Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

H

2

Foreign Policy Initiatives

Gorbachev deserves as much credit as any head of state for the end of the Cold War. One of his first personnel changes was to replace the longtime Soviet foreign minister, Gromyko, with Eduard Shevardnadze, the CPSU first secretary of the Georgian SSR. Between 1985 and 1991, Gorbachev held a series of path-breaking summit conferences with U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. At his meeting with Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, the two leaders exchanged bold new arms reduction proposals, although negotiations foundered over the Soviet demand for limitations on the United States’ Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a military research program for developing an antiballistic missile (ABM) defense system. Gorbachev and Reagan signed an agreement in December 1987 to eliminate medium-range and certain shorter-range missiles in Europe. In May 1990 Gorbachev and Bush initialed a treaty to end production and reduce stockpiles of chemical weapons, and in July 1991 they signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) requiring substantial cuts in strategic nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev’s gambits in other areas of foreign policy were equally striking. He and Shevardnadze agreed in April 1988 to the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. It was completed by February 1989; in October Soviet leaders acknowledged that the 1979 intervention had “violated the norms of proper behavior.” In December 1988, at the UN General Assembly, Gorbachev announced unilateral reductions in conventional forces, notably in Eastern Europe and along the China-USSR border. During his visit to Beijing in May 1989, China and the USSR agreed to resume normal relations after a 30-year rift. At a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome, Gorbachev promised that the Soviet Union would allow full religious freedom, and the USSR and the Vatican agreed to establish diplomatic ties. Relations with Israel also improved, as the Soviets relaxed restrictions on Jewish emigration. After August 1990, with tensions rising in the Persian Gulf, the USSR generally supported the U.S.-led effort to use economic and military pressure to force Iraq to give up its annexation of Kuwait.

I

Communism in Crisis

Among the most audacious departures from past policy was the refusal of the USSR to intervene in Eastern Europe when popular pressure for political transformations there gained steam in 1989. Largely for this reason, reform movements were able to oust Communist governments all across the Soviet bloc. In the most dramatic change, the Berlin Wall was torn down and Communist East Germany merged with West Germany, forming a united Federal Republic of Germany. Unwilling to expend resources on sustaining old structures in the area, and increasingly distracted by domestic developments, the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its troops from Eastern Europe and to dissolve COMECON and the Warsaw Pact, two cornerstones of its postwar foreign policy.

These revolutionary changes were soon echoed inside the USSR. Events might conceivably have taken a different turn in the short term had Gorbachev been willing either to use military force to contain the swelling discontent or, alternatively, to resign from the CPSU and attempt to take charge of the democratic movement. Doing neither, he was caught in a pincer between conservative and liberal factions and points of view.

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The beneficiaries of the growing disarray in Gorbachev’s administration were the union republics, hollow shells for much of their existence but now suddenly able to challenge Moscow. Their governments newly elected in 1990, the republics profited from long-suppressed nationalism, from hopes they would be more adept than the center in reforming the economy, and from a belief that only they stood in the way of complete chaos. One by one, the republic parliaments adopted resolutions affirming their sovereignty and the primacy of their laws over Soviet legislation. In several cases, notably in Lithuania and Georgia, the republic went so far as to assert its complete independence from the Soviet Union. The RSFSR, whose legislature passed a sovereignty resolution on June 12, 1990, became more and more of a thorn in Gorbachev’s side as Boris Yeltsin bid for popular support in what became an acrimonious duel with the Soviet president. Gorbachev, having vacillated for a year between oppressive and conciliatory policies, gambled in the spring of 1991 on an effort to renegotiate with the republics the 1922 treaty that had formed the USSR. A draft Union Treaty was worked out that the RSFSR and six or seven other republics were prepared to initial on August 20, 1991.

The signing ceremony never took place, for on August 19 a group of Communist hard-liners in the highest councils of the regime—spearheaded by Gorbachev’s prime minister, vice-president, defense minister, and KGB chief—attempted to impose a national state of emergency and to force him to go along with the decision. The coup failed abjectly. Yeltsin, having rallied pro-democracy forces in front of the Russian parliamentary building, emerged as the hero of the hour. On August 22 the army withdrew its tanks from Moscow and the leaders of the plot surrendered. Gorbachev, discredited by his inept handling of the crisis, never recovered from it. On August 24 he resigned as general secretary of the CPSU. Within several days the Communist Party’s activities had been suspended; in November 1991 Yeltsin dissolved it, making it defunct within the borders of the RSFSR.

I

1

Republics Secede

Between August 20 and August 31, eight union republics (Estonia and Latvia in the Baltic region; Ukraine, Belorussia, and Moldavia in the European USSR; Kirgizia and Uzbekistan in Central Asia; and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus) joined Lithuania and Georgia in declaring their independence. The Tajik, Armenian, and Turkmen republics followed in September and October, leaving only the RSFSR and Kazakhstan, legally speaking, as members of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin unilaterally asserted Russian control over many of the remaining organizational and financial assets of the USSR. On December 7, 1991, six days after a referendum in Ukraine overwhelmingly backed Ukrainian independence, Yeltsin met with the Ukrainian and Belorussian heads of state in Belorussia. The three leaders signed an agreement proclaiming the Soviet Union to be defunct and announcing the formation of a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose grouping of the three Slavic republics without any central state structure. Eight other republics joined the CIS two weeks later. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev announced his resignation as president in a solemn television address. The rump Soviet parliament passed its final resolution, acknowledging the dissolution of the Soviet Union, on December 26. On December 31 all residual functions of the first Communist state ceased: The USSR no longer existed.

J

Soviet Legacy

The collapse of the Soviet Union paved the way for remarkable turmoil in the area. The CIS, to which all the post-Soviet countries except Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are signatories, has been a feeble presence. The newly independent states have for the most part gone their own way, choosing markedly different trajectories in the process.

The Baltic States have by general agreement made the most rapid advances in the direction of a functioning market economy and democratic institutions. In most of Central Asia and in Belarus (formerly Belorussia), reforms have been much thinner and patterns of government have a pronounced neo-Soviet air. The Russian Federation (formerly the RSFSR) and Ukraine occupy a middling position, with some progress in both the economic and the political domains counterbalanced by signs of the same lack of vision for which Gorbachev was faulted before 1991. Civil wars and extreme instability have grievously impeded development in Moldova (formerly Moldavia), Tajikistan, and the countries of the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan).

Despite their legal divorce from the Soviet center, the successor states share many common and overlapping problems. Trade patterns have been disrupted by economic reform, tariff and currency barriers, and the preference of many exporters (such as the Russian oil and gas industry) to sell their products in markets outside the confines of the former USSR. Environmental degradation continues in many parts of the former Soviet Union, and the resulting pollutants do not respect international borders. Territorial disputes have set many of the former republics off against others. One conflict—between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh area—has already resulted in deadly violence and ethnic cleansing. The potentially most dangerous dispute is between Russia and Ukraine over possession of the Crimean Peninsula in southeastern Ukraine, which is populated largely by ethnic Russians.

A fortified CIS could possibly deal with some of these problems. Bilateral and multilateral agreements of a more specialized nature may also have their place. The expectations and ambitions of the Russian Federation are pivotal to future developments. While many Russians have a sentimental attachment to the Soviet past, and regret that the USSR’s collapse diminished their country’s standing in the world, the Russian Federation for the foreseeable future is likely to be too weak and divided to systematically reassert Russian interests in the former union republics.

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