Gorbachev never implemented any comprehensive economic reform. No presidential plan ever became a reality. Yeltsin nullified all his plans. The continued economic deterioration in the Soviet Union stemmed mainly from the withdrawal of the Party from the economy, that is, the destruction of the centrally planned economy, as well as the disruption stemming from republics going their separate ways, and the impact of breaking economic links with Eastern Europe. After January 1992, with full power in Russia, Yeltsin and his economists imposed shock therapy with catastrophic results. By 1994, industrial production in post-Soviet Russia would fall to half of its already disastrous 1991 level.
The end of the Soviet Union as a multi-national federal state came in 1989-91. In these three years, Gorbachev stopped ignoring the national question. In September 1989, in an effort to deal with growing separatism, the CC held a Plenum on the national question, but things had unraveled too far to stop. Anatoly Chernyaev called the CC Plenum “stillborn, a platform that was outdated even before it was written.”552 On specific occasions in these years Gorbachev tried to repress the separatists. After February 1991, he switched strategies and tried to accommodate the separatists with a renegotiated Union Treaty.
Everything failed. Nationalist separatism triumphed in the outlying republics. Yeltsin took Russia out of the USSR to press ahead with his economic program. Years later Gorbachev admitted how late he came to appreciate the complexity of the national question.553 From the Baku riots in December 1986 to Yeltsin’s removal of the Kremlin’s red flag in December 1991, separatist feeling and national strife grew all over the USSR.
Eastern Europe’s 1989 upheavals worsened national relations in the USSR. National feeling against the Soviet Union and Russians contributed to the downfall of many Communist governments in 1989. In turn, these upheavals encouraged separatists in the smaller republics in the USSR. In August 1989, a non-Communist government formed in Poland. In October 1989, the regime in Hungary collapsed. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. In November 1989 in Czechoslovakia, a “velvet revolution” was victorious. In December 1989 in Rumania, anti-Ceaucescu elements forcibly overthrew and executed him and his wife.
The weakening of the CPSU in all areas of Soviet life weakened the one institution proven capable of holding a disparate people together. Ligachev remarked, “By April 1989, the Secretariat’s sessions, at which we could and should have discussed such a question [Georgian nationalist secessionism], had long since ceased. …I suddenly realized how strangely weak government authority in the country was becoming.”554
Russia was the linchpin of the whole USSR, and Russian separatism posed the greatest threat of all. Jerry Hough said that, ultimately, Russia ended the USSR by seceding from it.555 Lenin and Stalin had supported affirmative action, a Russian subsidy to bring the development of non-Russian peoples up to Russian levels. This policy enormously speeded up the economic and cultural progress of downtrodden peoples. Nevertheless, shortcomings remained. The Russians seemed blind to certain problems. For example, they ignored the threat to nationality and language involved when huge numbers of Russian workers emigrated to small republics, tipping the language and ethnic balance. In Estonia and Latvia, for example, this tipping created a festering sore. As elsewhere, when not skillfully handled, affirmative action caused a backlash. Some Russians resented the ongoing subsidy of outlying republics. Such resentment fueled Russian nationalism.
Russian nationalism grew for other reasons too. In the Brezhnev era, Soviet leaders had tolerated Russian nationalism. The dominant elements in the Brezhnev Politburo reasoned that Russian nationalism was a salutary counterweight to the Western influences penetrating Russian society because of detente.
Western influence on the national question in the USSR went far beyond the subtle, long-term effects of détente. Over the whole Soviet era—unobstructed in the final years—Western radio voices worked to aggravate national strife in the USSR. Radio Liberty, filled with rabid right-wing nationalists recruited from non-Russian Soviet republics, beamed a steady stream of broadcasts in non-Russian languages aimed at stirring separatist rage.556
Through the Interregional Group in the USSR Congress and the glasnost media, the dissident, Andrei Sakharov, popularized the concept of “sovereignization.” This was the idea that Russia too was deprived of equality with other republics by the Stalin-era constitution and that a new constitution should give Russia its own republican institutions.557 The “democrats” adopted Sakharov’s sovereignization idea and, when elected chair of the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1990, Boris Yeltsin put it into effect.
Sakharov framed the sovereignization demand as a negation of the Stalin policy on nationalities. That appealed both to Yeltsin’s “democrats” and to Gorbachev’s reformers. In 1988 with Gorbachev’s and Yakovlev’s tacit support, Sakharov visited the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave to make an on-the-spot analysis, surely a case of the blind leading the blind. In 1988-89, Sakharov aired his views in the media. His radical sovereignization view was:
All republics both union and autonomous, autonomous oblasts [regions] and national okrugs [territories] must be granted equal rights, with the preservation of the present territorial borders. They must all receive the maximum degree of independence. Their sovereignty must be minimally limited in such areas as defense, foreign policy, communications, and transportation. …Russian autonomous regions such as Yakutiya, Chuvashiya, Bashkiriya, and Tatariya must receive the same rights as Ukraine and Estonia. There must be no distinction between republics and autonomous oblasts. All must be turned into republics and all must have the right to secede from the Union.558
What was the appeal of sovereignization? Sounding democratic, sovereignization departed from the traditional affirmative action policy. Sovereignization required no struggle against national inequality, certainly not on the part of the Russians, historically the dominant and privileged nation. Sakharov was explicit on this point, saying the Stalinist system “oppressed the large peoples as well as the small ones, particularly the Russian people, one of its main victims.”559 Sovereignization also required no struggle for multinational unity. The concept abandoned the Communist class-based approach to the national question, which affirmed the democratic right of nations to self determination, including the right of secession, and spelled out the conditions under which secession of a small nation from a larger state was justified as a last resort.560 Sovereignization appealed to the separatists because it blessed their departure. It appealed to the pro-capitalist “democrats” because it was a classless and Party-less formula, and it was consistent with their “anti-Stalinism” program on other issues. Sakharov’s doctrine dovetailed with Yeltsin’s desire to pull Russia out of the USSR. The sovereignization notion placed Sakharov firmly in the Bukharin–Khrushchev tradition of blundering opportunism on the national question.
Unresolved national problems differed in various regions of the Soviet Union. Nationalism had strong appeal in the Baltic states, which had become part of the USSR in 1939 after twenty years of state independence. In the Transcaucasus, nationalism was fueled by a longstanding territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the Islamic areas of Soviet Central Asia, nationalism was stimulated by resurgent Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The Tatars and Chechens, who had been uprooted by Stalin in the war years, nurtured unredressed grievances. Russia, the keystone of the USSR, had its own feelings of grievance too.