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archie brown
Soviet troops was intended by their chiefs in the power ministries to be but the
beginning of a more general crackdown on all fissiparous movements. They
also hoped to separate Gorbachev from the most liberal-minded members
of his team and from the democratic movement that had developed after
1989 in Russian society. In the latter aim in particular the conservatives had
some success. Yet – in contrast with the sustained violence in Chechnya in
post-Soviet Russia – each incident in which force was used in the Gorbachev
era was a one-day event. The forces favouring violent suppression of national
and separatist movements were never given their head to ‘finish the job’,
partly because of Gorbachev’s reluctance on moral grounds to shed blood and
partly because he realised that such violence as had been applied was entirely
counter-productive.
Separatist movements in the Soviet Union were given a huge impetus by
developments in Eastern Europe in 1989. It was at this point that the radicali-
sation of the political agenda came full circle. Developments within the Soviet
Union itself had been the key to change in the rest of Communist Europe.
The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe had decided to test the sincerity
of Gorbachev’s professed willingness to let the people of each country decide
for themselves the character of their political system. They could not fail to
notice that, to their surprise, domestic liberalisation had gone further by the
end of 1988 within Russia than it had in most of the Warsaw Pact countries.
The outcome of taking Gorbachev at his word was that in the course of one
year Eastern European countries became non-Communist and independent.
For Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, this was especially significant. They
were no longer ready to argue simply for greater sovereignty within a renewed
Soviet Union but for an independent statehood that would be no less than that
enjoyed by Czechs, Hungarians and Poles.
53
Moreover, competitive elections
had brought to the fore politicians – including, in the case of Lithuania, even
the Communist Party first secretary (Algirdas-Mikolas Brazauskas) – ready to
embrace the national cause.
When Gorbachev had declared each people’s ‘right to choose’, he had in
mind existing states. He truly believed that there was a ‘Soviet people’ who
had a lot in common which transcended national differences. His doctrine
of liberation was not intended to lead to separatism in the USSR. When he
came round to recognising the reality of the Soviet Union’s own ‘nationality
problem’, his preferred solution was to turn pseudo-federation into genuine
53 Archie Brown, ‘TransnationalInfluences inthe Transition from Communism’, Post-Soviet
Affairs 16, 2 (Apr.–June 2000): 177–200.
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The Gorbachev era
federation – even, as a last resort, in late 1991 into a loose confederation. In April
1991 Gorbachev initiated a new attempt to negotiate a Union Treaty that would
preserve a renamed Union on a voluntary basis. Only nine out of the fifteen
republics participated in the talks. The fact that they went ahead regardless
reflected the fact that Gorbachev and the liberal wing of the leadership (people
such as Yakovlev, Shakhnazarov and Cherniaev) had come to accept de facto
that the Union would not consist of as many as fifteen republics in the future.
They wished, however, that secession, where it had become a political necessity,
would be orderly and legally defined.
Events conspired against the preservation of even a smaller union. The
election of Yeltsin as Russian president in June 1991 gave him a legitimacy
to speak for Russia that was now greater than that of Gorbachev, who had
been only indirectly elected by a legislature representing the whole of the
USSR more than a year earlier. For some time Yeltsin had been pressing for
Russian sovereignty within the Union. In May 1990 he insisted that Russian law
had supremacy over Union law. This was a massive blow against a federalist
solution to the problems of the Union.
54
The same claim had been made on
behalf of Estonia, but Russia contained three-quarters of the territory of the
USSR and just over half of its population, so the threat to the future of a
federal union was of a different order. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1991,
the nine plus one negotiations had produced a draft agreement which Yeltsin
and the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, were prepared to sign. The
president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, at that time a strong supporter
of preserving a Union, played a constructive role in securing the agreement.
55
Gorbachev had made many concessions. A vast amount of power was to be
devolved to the republics, so much so that the conservative majority within
the CPSU apparatus, the army and the KGB were convinced that this would
be but a stepping-stone to the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Thus, with the draft Union Treaty due to be signed on 20 August 1991,
and with Gorbachev preparing to fly back to Moscow from his holiday home
in Foros on the Crimean coast, the final blow to the Union was struck by
people whose main aim was to preserve it. Gorbachev, his wife and family
and one or two close colleagues (including Cherniaev) were put under house
arrest on 18 August and a state of emergency was declared in Moscow early
in the morning of 19 August. A self-appointed State Committee for the State
of Emergency was set up in which the Soviet vice-president, Gennadii Ianaev,
54 See Aron, Boris Yeltsin,p.377.
55 Georgii Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobody: Reformatsiia Gorbacheva glazami ego pomoshchnika
(Moscow: Rossika Zevs, 1993), p. 233.
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archie brown
had been persuaded to play the most public role. In order to provide a fig leaf
of legality, the plan had been to persuade Gorbachev to hand over his powers
(temporarily, he was told) to the vice-president.
From the moment that Gorbachev denounced the delegation which had
been sent to cajole or intimidate him into acquiescing with their action (which
had begun with cutting off all his telephones) the putschists were in trou-
ble.
56
The key figures in this attempt to turn the clock back (which, if it had
succeeded, would logically have resulted in severe repression in the most dis-
affected republics and a return to a highly authoritarian regime in the Soviet
Union as a whole) were, unsurprisingly, the chairman of the KGB, Vladimir
Kriuchkov, the powerful head of the military-industrial complex of the Soviet
Union, Oleg Baklanov, and the minister of defence, Dmitrii Iazov. Many senior
Communist Party officials sympathised with them and one Politburo member,
Oleg Shenin, was intimately involved in the coup attempt. Because, however,
the CPSU had by this time lost whatever prestige it once enjoyed, the emphasis
of the plotters was on patriotism and preserving the Soviet state. There was no
reference to restoring the monopoly of power of the Communist Party or to
Marxism-Leninism. Many people demonstrated in Moscow against the coup,
but throughout the country as a whole most citizens waited to see who would
come out on top. Many republican and most regional party leaders assumed
that those who had taken such drastic action would prevail and hastened to
acknowledge the ‘new leadership’.
It emerged, however, that even the most conservative section of the Soviet
party and state establishment had been affected by the changes in Soviet society
and the new norms that had come to prevail over the previous six and a half
years. Yeltsin, in the Russian White House (the home at that time of the Russian
government), became the symbol of resistance to the coup. He received strong
support from Western leaders, although a few had initially been prepared to
accept the coup as a fait accompli, among them President Mitterrand of France.
The tens of thousands of Muscovites (several hundred thousand over several
days when account is taken of comings and goings) who surrounded the White
House raised the political cost of its storming, but would not have prevented
the building and its occupants being seized, if the army, Ministry of Interior
and KGB troops had acted with the kind of ruthlessness they displayed in
56 On the coup, see Mikhail Gorbachev, The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons (London:
HarperCollins, 1991); Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed.
Robert English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2000), esp. ‘Afterword to the U.S. Edition’, pp. 401–23; and V. Stepankov and E.
Lisov, Kremlevskii zagovor: Versiia sledstviia (Moscow: Ogonek, 1992).
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The Gorbachev era
pre-perestroika times. Yet, faced with political resistance, the forces of coercion
themselves became divided. Since the coup leaders were people who had for
several years been denouncing Gorbachev – at first, in private, and of late in
public – for ‘indecisiveness’, it is ironic that their own indecision made certain
the failure of the coup. They lacked the resolution to carry it to its logical
conclusion and gave up the attempt as early as 21 August.
The putsch was, however, a mortal blow both for the Union and for the
leadership of Gorbachev. Having seen how close they had been to being fully
reincorporated in a Soviet state whichwouldhave been a throwbacktothe past,
the Baltic states instantly declared their independence. This was recognised
by the Soviet Union on 6 September. Four days later Armenia followed suit,
while Georgia and Moldova already considered themselves to be independent.
While Gorbachev had been isolated on the Crimean coast, Yeltsin had been the
public face of resistance to the coup, and Gorbachev’s position became weaker
and Yeltsin’s stronger in its aftermath. Taking full advantage of this further shift
in the balance of power, Yeltsin was no longer content with the draft Union
Treaty that was to have been signed in August. New negotiations saw further
concessions from Gorbachev which would have moved what remained of a
Union into something akin to a loose confederation. Ultimately, this did not
satisfy the leaders of the three Slavic republics – Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk of
Ukraine, and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus. At a meeting on 8 December
1991 they announced that the Soviet Union was ceasing to exist and that they
were going to create in its place a Commonwealth of Independent States (see
Map 12.1). Not the least of the attractions of this outcome for Yeltsin was that
with no Union there would be no Gorbachev in the Kremlin. In the months
following the coup he had been sharing that historic headquarters of Russian
leaders with Gorbachev, but, given their rivalry, such a ‘dual tenancy’, like
‘dual power’ in 1917, could not last.
In a televised ‘Address to Soviet Citizens’ on 25 December 1991, just as the
Soviet state itself was coming to an end, Gorbachev announced that he was
ceasing to be president of the USSR. He said that, although he had favoured
sovereignty of the republics, he could not accept the complete dismemberment
of the Soviet Union and held that decisions of such magnitude should have
been accepted only if ratified by popular will. Looking back on his years in
power, he observed that all the changes had been carried through in sharp
struggle with ‘the old, obsolete and reactionary forces’ and had come up
against ‘our intolerance, low level of political culture and fear of change’. Yet,
he could justly claim that the society ‘had been freed politically and spiritually’,
with the establishment of free elections, freedom of the press and freedom of
349
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0
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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The Gorbachev era
worship. On foreign policy the gains seemed to Gorbachev to be especially
clear:
An end has been put to the ‘Cold War’, the arms race and the insane mili-
tarisation of our country, which disfigured our economy, social thinking and
morals. The threat of world war has been removed.
Moreover:
We opened ourselves up to the rest of the world, renounced interference in
the affairs of others and the use of troops beyond our borders. In response,
we have gained trust, solidarity and respect.
Looking ahead, Gorbachev had words of warning:
I consider it vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements of
the last few years. We have earned them through the suffering of our entire
history and our tragic experience. We must not abandon them under any
circumstances or under any pretext. Otherwise, all our hopes for a better
future will be buried.
57
57 The full text of Gorbachev’s resignation speech is to be found in Mikhail Gorbachev,
Zhizn’ i reformy, vol. i,pp.5–8; and in the abbreviated English translation of that book:
Gorbachev, Memoirs (London: Transworld, 1996), pp. xxvi–xxix.
351
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13
The Russian Federation
michael mc faul
The immediate afterglow of the failed coup attempt in August 1991 must rank
as one of the more optimistic periods in Russian history. In August 1991, like
many other times in Russia’s past, Kremlin rulers had issued orders to suppress
the people. This time around, some of the people resisted. For three days, a
military stand-off ensued between those defending elected representatives of
the people in the White House – the home to Russia’s Congress of People’s
Deputies – and those carrying out orders issued by non-elected leaders in
the Kremlin.
1
Popular resistance to the coup attempt was not widespread. In
fact, except for Moscow, St Petersburg and the industrial centres in the Urals,
there were no signs of resistance at all.
2
But this concentrated opposition,
especially in Moscow, produced major consequences for Russia’s history. In
this round of conflict between the Russian people and their rulers, the people
prevailed. The victory created an atmosphere of unlimited potential. One
Western publication declared, ‘Serfdom’s End: a thousand years of autocracy
are reversed’.
3
The triumph, however, also fuelled inflated expectations about what was to
come next. The victors immediately accomplished some symbolic gestures,
such as the arrest of the coup plotters and the destruction of Feliks Dzerzhin-
sky’s statue outside the KGB’s headquarters. But the bigger tasks of creating
a new state, economy and polity soon erased the euphoria of August 1991 for
Russia’s political leadership. Russian President Boris Yeltsin, the unquestioned
hero of the dramatic August events, most certainly seemed overwhelmed. He
spent three weeks in September outside Moscow on vacation.
1 The situation represented a classic revolutionary situation of dual sovereignty. See Charles
Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), ch. 9.
2 For assessments of national resistance, see John Dunlop, TheRiseofRussiaandtheFallof
the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 236–7.
3 This title is from Time, 2 Sept. 1991,p.3.
352
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0
0
800 km
800 miles
Komi
Tatar
2
Komi
23
58
17
Adygea 432
Bashkortostan 3,943
Buriatia 1,038
Chechnya and Ingushetia* 1,270
Chuvashia 1,338
Dagestan 1,802
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191
Kabardino-Balkaria 754
Kalmykia 323
Karachai-Cherkessia 414
Karelia 790
Khakassia 567
Komi 1,251
Mari El 750
Mordovia 963
North Ossetia 632
Tatarstan 3,642
Tuva 30
9
Udmurtia 1,606
Yakutia 1,094
Occupied by the
Soviet Union in 1945
administered by Russia,
claimed by Japan
Per cent of:
Other
Titular
Republic
Nationality
Russians
Source: 1989 Census.
Minor
Nationality
Udmurtia
Mari El
Chuvashia
Karelia
Mordovia
Adygea
Karachai-
Cherkessia
Kabardino-
Balkaria
North Ossetia
Chechnya*
Ingushetia*
Kalmykia
* At the time of the 1989 Census Chechnya and
Ingushetia were a single Soviet autonomous republic.
Population distribution between the two current
republics has not been determined.
Tatar
2
Yakut
33
50
15
Yakutia
Tatar
7
Udmurt
31
59
3
Tatar
6
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43
48
3
Tatar
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10
74
15
Tatar
3
Chuvash
68
27
2
Tatar
5
Mordvinian
33
61
1
Cherkess
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Karachai
31
42
17
Balkar
9
Kabardin
48
32
11
Tatar
1
Adygei
22
68
9
Ingush
5
Ossetian
53
30
12
Chechen
58
Dagestani
Peoples
80
Ingush
13
23
6
Dagestan
Bashkortostan
Tatarstan
Chechen
3
Dagestani
Peoples
6
Kalmyk
45
Tatar
49
Bashkir
22
4
43
Chuvash
4
39
11
38
9
8
Tatar
28
11
Gorno-Altai
Khakassia
Tuva
Buriatia
Tatar
1
Altay
31
60
8
8
Tatar
1
80
Khakass
1
32
3
Khakass
11
Tuvinian
64
Tatar
1
70
5
Buryat
24
Total Republic Population
(in thousands)
Republic
Russia
Map 13.1. Ethnic Republics in 1994
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
michael mcfaul
August 1991 may have punctuated the end of one regime, but did little to
define the contours of what was to follow. As in all revolutions, destruction of
the ancien r
´
egime came easier and more quickly than the construction of a new
order.
4
Throughout the autumn of 1991, it remained uncertain what kind of
political regime or economic system would fill the void left by the collapsing
Soviet state. Some within Russia were convinced that the command economy
had to be dismantled and replaced by a market system. Others had a different
view. Likewise, many within Russia spoke about the need to destroy the last
vestiges of autocracy and erect a democracy. But among these advocates of
regime change, there was little agreement about the ultimate endpoint. And
with hindsight, we now know that many powerful actors within the Soviet
Union had no intention of building democracy, as the majority of regimes in
place today in the states of the former Soviet Union are forms of dictatorship,
not liberal democracies.
5
Even the borders of the new political units were
unclear. And those who had a notion of what the endpoint should be regarding
political and economic change did not have a roadmap in hand for how to get
there.
Even if Yeltsin and his supporters had known precisely what they wanted
and had a blueprint for creating it, they still did not have the political power
to implement their agenda. In August 1991, Yeltsin of course was the most
popular figure in Russia. Yet, this popularity was ephemeral and perhaps not
as widespread as observers stationed in Moscow made it out to be. Yeltsin’s
authority was not institutionalised in either political organisations or state
offices. Even the powers of his presidential office – created just two months
earlier – were not clear. Equally ambiguous was the strength of those political
forces that favoured preservation of the Soviet political and economic order.
The coup had failed, but those sympathetic to the coup’s aims were still in
4 For elaboration of the frame of revolution as a method for understanding change in
post-Communist Russia, see Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya, The Challenge of
Revolution: Contemporary Russia in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001).
5 In his classifications of regimes in the former Soviet space at the end of 2001, Larry
Diamond ranks only three (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) as liberal democracies, one
(Moldova) as an electoral democracy, three (Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine) as ambiguous
regimes, two (Russia and Belarus) as competitive authoritarian regimes, five (Azerbaijan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) as hegemonic electoral authoritar-
ian regimes, and one (Turkmenistan) as a politically closed authoritarian regime. See
Larry Diamond, ‘Thinking about Hybrid Regimes’, Journal of Democracy 13, 2 (Apr. 2002):
30. For arguments explaining this variation, see Steven M. Fish, ‘Democratization’s Req-
uisites’, Post-Soviet Affairs 14, 3 (1998): 212–47; Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, ‘The Rise of
Competitive Authoritarianism, Journal of Democracy 13, 2 (Apr. 2002): 51–65; and Michael
McFaul, ‘The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions
in the Postcommunist World’, World Politics 54, 2 (Jan.2002): 212–44.
354
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The Russian Federation
power in the government, the army, the KGB, in local governments and even
in the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies. Fearing a replay of 1917, Yeltsin
and his band of revolutionaries decided not to use force against their enemies.
In attempting to advance a peaceful revolution, however, the new leaders in
Moscow were constrained by lingering legacies of the Soviet era for the rest
of the decade.
Yeltsin and his allies, therefore, did not enjoy a tabula rasa in constructing a
new state, economy and political system after the 1991 coup. Although Russia’s
abrupt, revolutionary mode of transition removed guideposts for navigating
the transition, the non-violent nature of the transition also allowed many indi-
viduals, institutions and social forces endowed with certain rights and powers
in the Soviet system to continue to play important political and economic roles
in the post-Soviet era. The clash between fading old institutions and groups,
emerging new actors, forces and practices, and robust mutations between
the old and the new defined the drama in Russian history throughout the
1990s.
6
Dissolving the Soviet Union
In tackling the triple agenda of state formation, economic transformation and
regime change, Yeltsin made the creation of an independent Russian state his
first priority. He had no popular mandate for this momentous task. Only a few
months earlier, in March 1991, over 70 per cent of Russian citizens had voted
to preserve the Soviet Union. After the August coup attempt, however, Yeltsin
saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union as both inevitable and desirable. The
Baltic republics took immediate advantage of the power vacuum in Moscow
after the coup to push for complete independence from the Soviet Union.
Other republics followed the Baltic lead. The week after the coup attempt,
the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet voted overwhelmingly (321 in favour, 6 against)
to declare Ukraine an independent state, and set 1 December 1991 as the date
for a referendum to obtain a popular mandate for their decision. Georgia and
Armenia quickly followed by voting in September for full independence. At
the time, Gorbachev was still formally the president of the Soviet Union, but
in actuality he had little authority or power left to sanction these rebellious
6 At the beginning of the 1990s, the losers from change in the post-Communist order were
thought to be the greatest enemies of reform. See, most importantly, Adam Przeworski,
Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Later in the decade, those that benefited
from partial reform emerged as the real threat. See Joel Hellman, ‘Winners Take All: The
Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions’, World Politics 50 (1998): 203–34.
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