79
It is critical to note that I am not saying that no shift in Ukrainian public
opinion occurred between March and December 1991. Important events in
Moscow took place in the interim that rendered the Soviet Union a much
riskier place for Ukraine but that simultaneously gave Ukrainian leaders a
rare window of opportunity actually to secede. The August coup was the
first such critical event. It finally convinced Ukrainian leaders that they
could not be safe in a union, a fear that was easy to communicate to the
masses even if they did not buy nationalist rhetoric of cultural revival. It
showed that Gorbachev’s promises were not reliable, since conservative
feelings ran so strong that such forces were willing, and potentially able,
to remove Gorbachev himself to achieve their aims if need be. Crucially,
the failure of this coup attempt presented to Ukraine a unique chance to
seize the day—the military was divided and decapitated, and Russian
President Boris Yeltsin’s bold resistance to it had thrown nearly all central
institutions into disarray. If there was ever a chance for Ukraine to win its
independence, this was it.
In defeating the coup, however, Yeltsin’s Russia seemed to many
observers to be bent on taking over Soviet institutions for itself, essentially
cutting other republics out of the most important decisionmaking
processes. Boosted by new power realities and the new moral authority
deriving from Yeltsin’s heroic stand, Russia’s representatives dominated
the new temporary institutions set up to govern the USSR. For example,
Yeltsin’s Prime Minister, Ivan Silaev, became the head of the new
temporary government. While Kravchuk did not trust Gorbachev, these
events gave cause for him to trust the seemingly unpredictable and
volatile Boris Yeltsin even less. Thus, at a press conference on 30 August
1991, the Ukrainian leader called attention to the post-putsch “euphoria”
in Russia and the attendant “exaggeration of the merits of some one
individual or one people.” He pointedly declared:
This is already taking concrete forms. Let’s say [that] all state
structures should be based on the Russian ones and that the cadres should
only be Russian. You see that now a committee has been formed headed
by [Russian Prime Minister Ivan] Silaev and other representatives of
Russia. Right now I do not want to pass judgment on the work of this
committee, but as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine I have my
doubts whether this committee, which is composed of representatives of
one republic, can defend the interests of other republics. 80
As Yeltsin laid claim to Soviet central institutions and as Kravchuk
responded with the rapid establishment of Ukrainian independence,

79
Burov, Igor. Survey of residents of Ukraine conducted by the Ukrainian Independent
Center of Sociological Research “Poshuk” in the fall of 1991.
80
Sil’ski Visti September 4, 1991, p. 1, quoted in Solchanyk 1993, pp. 350–351.
 Henry E. Hale 29

tensions between their two republics began to escalate. On August 26, two
days after Ukraine’s declaration of independence, Yeltsin’s press secretary
stated that if Ukraine followed through on independence, Russia might
lay claim to certain of its regions dominated by Russian-speakers. Russian
vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi then led a Russian delegation to
Ukraine, the purpose of which Yeltsin said was “to tell the Ukrainian
people: If you stay in the union we will not make territorial claims.” 81
Equally importantly, all this took place as Ukraine was gearing up for
presidential elections scheduled for December, elections that had been
planned even before the August coup attempt. 82 These presidential
elections gave Kravchuk added incentive to feel out the contours of his
republic’s opinion structure, aligning himself with what now seemed to be
a clear republic interest in secession. The race pitted several candidates
against each other, but the main contest was between Kravchuk and the
Rukh leader and president of the Lviv legislature, Vyacheslav Chornovil.
Tellingly, all of the other major candidates were on the nationalist side of
the political spectrum, and none of them approached the appeal of
Chornovil. After a hard-fought campaign, Kravchuk won handily,
garnering more than 60 percent of the ballots cast, with Chornovil netting
just 23 percent. 83 On one hand, his victory, which occurred on the same
day as Ukraine’s independence referendum, was a triumph for separatism
and the declaration of independence, since he had championed both in his
campaign. 84 On the other hand, it could also be interpreted as a call for
moderation—if the Ukrainian population had really wanted a complete
break with Russia and the USSR, it could have followed most western
Ukraine voters in opting for the man (Chornovil) who had supported such
a policy much more consistently over the previous two years.
In this light, then, the shift in public opinion that took place in Ukraine
between March and December 1991 is best seen as more a change in risk
calculation than a sudden radical assertion of national will. Even so, this
shift did not simply “happen;” it would be more accurate (if less concise)
to describe the August coup and Russia’s subsequent provocative moves
as providing Ukrainian politicians with important symbolic resources that
were then used to convince their constituents that any future union
represented a grave threat to Ukraine’s economic security. Polling data
indeed suggest that support for the independence option grew (if only by
a few percentage points) between August and December 1991, and that
Ukrainian politicians took the lead in mobilizing this shift. Indeed,
Burov’s poll results strongly suggest that a referendum question worded
similarly to the March 1991 query would have won a similar level of
support even in the fall of 1991, after the coup. Kravchuk and his team
81
Solchanyk 1993, pp. 351–353.
82
Vedomosti USSR 1991, p. 848.
83
Motyl and Krawchenko in Bremmer and Taras (eds.) 1997, p. 269.
84
Marples 1993, p. 42.
30 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

had been steadily exploring the contours of Ukrainian opinion on the

issue of the union ever since the Rada elections of 1990. In the wake of the
coup, they were keen enough observers to have known not only that they
could persuade the people to back independence. Even more critically,
they had to have realized that if they did not do so, their political
opponents certainly would. While this “latent” shift in public opinion in
favor of separatism was not of earth-shaking proportions, it was enough
to convince previously uncertain Ukrainian leaders that secession was
now a winning political strategy. Kravchuk himself therefore sought out
to craft Ukrainian independence on his own terms, and proved successful.
Somewhat ironically, however, he won his separatist victory, defeating his
even more staunchly independence-minded competitors, because he
could most credibly also be seen as a defender of the “first dimension” of
Ukrainian public opinion, which still remained strong as shown above:
the desire to benefit from continued economic ties to Russia.

The Failure to Form a Rump Union: Central Asia and

the CIS
Why did no “rump Soviet Union” form after Ukraine seceded? If Russia
really did want to save the union in some form, then it would have
seemed natural to salvage at least a loose confederation with other willing
states. And while the separatist firebrands (notably Ukraine, the Baltic
countries and Georgia) attracted most of the media attention, a relatively
large number of important republics did voice their readiness to cooperate
closely with Russia. The Central Asian states topped the list of prospective
partners, expressing surprise and even dismay at their sudden
confrontation with independent statehood.
I argue, however, that this apparent convergence of unionist interests
was only illusory, that the kind of unions desired by Russia and Central
Asia were in fact quite different and nearly mutually exclusive, although
common ground did exist. The Central Asian republics, lagging far behind
Russia in most indicators of economic development, were eager to stay in
the union so as to preserve economic ties and, critically, subsidies from
Moscow. Yet Russia had been consistently trying to weaken the USSR
precisely so as to avoid subsidizing other republics. Both sets of republics
also struggled for control over the levers of power in any rump union—
Russia sought to avoid losing a handle on its delicate economic reform
process and Central Asia sought to protect itself against the sometimes
dangerous whims of Russia’s radical government. In the pages that
follow, I will focus primarily on Uzbekistan as representative of general
Central Asian attitudes to the USSR, although I will refer to other cases,
especially the critical republic of Kazakhstan, where appropriate.
Examination of Uzbekistan’s leaders’ actions and statements in 1990–
1991 makes quite clear that Uzbekistan was ready for a national revival
 Henry E. Hale 31

and that it wanted more autonomy than it had been granted by

Gorbachev’s predecessors, but that it backed away from actual secession
precisely because of its poverty and in the hope that it would yet benefit
from ties to the rest of the union. Indeed, Uzbekistan was among the very
poorest of the 15 Soviet republics, as a variety of statistics demonstrate.
For example, just 41 percent of its population lived in urban areas as of
1989. Its retail commodity turnover, a good indicator of living standards,
was just 760 rubles per capita, far below Ukraine’s at 1,210 and Russia’s at
1,400. In this, Uzbekistan is representative of the rest of Central Asia,
although Kazakhstan also contained an industrialized north, populated
primarily by ethnic Russians, that tended to lift some of its statistical
economic averages up closer to those of Russia.
Instead of looking to the past in order to ascribe blame, Uzbekistan’s
leaders saw a reformed Soviet Union as its best chance of escaping its
poverty and dependency in the years ahead. As Uzbek President Islom
Karimov put it in an interview with a German publication in March 1991:
After sober analysis of the situation in Uzbekistan, however, we have
come to the view that our republic’s best prospects lie in a renewed
federation. I would like to give you just two figures: The per-capita
national income in Uzbekistan is not only three times lower than in the
Baltic states, but it is also only half of the union average. The republic has
a completely underdeveloped, one-sided economy. We are mainly
deliverers of raw material, and even the existing processing industry
provides mostly only intermediate products. A total of 92 percent of all
Uzbek cotton fibers are not processed in our country. On the other hand,
we have to import more than half of the goods needed by the population.85
Uzbekistan, therefore, actively sought greater autonomy in order to
restructure its economy, but unlike Ukraine, it never sought outright
secession since it saw ties with the USSR as a ticket to advancement. Thus
Uzbekistan joined all republics in declaring sovereignty in 1990, yet unlike
Ukraine and Russia, the draft New Union Treaty that it submitted to
Gorbachev’s working group in the fall differed very little from the version
Gorbachev drafted. 86 Not surprisingly, Karimov handily orchestrated a 90
percent vote for the union in Gorbachev’s referendum of March 1991.
Karimov did strongly object to Gorbachev’s attempts to impose the treaty
on the republics based only on bilateral negotiations, but he was easily
accommodated when Gorbachev decided to negotiate the treaty directly
with all willing republic leaders as part of the Novo-Ogarevo process in
April 1991. Accordingly, Uzbekistan’s parliament approved the basic
propositions of the latest draft treaty on June 13, 1991, and confirmed that
a delegation to be led by Karimov would negotiate the details further and

85
Berliner Zeitung March 5, 1991, p. 3 FBIS -SOV-91-051, pp. 84–86.
86
Draft New Union Treaty drawn up by Uzbekistan, original document in possession of
the author, 1990.
32 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

would sign it. 87 During August 1991, Uzbekistan declared its intent to be
among the initial signatories of the New Union Treaty, slated to be
formally concluded that same month. 88
The Moscow coup attempt of August 18 did prompt Uzbekistan’s
parliament to proclaim independence, but legislators did not intend this to
mean a complete break with Soviet structures, especially economic ones.
The declaration of independence itself called for a “unified economic
space in the Union” and stated that Uzbekistan would participate in the
creation of a collective security force and in the maintenance of the
strategic troops of the USSR. 89 In fact, the Uzbek-language word that
Karimov chose for “independence” (mustaqillik) was the same word he
had used to declare the much less radical concept of “sovereignty” back in
the summer of 1990 even though other possibilities were available.
Although Russian versions of the declaration reflected the distinction
between the two concepts and thereby mirrored the terminology used in
all other republics that so declared, the Uzbek-language choice fits well
with a desire not to alarm the Uzbek-speaking population. Thus, while
Ukrainian leaders took advantage of terminological ambiguity to bolster
their secession drive, the Uzbek ones used it to push in the other direction.
Indeed, as the fall of 1991 wound down, Karimov remained a strong
supporter of a decentralized union.
Referring back to the above discussion of Russian behavior in the
union, it is clear that the Central Asian desire for continued or even
expanded support did not mesh easily with Russia’s desire to extricate
itself from financial obligations outside its borders. But while few
republics were completely satisfied with Gorbachev’s metropole, these
central Soviet institutions wielded the power to engage in logrolling and
otherwise to cajole each republic into accepting some form of compromise
for the sake of what was perceived as the common good. Republics were
willing to give up some of their “first choice” demands just so as to avoid
the unnecessary costs of transition that the collapse of the union would
involve. Conservatism, then, worked in favor of the union before late
1991, and this held Central Asia and Russia together. Now that the USSR
had collapsed, however, conservatism increasingly pushed in the opposite
direction. The damage of the dissolution had been done, the costs had
been imposed. In this context, then, divergent interests in integration took
on a much greater significance.
Two major Russian interests (one geopolitical and the other economic)
clashed with Central Asian interests in the CIS, ultimately combining to
ensure that no truncated union formed in the wake of the Soviet collapse
throughout the 1990s. First, since Ukraine was perceived to be a much

87
Vedomosti USSR 1991, no. 8, p. 194.
88
Revenko intervi ew.
89
Vedomosti USSR 1991, no. 11, pp. 68–69.
 Henry E. Hale 33

more valuable partner than Central Asia, Russia took a gamble by holding
the latter at bay in an effort to win the trust of the former in the CIS. Public
opinion polling in Russia shows that Russians as a whole regarded the
Central Asian republics as among the least desired integration partners
and Ukraine as the most attractive. 90 Agreeing with Yeltsin’s statement
that he could not conceive of a union without Ukraine, Russian leaders
feared, with justification, that any quick Russian moves to consolidate a
“rump union” immediately after signing the CIS treaty would have only
served to justify Ukraine’s suspicion that Russia was still bent on restoring
its old empire, albeit in a new guise. With a year’s hindsight, Yeltsin’s
Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev described his team’s reasoning: “The
pivotal moment became the Ukrainian referendum. Before Russia the
dilemma arose: either we recognize the independence of Ukraine as a
completed fact (whether we liked it or not was not important), or we
oppose that independence.” This latter option, he said, would have meant
calling in the army. Given this situation, “a USSR without Ukraine or a
CIS without Ukraine would signify, in any case for the leadership of
Ukraine, that this is a union directed against Ukraine.” 91 Thus, Russia
spurned the Central Asian states in the vain hope of winning what it saw
as a greater prize, but as was demonstrated above, this hope was seriously
misplaced.
The second major Russian interest that clashed with Central Asian
ambitions involved economics. As is documented above, Russia
consistently sought to stem the outflow of funds going to other republics
as a form of subsidy. Public opinion research demonstrates that this policy
had strong support in the Russian population at large, as people tended to
support integration projects (even with other Slavic states like Ukraine)
only if this would not cost them anything. 92 The power of this Russian
interest is evident in the fact that Russia itself was the one to destroy the
Ruble Zone, the set of former Soviet territories where the ruble was the
primary currency. Once the Soviet Union broke up, the Ruble Zone
represented a serious threat to the Russian economy in two ways. First, it
encouraged inflation since each newly independent government gave
itself the power to issue unlimited amounts of ruble credits, which could
then be used to buy goods in other republics. Russia eliminated this
problem in the summer of 1992 by imposing a strict system of mutual
accounting in trade. Second, the Ruble Zone became a massive source of
subsidies for the member republics. According to a report drafted by
Western technical advisors for the Russian government, 93 Russia was
providing over 27 percent of its total cash emissions to the republics that
remained in the Ruble Zone in 1992, and by the first quarter of 1993, this

90
Data from VTsIOM polling database. Poll taken in January 1993.
91
Nezavisimaya Gazeta December 8, 1992, p. 5.
92
RFE/RL Daily Reports, no. 70, April 13, 1994.
93
In possession of the author.
34 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

figure had leapt to 55 percent, although it dipped again to 29 percent for

the second quarter. In fact, Russian cash transfers to Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan amounted to 45–70 percent of these
countries’ GDP according to one estimate and were the main means used
to pay their workers’ wages. During the course of 1993, Russia steadily
pushed these republics out of the Ruble Zone, even though Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Belarus and Armenia had proven willing to sign
away virtually the entire control over their economies to Russia in the
Ruble Zone of a New Type treaties of 1993, which called for member
states to contribute gold, hard currency and other highly liquid bank
assets to help back the ruble and to abide not only by Russia’s credit,
emissions and banking policies, but also its overall economic, budget,
trade and customs policies.
In the end, this and similar Russian moves essentially forced Central
Asia and the other unionist republics to build up their own institutions of
independent statehood in a way that made them ever more reluctant to
reintegrate with Russia. As argued above, Russia’s moves compelled them
to discover that the unthinkable was in fact thinkable, that their own
regimes could survive the break in ties with Russia intact. Gradually,
integration became the great unknown and separation the familiar
commodity. The conservative path, therefore, became the path of
independence. Even more importantly, however, some of these republics
launched out on programs designed explicitly to reduce their own
dependence on Russia. Most notably, Karimov aggressively developed
newly discovered oil reserves and built a refining capacity that enabled
Uzbekistan to escape its reliance on Russian energy supplies by 1996 en
route to becoming a significant exporter. Not surprisingly, at just this time,
Uzbekistan moved away from its time-tested unionism to blaze a
decisively separatist path vis-à-vis Russia. Suddenly Karimov was balking
at even the most trivial of CIS agreements that he had considered
uncontroversial before.
The Commonwealth of Independent States was born of chaos, and in
chaos it remained. Negotiators worked tirelessly to produce agreements
that satisfied not only the unionists, but also Ukraine and the fiscally
conservative forces within Russia itself. The result, however, was only to
bring the CIS down to the level of coherence favored by separatist states
like Ukraine, rendering its institutions extremely weak. Although it
generated seemingly countless agreements, few were actually
implemented, and the CIS, as of 1993, was widely regarded as merely a
means for a “civilized divorce,” regulating the process of disintegration
and avoiding Yugoslavia’s path to dissolution. 94 Although some progress
was made in the area of security cooperation, notably peacekeeping

94
Legvold, Robert. “Foreign Policy,” in Timothy J. Colton and Legvold (eds.), After the
Soviet Union: From Empires to Nations (N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), pp. 85–112.
 Henry E. Hale 35

operations in Georgia and Tajikistan, the direction that appeared most

promising as the twentieth century drew to a close was that of creating a
free market of goods and services across much of former Soviet Eurasia.
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan had joined Russia and Belarus in
a kind of “mini-CIS” devoted primarily to forming a customs union, for
which all voiced strong support. Even here, however, complications arose.
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan also belonged to a Central Asian
customs union project that excluded Russia but included Uzbekistan, a
situation that would eventually force them to choose partners so long as
Uzbekistan continued to refuse to join any customs union agreements
involving Russia. Nevertheless, a core group within the CIS was starting
to congeal around this very limited, and relatively cost-free, goal of
creating a free market. 95 By the end of the 1990s, therefore, even the
“geopolitical” forces in Russia were compelled to think in terms of years
and even decades when contemplating CIS integration.
The final piece has thus been added to the puzzle of the Soviet
collapse. When Gorbachev first decided to democratize the USSR, he did
not realize the inherent fragility of this union. Key republics like Ukraine
were at least roughly as developed economically as Russia, and
democratization, combined with historically rooted distrust and clumsy
initial Soviet policymaking, drove them to try to secede and thereby avert
any possibility of Russian exploitation. The Soviet leader nearly managed
to achieve the improbable, allaying Ukraine’s security concerns and
convincing it to remain in a reformed USSR voluntarily, but the plotters of
the August coup in one fell swoop demonstrated irreversibly that Soviet
governments could not be trusted and split the military forces that were
Gorbachev’s last hope of keeping the union together. Although both
Russia and Central Asia appeared to agree on the need to integrate even
after Ukraine had opted out, this consensus proved illusory. Central Asia
wanted a union, but one where it would receive subsidies and retain
significant control over union economic policy. Russia wanted a union,
but one where it would not provide subsidies and would not relinquish
any control over its own economy. A compromise was possible early on,
but Russia sacrificed this opportunity in order to convince Ukraine that it
had given up its imperial ambitions in what proved to be the unrequited
hope that Ukraine would soon return to the unionist fold. In struggling to
save their union, therefore, Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the plotters of the
August coup reaped only its ruin.

95
For what will likely become the definitive work on CIS economic integration in the
1990s, see the forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation in Political Science by Keith Darden,
University of California at Berkeley, expected 1999.
36 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

Conclusion: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse

By virtue of the situation that has taken shape with the formation of the
Commonwealth of Independent States, I am ending my activity in the
post of USSR President. I take this decision for reasons of principle. I have
firmly spoken out for self-sufficiency, the independence of peoples and for
the sovereignty of the republics. But simultaneously for the preservation
of the union state, the integrity of the country. Events have taken another
path. 96
When a glum Gorbachev uttered these words of resignation in the
December of 1991, he ushered in a new world of uncertainty and
opportunity, a world with 15 new states and with only one global
superpower. He also left behind lessons for future leaders. Although
many would see in his life actions to avoid, his strategy of trust-building
and institutional creation offers hope to societies struggling to survive
united. The Soviet Union took its place on the ash heap of history,
although more due to the caprice of contingency than to the feckless
failure of a single man. And while serendipity demands its due, human
experience offers us the opportunity to learn and to create better chances
for ourselves in times to come. Although we must not unthinkingly apply
“lessons” from one situation to another, neither must we assume that
what fails at one juncture in time will necessarily fail at another. The goal
is to identify in the frothy brew of history patterns of behavior that can
guide us in our future choices of drink. To conclude this article, therefore,
it is worth speculating on what the epic collapse of the USSR has to teach
us. The lessons are important and should impact how we cope with
national tensions in states as different as Bosnia and China.
Although I have argued that ethnofederalism was part of the problem
in the USSR, the international community often presents it as a solution to
ethnic conflicts in war-ravaged states like Bosnia. 97 Does the Soviet
experience teach us that this advice is misguided? Is ethnofederalism a
way to build trust in a democratizing society, or does it just create
centrifugal forces that will inevitably rend a teetering union asunder? The
lessons of the Soviet collapse are not so simple. But while this event does
not lend itself to blanket prescriptions, it does suggest the importance of
considering two factors that determine when ethnofederalism promises to
be source of unity, not instability. The first factor is the pattern of relative
wealth among key ethnic regions and the second is leadership. Indeed, the
most important lesson of the Soviet collapse may be that strong and
creative leadership can potentially save even the most unstable
multinational states, but that this process is difficult and fraught with
peril.

96
Gorbachev, Mikhail, Zhizn’ i reformy (Moscow: Novosti, 1995) p. 5.
97
For encouraging me to think about these issues, I am particularly grateful to Jack
Snyder.
 Henry E. Hale 37

If we want to predict whether a given ethnofederation will survive

democratization, we must first and foremost examine how its regions
stack up to each other economically. Ethnofederations are most stable
when they contain one relatively rich hegemonic ethnic region attached to
a series of smaller and poorer ones that will cling to it for the sake of their
economies. All evidence suggests that the USSR would have survived had
it contained just Russia and a set of Central Asian republics. This bodes
well for China, where the vast majority of its ethnic regions are
significantly poorer than the national average and have strong incentive to
look to China’s booming coastal regions for their future development.
Other hist orical examples appear to bear this out, including Russia
itself. Although the Russian Federation contains mostly Russian-
dominated oblasts, it is also home to more than 30 ethnically defined
republics and autonomous regions that together occupy 53 percent of
Russian territory. Some of these national regions have no real hope of ever
actually seceding, since they are completely surrounded by Russian
territory. Others, however, do lie on Russia’s periphery and could
meaningfully secede. Virtually all republics in this peripheral set ranked
lower than the Russian average for the years 1988–1989 in key indicators
of economic development, such as retail commodity turnover, the volume
of services and the number of doctors per capita. 98 Factors other than
relative wealth certainly came into play, of course, and should also be
considered when evaluating the stability of a given ethnofederal state.
Some of these regions had so little institutional autonomy to begin with
that it was very difficult for them to mount separatist claims. 99 In many
cases, the “native” groups themselves had assimilated into the
surrounding cultures quite extensively, reducing for them the fear of
exploitation at the hands of Russia. As I have found in a statistical analysis
of 45 of the USSR’s ethnic regions, including those within Russia, both of
these additional factors (institutional autonomy and assimilation) help us
explain why Russia’s own republics did not follow Ukraine and the Baltic
states in lunging for independence. Yet this same statistical analysis also
suggests that the economic factors were also quite important in keeping
the Russian Federation together in the way I just argued. 100 Thus even
highly nationally aware republics like Tuva backed away from
demanding outright secession despite a history of independence and anti-
Russian violence, and I think it is more than coincidental that Tuva was

98
The main exceptions (among the republics, the units of highest rank) on these three
indicators are Yakutia, Karelia, the Komi Republic, and Kabardino-Balkaria.
99
For an excellent analysis of how such “institutional resources” affected ethnic
mobilization in Russia’s republics, see Dmitri Gorenburg’s doctoral dissertation in
Political Science at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., expected 1998. My own
statistical work also bears out this hypothesis—see my “Parade of Sovereignties: Testing
Theories of Secession in the Soviet Setting,” British Journal of Political Science,
forthcoming 1998.
100
Author.
38 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

also one of the least economically developed regions of the USSR and was
hence dependent on Russia for its economic future. Chechnya, of course,
stands out as the main exception, although even it did in fact count among
the most moderate republics before Djokhar Dudaev, a Soviet general,
seized power there illegally in 1991 and galvanized his support when
Moscow bungled a military attempt to remove him, events reminding us
that leadership and provocation still matter.
But what of ethnofederations that are not so fortunate, that contain an
unstable constellation of national republics? For a state that is about to
democratize, the Soviet experience does strongly warn against creating
ethnofederal institutions where none existed before. The USSR fell apart
when democratic elections forced vote-seeking politicians to outbid each
other for support in explicitly ethnic “homelands,” a process that drove
primarily the richest ones to try to secede and poor ones to cling to the
union. This competition also compelled Russian leaders to seek a greater
position for Russia within the USSR, a process evoking fears of
exploitation in the other republics. The “security dilemma” spiral
accelerated as the rich republics’ separatist demands in turn provoked a
harsher stance among some vocal segments of the Russian polity, which in
turn only strengthened the restive regions’ resolve.
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia also collapsed along this same pattern.
In neither case was there a wealthy, hegemonic region with the economic
power to induce poorer partners to overcome their fears of exploitation in
the union and the political power sufficient to remove any fears of
exploitation by other ethnic groups. Although the Serbs were the most
powerful group in Yugoslavia numerically, few have called them
hegemonic in the way that Russians were in the USSR. In any case, Serbia
was also less developed than the key republics of Slovenia and Croatia,
and it was precisely these two wealthiest ethnic regions that led the
separatist charge, while the poorer regions of the country tended to
remain unionist. Susan Woodward documents this claim in her excellent
book on the disintegration of Yugoslavia, concurring that political leaders
in the poorest ethnic republics had good economic incentives not to raise
grievances against the central government. 101 The surge to secession of the
rich republics ultimately plunged Yugoslavia into a civil war, the
implications of which have still not played themselves out. In
Czechoslovakia, the situation was more complex since it has frequently
been stated that the somewhat poorer Slovaks initiated the break-up.
More rigorous analysis of events, however, has recently pointed to the
Czechs as the initiator of the union’s demise. Like Russia in the USSR, the
Czech government (led by Vaclav Klaus) sought to end the situation
whereby the Czechs were essentially subsidizing the Slovak economy at a

101
Woodward, Susan L., Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War
(Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995) pp. 349–352.
 Henry E. Hale 39

time when the Czech Republic needed fiscal discipline for the sake of
successfully implementing marketizing reforms. In the end, the Czechs
(who, unlike the Russians, were not numerous enough to escape a security
threat from other groups) ultimately pushed the Slovaks out of the union,
since the latter would not agree formally to surrender most key economic
levers to Klaus’s government. 102
History does suggest some means by which such states might still
survive the process of democratization. Nehru “federalized” India’s
budding democracy along ethno-linguistic lines in the early 1950s, and
succeeded in keeping the country together largely by harshly enforcing a
ban on all secessionist activity. 103 Yugoslavia, however, represents the
negative example of this policy, as Slovenia and then Croatia balked at
Slobodan Milosevic’s threats to use troops to preserve the union. A third-
party guarantee of ethnic group security might also facilitate the transition
to democracy in an ethnofederation, as the architects of the Bosnian peace
plan have hoped. Yet the problem, as Chaim Kaufman has pointed out,
comes when this third party finally leaves the locals to their own devices.
This departure creates much of the same kind of uncertainty about the
future that drove Yugoslavia’s richest republics to secede in the first
place. 104 A common external threat might similarly force fearful ethnic
regions to stick together as they democratize, but it is equally likely that
this external threat would attempt to manipulate the potentially separatist
groups as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy, or more importantly,
that one group might fear that the other group has already become just
such an “agent.” Leaders might also seek to dismantle their own
ethnofederal institutions, but this is likely to politicize the very thing they
are seeking to depoliticize—ethnicity. Indeed, even at the very apogee of
Soviet power, national groups sometimes invited certain reprisals by
publicly protesting much more minor changes in ethnic group status.
Yet Mikhail Gorbachev demonstrated that creative leadership can still
overcome the inherent vulnerability of ethnofederal states in the face of
democratization, largely by providing security guarantees to groups by
building both trust and institutions. More by political instinct than grand
design, the first and last Soviet president developed such a strategy to
assuage the security concerns of his richest republics and thereby nearly
saved his union. Although he had largely written off the steely separatists
of the Baltic region, he had actually managed to forge an agreement that
all of the most important republics were on track to sign, indicating the

102
On this point, see Abigail Innes, Ph.D. dissertation in political science, M.I.T., 1997.
103
Brass, Paul R, “Language and National Identity in the Soviet Union and India,” in
Alexander J. Motyl (ed.), Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities: History and
Comparison in the Study of the USSR (N.Y.: Columbia University Press), pp. 99–128. I am
also grateful to Steven Wilkinson for discussions on this subject.
104
Kaufmann, Chaim. “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars,”
International Security v. 20, no. 4, Spring 1996, pp. 136–175.
40 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

great promise of this policy direction. What, then, was this “Gorbachev
model” of ethnofederal reform leadership? Above all, he had to build
trust. But the necessary materials, needless to say, were in no great
surplus in the late Soviet era. Indeed, political activists at just this time
first found the freedom to investigate and publicize national grievances of
the Soviet past. In part this meant that Gorbachev had to assure republic
leaders and publics that he took their concerns seriously and was not out
to trick them. But it also required the creation of new political institutions
that made each republic unlikely to face exploitation in the future.
The Gorbachev model thus required attention to both process and
product. The process had to begin with the recognition that each republic
was in fact sovereign, that it had the right to decide its own fate. The
process thus had to be inclusive and to engage directly the top elected
decisionmakers of the republics, above all the presidents, in order to avoid
the perception that this was something imposed on them from above. The
process also had to be predictable—Gorbachev sough t to institute a series
of laws channeling separatist pressures and, more importantly, making
Moscow’s responses to insubordination appear fair and foreseeable rather
than exploitative and arbitrary. The process also had to be tacitly enforced.
While any massive use of military might threatened to torpedo the whole
trust-building project, Gorbachev still wanted the republics to know that
he could call in the troops as a last resort should they leave the bargaining
table altogether, or should they exceed other boundaries of civil behavior.
This could never be spoken directly lest it undermine the recognition of
sovereignty—it could only be implied. These four elements (recognition,
inclusiveness, predictability and tacit enforcement) represent the delicate
balance Gorbachev sought to strike in the process of negotiating the “new
union.”
The product of the negotiations, however, was equally important: a
new set of Soviet institutions that would have restricted the central
government’s opportunity to exploit and would have empowered
republics to defend their own interests in case of a breakdown. The
Gorbachev model first and foremost granted the republics great autonomy
to set their own economic policies, including methods of taxation and
regulation. This meant that the republics, not the central government,
controlled the key levers by which Moscow had exercised control in the
past, reducing the possibility that it could do so again without the
republics’ consent. To this end, Gorbachev also sought to give the
republics the genuine right to secede, making real what Stalin’s
constitution had falsely promised. If the republics could be convinced that
they could secede anytime they saw fit, they would be much more likely to
stay in the union in the first place. Gorba chev thus pointedly refrained
from force in dealing with Armenia, the only “hard-core” separatist
republic consciously to follow the 1990 law on secession. In addition,
Gorbachev’s model gave the republics independent access to the
 Henry E. Hale 41

international arena, allowing them their own representation in foreign

capitals and the right to establish their own direct foreign economic
relations. In pushing such a decentralized “product,” therefore, the Soviet
leader focused far into the Eurasian horizon, confident that ec onomic
interests would eventually draw the republics more tightly together of
their own accord if only he could sustain their trust. In fact, the process
and product of these negotiations reinforced each other quite nicely—by
agreeing to and even proposing institutions that empowered the
republics, Gorbachev added credibility to the center’s commitment to the
republics’ security.
Although the Gorbachev model of ethnofederal democratization failed,
it failed not because of any flaw intrinsic to its design. It failed for an
entirely secondary reason—Gorbachev misjudged the level of breakdown
within his own “force ministries,” most notably the army and KGB. The
problem was not that these institutions were incapable of applying
coercion—the problem was that their leaders did not have the intelligence
(perhaps in both senses of the word) to realize that their troops would not
obey orders to shed blood without the firm orders of their Commander-in-
Chief, Mikhail Gorbachev. When the nervous nabobs of the August coup
issued their infamous proclamation, they unwittingly undermined two
critical elements of Gorbachev’s strategy for saving the union. By
attempting to seize power, they convinced key republics that Moscow
could never be trusted since dark forces always seemed to be lurking in
wait of an opportunity to grab the political reins for exploitative purposes.
But at the same time that they convinced key republics that they needed to
secede, the conspirators provoked a glaring split in the military itself,
making outright secession not only thinkable but relatively risk-free.
Ukraine then bolted, dragging Russia away with it. In hopes of saving its
valuable ties to Ukraine, the Yeltsin administration largely cast away the
republics of Central Asia that had virtually prostrated themselves to
restore the union, sealing the fragmented fate of post-Soviet Eurasia.
The Gorbachev model had failed, but its failure demonstrated not the
strategy’s own inadequacy but the danger inherent in democratizing any
unstable ethnofederation. Had a few different men wielded the force of
Soviet arms in that momentous August of 1991, we might today be
writing about a reforming confederation stretching across the Eurasian
continent. Had Gorbachev better understood the lack of communication
within the military, or had he more astutely gauged the blind impudence
of his chief deputies, we might today still be calling him “Mr. President.”
But despite all of these historical what-might-have-beens, the USSR
collapsed in the end—and not only the USSR, but also Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia. The fact that democratization destroyed all three of these
“unstable” unions—despite the diverse leadership strategies of such major
twentieth century figures as Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel and
Slobodan Milosevic—suggests that the underlying centrifugal dynamic is
42 The Strange Death of the Soviet Union

quite powerful and resistant to a great variety of approaches to combating

it. Ironically, it is sometimes the great scope of historical contingency, the
vast number of possible things that “could go wrong,” that causes
ethnofederations to behave in a predictable manner. While creative
leadership could have defied the odds and saved the USSR, such
strategies are by nature extremely delicate. Any number of miscues and
false steps could have disrupted the sensitive operation of building trust.
Any one of these “chance” events, therefore, could have been expected to
trigger the “predicted” collapse of an unstable ethnofederal system as it
democratized.
The three Slavic leaders that gathered outside Minsk on that cold
December day in 1991, however, were not thinking about chance or the
laws of history—they were there to resolve a very immediate crisis of
power that threatened the entire Eurasian landmass. Boris Yeltsin and
Leonid Kravchuk sought opposite solutions, yet found agreement in the
vague symbolism of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Yet it was
only later that Yeltsin realized he had been bested. Having set Ukraine
free in the hope of keeping it, he found that Ukraine had simply flown
away. To make things worse, the Central Asian states had in the
meantime found their wings and left the unionist nest. Gorbachev had
seen this coming, but only after he himself was too weak to stop it. His
day in the sun done, he could only protest as events took their course. The
Soviet Union thus ended where Slavic civilization first began, in the dark
shadow of the Belorussian forest.