Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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jeremy smith

39,000 Lithuanians; in 1945–6, a further 100,000 Lithuanians, 41,000 Estonians

and 60,000 Latvians.

Caught between the twin evils of Nazi Germany and

Stalin’s Soviet Union, large numbers took to the forests and formed partisan

units which fought against both sides, many of the ‘Forest Brethren’ holding

out until 1952. Soviet control over the new territories was reinforced by a

deliberate long-term policy of migration of Russians and other Slavs into the

republics, causing a substantial demographic shift, especially in Estonia and

Latvia. Thus, in Estonia the proportion of Estonians in the overall population

fell from 88 per cent in 1939 to 76 per cent in 1950 and 61.5 per cent in 1989.

By annexing the Baltic republics and other territories, Stalin had not only

secured a strategic advantage on his borders but had gone a long way towards

obtaining for the Soviet Union the same borders that had bounded the Russian

Empire. But the long-term costs for the USSR were high. Unlike most of the

other nationalities who owed much of their sense of mass national identity to

thenation-buildingperiodofthe 1920s,forLithuanians,Latvians and Estonians,

nationhood was linked to the experience of independent statehood between

1918 and 1939. Incorporation into the Soviet Union remained for much of the

population an occupation by a foreignpower, and the massive inﬂux of Russians

after the war, often into top jobs, only served to further antagonise the locals.

Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians never really joined the Brotherhood of

Peoples, and it is no coincidence that they played a major part in the events

leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In the last years of Stalin’s life, the balance of national rights and repub-

lican powers established before the war and reinforced during it continued

to consolidate. For one group, however, the situation took a dramatic turn

for the worse. Before 1917, Jews had suffered more than any other national-

ity from ofﬁcial government policies, which in their turn spurred on popular

anti-Semitism, culminating in a series of massacres or ‘pogroms’ of Jews in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A renewal of pogroms in the

civil war, carried out primarily by anti-Bolsheviks, led thousands of Jews to see

the Bolsheviks and the Red Army as their surest source of protection, many

of them joining the ranks of the Communist Party, which already counted a

number of Jews among its leading members. Jews beneﬁted from the policies

of korenizatsiia on top of the removal of former restrictions, and in the 1920s

Jewish organisations, culture and Yiddish schools ﬂourished, with an unusually

32 Aleksandras Shtroma, ‘The Baltic States as Soviet Republics: Tensions and Contradic-

tions’, in Graham Smith (ed.), The Baltic States: The National Self-Determination of Estonia,

Latvia and Lithuania (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 86–117; 87; Toivo U. Raun, Estonia

and the Estonians (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1991), p. 181.

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high proportion of Jews going into higher education. As the Jews did not have

their own territory, this made them difﬁcult to ﬁt into the overall pattern of

Soviet nationality policies that favoured the construction of distinct national

regions and republics, a situation which the Soviet government, enthusiasti-

cally spurred on by the USSR President Mikhail Kalinin, sought to remedy by

creating a Jewish autonomous region in Birobidzhan in the Far East.

Some

historians, however, have seen the Birobidzhan project as a continuation of

tsarist policies whose main aim was to transform Jews from traditional artisan

and entrepreneurial occupations into productive agricultural labourers.

any case, Birobidzhan did not attract enough Jewish migrants to act as an effec-

tive homeland or cultural centre for Soviet Jews, although at times it succeeded

in attracting positive international attention, funds and even immigrants from

the Americas.

There is a good deal of anecdotal testimony to Stalin’s personal anti-

Semitism,

but in many respects Jewish life continued to prosper in the 1930s.

Tens of thousands of Jews lost their lives in the Great Terror and Jewish cul-

ture, especially religion, was subject to restrictions similar to those imposed

on other nationalities, including a marked reduction in university enrolment.

After the suffering of the war years, Jews in the Soviet Union were subjected

to a further attack. In 1944, leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Com-

mittee (JAC), set up in 1942 to co-ordinate Jewish participation in the war

effort and to attract international support, began to discuss the idea of an

alternative homeland for the Jews in the Crimea or the Volga region. This

was later to provide the pretext for accusations of ‘bourgeois Jewish nation-

alism’ and Zionism that culminated in the arrest and execution of former

JAC leaders in 1952. In January 1948 the prominent Jewish actor Solomon

Mikhoels died in mysterious circumstances, almost certainly murdered by the

security services. Later that year a campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’ pro-

vided the pretext for the harassment and arrest of leading Soviet Jews, the

closure of theatres and other cultural institutions, and the disbanding of the

JAC and other Jewish organisations. From 1948 to 1953, any Jew who had been

active in politics or in Jewish culture lived in permanent fear of arrest, a fate

33 Chimen Abramsky, ‘The Biro-Bidzhan Project, 1927–1959’, in Lionel Kochan (ed.), The

Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 64–77.

34 Robert Weinberg, ‘Jews into Peasants? Solving the Jewish Question in Birobidzhan’, in

Yaacov Ro’i (ed.), Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union (Ilford: Frank Cass,

1995), pp. 87–102; 88–91.

35 Robert Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish

Homeland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

36 Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), pp. 24–6.

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suffered by thousands of them.

A series of prominent articles and speeches

raised the spectre of an international Jewish conspiracy to overthrow Soviet

power. The campaign culminated in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’ early in 1953,

when a number of leading Jewish doctors were arrested and charged with

having caused the deaths of the former Politburo members Zhdanov and

Shcherbakov and of plotting to kill Stalin and other leaders. Goaded on by

ofﬁcial propaganda, popular anti-Semitism was turned against Jews from all

walks of life. There is now strong evidence that Stalin, Malenkov and others

were preparing a plan for the wholesale forced deportation of Jews from the

western parts of the Soviet Union to Siberia, with the intention that up to half

should die on the way.

They were spared this fate only by Stalin’s death on

5 March 1953.

The Jews were the only nationality to be persecuted in this way in the post-

war years. No clear explanation for the anti-Jewish campaign has yet emerged,

but a combination of Stalin’s personal anti-Semitism, fear that Jewish organi-

sations would gain undue inﬂuence as a result of sympathy for the Holocaust

and a foreign policy that supported new-found allies in the Arab world against

the new Israeli state all played a role. Although the overt government cam-

paigns died with Stalin, anti-Semitism remained a signiﬁcant feature of Soviet

life and the experience of 1948–53 did much to stimulate the movement for

emigration among Soviet Jews in later years.

For other non-Russians, the post-war years were a period of reconstruction,

of grief and of the consolidation of a sense of pride in the Soviet system.

The overt appeals to Russian nationalism of the war and the subsequent anti-

cosmopolitanism campaign encouraged some elements of the leadership to

propose a more Russifying line, but by and large these were defeated. Thus

proposals to abolish mother-tongue instruction in schools of the autonomous

republics of the RSFSR beyond the fourth grade were abandoned in favour of

retaining the principle of mother-tongue education for all.

The union republics of the USSR played an important role in the com-

petition for power which followed Stalin’s death (1953–57). Of the Politburo

contenders to succeed Stalin, Lavrentii Beria, Lazar Kaganovich and Nikita

Khrushchev had all spent a signiﬁcant period of their earlier careers in the

37 Nora Levin, The Jews of the Soviet Union since 1917, 2 vols. (London and New York:

I. B.Tauris, 1990), vol. i,pp.488–525; vol. ii,pp.527–50.

38 Iakov Etinger, ‘The Doctors’ Plot: Stalin’s Solution to the Jewish Question’, in Ro’i, Jews

and Jewish Life,pp.103–26.

39 Peter A. Blitstein, ‘Nation-Building or Russiﬁcation? Obligatory Russian Instruction

in the Soviet Non-Russian School, 1938–1953’, in Suny and Martin, A State of Nations,

pp. 253–274; 263–7.

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Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after

republics. Ultimately the balance of power could be decided by votes in the

Central Committee of the CPSU, many of whose members came from the

republics, especially Ukraine where both Khrushchev and Kaganovich had

served. During the few months of his ascendancy prior to his arrest, Beria had

time to launch an attack on Stalin’s later nationality policies, accusing him of

abandoning Leninist principles, and was able to initiate signiﬁcant changes in

republican leaderships which favoured local nationals over Russians, such as

the replacement of Mel’nikov by Kirichenko as party leader in Ukraine. The

general principle that the ﬁrst party secretary in each republic should be a local

national was established at this time. Beria also moved quickly to release the

accused in the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ from prison and to condemn the anti-Semitism

of the late Stalin years.

Although ‘activating remnants of bourgeois-nationalist elements in the

union republics’ was one of the charges laid against Beria at the time of

his arrest in June 1953, the republics continued to enjoy advantages relative

to their position in the late Stalin years. Khrushchev in particular used his

position as General Secretary to promote former colleagues from Ukraine,

increasing Ukrainian representation in the Central Committee from sixteen in

1952 to ﬁfty-nine in 1961. Ukraine also beneﬁted from the decision to transfer

the Crimean peninsula from the RSFSR to Ukrainian jurisdiction in 1954, while

the rehabilitation of most of the deported peoples in 1956–7 also signalled that

non-Russians would no longer be subject to the kind of arbitrary treatment

they had reason to fear under Stalin. In seeking to impose his authority over

economic policy against his rival Malenkov, Khrushchev decentralised a num-

ber of economic ministries and the Ministry of Justice, considerably increasing

the decision-making powers of the republics. While there was sound economic

reasoning behind these moves, Khrushchev also reckoned that such measures

might stand him in a more powerful position in any future inner-party

conﬂicts.

The strategy paid off. When his main rivals in the Politburo sought to

remove him in June 1957, Khrushchev successfully appealed to the Central

Committee, which was by now packed with supporters from Ukraine and

other republics. But it would be a mistake to view Khrushchev as a keen sup-

porter of the rights of non-Russians.Afterall,he owed much of his rise to the top

of the Soviet system to the reputation he had earned in crushing all displays

of Ukrainian nationalism after 1937. Having consolidated his power in 1957,

40 Gerhard Simon, Nationalismand PolicyToward theNationalities inthe SovietUnion (Boulder,

Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 231–3.

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Khrushchev soon moved to reverse most of the decentralising measures intro-

duced in the preceding years. More signiﬁcantly, he signalled a far-reaching

ideological shift by abandoning talk of the ‘Brotherhood of Peoples’ in favour

of the ‘merging of peoples’.

It was inevitable that such a merged identity should be centred on the Slavic

languages and cultures. Khrushchev took care to include other Slavs, especially

Ukrainians, alongside Russians when it came to deﬁning the leading nations

of the state, as evidenced in both his promotions and his cultural policies. No

doubt he was mindful of the need to retain his personal base of support among

Ukrainians, but some commentators have noted another possible factor: the

relatively high birth rate among the Soviet Union’s Muslims compared to that

of the Russians, which threatened their overall majority in the population.

Modernising economic strategies also led to a renewed period of internal

migration as Russians and Ukrainians moved into less-developed regions.

Greatest controversy surrounded Khrushchev’s proposals for educational

reform. The theses on education he presented in November 1958 included

a provision, Article 19, which affected the status of non-Russian languages.

It gave parents the right to decide in which language their children should

receive instruction, and gave schools in the republics the option to drop the

teaching of a second language. In practice this meant abandoning Lenin’s

principle that every child should receive instruction in the mother tongue,

while also removing the requirement for Russians in the republics to study

the local language. The move was opposed by Communist leaders in almost

all the republics, who feared that the move would undermine the position

of the titular nationality. In Azerbaijan and Latvia, opposition went as far as

refusing to implement the provisions of Article 19 in new republican laws on

education, leading to the direct intervention of Moscow and high-level purges

in both republics.

The fears of the republic leaders were not immediately realised,

butinthe

longer term there was a substantial decline in the proportion of Ukrainians and

Belorussians attending schools in the mother tongue, with Belorussian schools

41 John A. Armstrong, ‘The Ethnic Scene in the Soviet Union: The View of the Dictator-

ship’, in Rachel Denber (ed.), The Soviet Nationality Reader: The Disintegration in Context

(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 227–56; 239.

42 Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism,pp.158–90.

43 George S. Counts, Khrushchev and the Central Committee Speak on Education (Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1959), p. 30.

44 Yaroslav Bilinsky, ‘The Soviet Education Laws of 1958–59 and Soviet Nationality Policy’,

Soviet Studies 14 (1962): 138–57.

45 Harry Lipset, ‘The Status of National Minority Languages’, Soviet Studies 19 (1967): 181–9;

183–4, 188.

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Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after

disappearing altogether from the capital Minsk.

In the RSFSR itself, mother-

tongue education declined dramatically. The number of languages used in

schools fell from forty-seven in the early 1960s to seventeen by 1982,twelveof

which were taught only as far as the fourth grade. Russian became the standard

language of instruction across the North Caucasus.

The Russiﬁcation of

schools in Ukraine and Belorussia seems to have been conﬁned mostly to the

cities, and so could be explained as a process of natural assimilation rather

than a deliberate policy, but for the national minorities of the RSFSR there

was a clear policy of linguistic Russiﬁcation implemented from Khrushchev’s

time onwards.

Under both Stalin and Khrushchev, republican leaders could consider them-

selves fortunate to stay in ofﬁce any longer than a few years. By contrast, one

of the central features of Leonid Brezhnev’s period of ofﬁce (1964–82)was

the ‘stability of cadres’. Nowhere was this policy more apparent than in the

union republics. In Estonia, Johannes K

abin was appointed ﬁrst secretary of the

Estonian Communist Party by Stalin in 1950, and came close to out-surviving

Brezhnev himself before his replacement in 1978, while in Uzbekistan Sharaf

Rashidov stayed in his post from 1959 to 1983. The average length of service for

a ﬁrst secretary in a union republic under Brezhnev was eleven years. Similar

levels of stability extended to other posts in the republican leaderships, which

also tended to become more dominated by members of the titular national-

ity.

Republican leaders did not have a completely free hand, however. Petro

Shelest’, ﬁrst secretary in Ukraine from 1963, pursued a policy of promoting

Ukrainian culture and identity to an extent that was not acceptable to the

leadership and was consequently dismissed in 1972. Although the Shelest’ case

established that there were limits to the activities of republican leaders, for the

most part they were allowed to run their republics without interference from

the Centre. Especially in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, a pattern emerged

of long-standing leaders building up a personal power base often centred on

members of their own extended families or clans, and riddled with corruption.

Ronald Suny has labelled these ruling elites as ‘national maﬁas’.

The new

46 Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism,pp.255–6;Nigel Grant, ‘Linguisticand EthnicMinori-

ties in the USSR: Educational Policies and Developments’, in J. J. Tomiak (ed.), Soviet

Education in the 1980s (London: Croom Helm, 1983), pp. 24–49; 28.

47 V. M. Alpatov, 150 iazykov i politika: 1917–1 997 (Moscow: IV RAN, 1997), p. 114.

48 Ben Fowkes, ‘The National Question in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev: Policy

and Response’, in Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (eds.), Brezhnev Reconsidered (London:

Palgrave, 2002), pp. 68–89; 69.

49 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the

Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 118.

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stability was underpinned by a reversion to the principle of ‘Brotherhood of

Nations’ on Brezhnev’s part.

For the most part, members of the titular nationality beneﬁted from the

patronage of the party bosses. Higher education ﬂourished in the republics.

Most non-Russian citizens shared in the general relative prosperity and stability

of the Brezhnev years. But national tensions never disappeared entirely. At

the day-to-day level, derogatory references to nationality were commonplace

in queues, on crowded public transport, at football or basketball matches

or in competition over girls and alcohol.

Mass protests erupted over the

announcement of results of competitive university entrance exams in the

Kazakh capital Alma Ata, and in Tbilisi over an attempt to introduce Russian

as a second ofﬁcial language of Georgia, both in 1978. Meanwhile speciﬁc

national grievances simmered away. From 1956 onwards, a series of protests,

mostly by intellectuals, over the status of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and

the Prigorodnyi district of North Ossetia preﬁgured the violent upheavals in

these areas in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Soviet Union’s Jews, although spared

the extreme ofﬁcial anti-Semitism of the late Stalin years, found that there was

little scope for them to practise their religion or culture, leading to a growing

movement in favour of emigration to Israel. This right was granted to large

numbers between 1971 and 1979, inspired by a thaw in Soviet–US relations,

but was denied thereafter, creating a cohort of refuseniks – Jews who had

been refused permission to emigrate and faced persecution for applying. By

1968 Crimean Tatars, still denied access to their homeland, had organised an

impressive series of petitions with a claimed total of 3,000,000 signatures.

Such examples of popular protest were few and generally small-scale, how-

ever. For the most part, national protest was conﬁned to small numbers of

intellectuals, who formed an important part of the dissident movement. In

the 1960s and 1970s, a ﬂourishing Ukrainian culture circulated in the form of

samizdat underground publications, and in 1970 a nationalist journal, Ukrainian

Herald, appeared secretly for the ﬁrst time. An Estonian National Front was set

up in 1971, followed by a Lithuanian National Popular Front in 1974.Inamore

individual act of protest, in 1972 a Lithuanian student set ﬁre to himself in a

50 Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR (Boston and London: Allen and Unwin,

1986), pp. 68–71.

51 A. A.Tsutsiev, Osetino-Ingushskii konﬂikt (1 992– . . .) ego predistoriia i faktory razvitiia

(Moscow: Rosspen,1998), p. 80; Christopher J. Walker, ‘TheArmenian Presencein Moun-

tainous Karabakh’, in John F. R.Wright, Suzanne Goldenberg and Richard Schoﬁeld

(eds.), Transcaucasian Boundaries (London: UCL Press, 1996), pp. 103–4; Stephen F. Jones,

‘Georgia: the Trauma of Statehood’, in Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras (eds.), New States,

New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1997), pp. 505–43; 510.

512

Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after

public square in Kaunas under a poster proclaiming ‘Freedom for Lithuania’.

In Georgia as well, underground journals ﬂourished in the 1970s. These activi-

ties were not ignored by the regime, and participants often faced persecution.

Waves of arrests of those suspected of Ukrainian nationalist sympathies were

conducted in 1965 and 1972, and in 1979 Moscow announced the execution

of three Armenian nationalists who had allegedly been involved in a terrorist

explosion on the Moscow underground.

Repressions helped to keep protests in check, while the bulk of the popula-

tion showed little active interest in the national question. The ‘years of stagna-

tion’, however, produced a dangerous situation. Most non-Russians enjoyed a

relatively privileged position in their republics, could use their mother tongue

at school and in public and had controlled access to their national cultures.

As a consequence, national identity was strong locally. In the Soviet Union

as a whole, however, non-Russians were regarded as second rate; signiﬁcant

career progression depended on a sufﬁcient mastery of Russian language;

school books and history texts demeaned their national past; and occasional

symbolic and arbitrary interferences from the centre could offend national

feelings. This did not matter so much as long as relative economic prosperity

and an adequate welfare system persisted, and Moscow could rely on the loy-

alty of a corrupt and afﬂuent national leadership. Any upset to this delicate

balance, however, might have drastic results.

Shortly after his appointment as General Secretary of the CPSU in 1985,

Mikhail Gorbachev declared that Soviet socialism had deﬁnitively resolved the

nationalities problem and that the population of the Soviet Union constituted

‘a single family – the Soviet people’.

This conﬁdence was shattered by mass

conﬂicts between Russians and Yakuts in Yakutia in June 1986, and when in

December of that year Gorbachev dismissed the corrupt ﬁrst secretary of

the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, and replaced

him by a Russian, Gennadii Kolbin, subsequent riots made the capital of

Kazakhstan, Alma Ata, ungovernable for days and, according to unofﬁcial

estimates, cost the lives of up to 250 protestors and members of the security

forces.

Subsequently Gorbachev adopted a far more cautious approach to

the national question, accusing ofﬁcials of lack of sensitivity, decentralising

economic decision-making, reforming the Council of Nationalities at the apex

of the Soviet system and repealing unpopular language laws. In November1990

52 Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union,pp.432–9.

53 Stephen White, After Gorbachev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 172.

54 Martha Brill Olcott, ‘Kazakhstan: Pushing for Eurasia’, in Bremmer and Taras, New

States, New Politics,pp.547–70; 552.

513

jeremy smith

he published the draft of a new Union Treaty, which was to remodel Soviet

federalism to the advantageofthe republics.Havingsecured a popular mandate

from most of the republics in a referendum held on 17 March 1991 to pursue a

new Union Treaty, he was in the ﬁnal stages of negotiation when a failed coup

attempt in Moscow in August 1991 brought the Communist system crashing

down around him.

By that time, however, events had proceeded at such a pace that it is unlikely

that a new treaty or the continuation of Gorbachev’s rule could have preserved

the Soviet Union in anything like its old form. For many non-Russians, the

introduction of market-style economic reforms led to particular hardship as

it meant that relatively underdeveloped regions such as Central Asia and the

Caucasus could no longer rely on unconditional central investment. Mean-

while, for more prosperous regions such as the three Baltic republics, eco-

nomic decline only made clearer the potential beneﬁts of independence from

Moscow. Economic decline upset the delicate balance which had underpinned

passive acceptance of Soviet central rule in the Brezhnev era. Gorbachev’s ham-

ﬁsted handling of relations with republican elites, typiﬁed by the Kunaev case,

further undermined the old system and subsequent insecurity led national

leaders to begin to mobilise around national demands as a means of securing

their own long-term positions.

Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ encouraged the articulation of a broad set

of demands. Environmentalist movements which sprang up in the republics

increasingly couched their complaints in national terms. By the spring of

1988, single-issue campaigns were developing into mass national movements,

nowhere more so than in the Baltic republics. Here intellectuals were initially

given encouragement by Gorbachev and other reformers who saw the Baltics

as an ideal testing ground for building up a market-based economy and devel-

oping foreigntrade, but found the road to reform blocked by conservative polit-

ical leaders. For the population, glasnost’ provided the opportunity to revive

memories of independence and the brutality of Sovietisation, to celebrate their

resilient national culture and identity and to call for an increased share in the

output of their owneconomies. The ﬁrst Popular Frontwas established in Esto-

nia in April 1988, followed in May and October by Latvia and Lithuania respec-

tively. Membership of the popular fronts was open to anyone with a grievance,

but was mostly restricted to members of the relevant nationality. The appoint-

ment of new reform-minded leaders in all three republics in the autumn led

55 Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conﬂict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind

Aﬂame (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 49–67.

514

Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after

to a period of co-operation between government and popular fronts during

which declarations of sovereignty, new language laws and the readoption of

separate ﬂags and national anthems emphasised the determination to estab-

lish and maintain a separate identity for each nationality. But if the republi-

can leaders, and even Gorbachev, had hoped to co-opt the growing national

movements in this way, their actions only served to encourage mass action

and an escalation of demands to the point where nothing short of outright

independence would satisfy a large section of the population. Huge protest

demonstrations became a regular occurrence, culminating on the ﬁftieth

anniversary of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in August 1989 when over

a million Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians joined hands in a human chain

stretching across all three republics. By the end of the year the pressure was

so great that the Supreme Soviet in each republic had declared their 1940

incorporation into the Soviet Union illegal, providing a strong formal basis

for any declaration of independence. This demand was now adopted by all

three popular fronts, no doubt encouraged by the ease with which Commu-

nism and obedience to Moscow had collapsed across Eastern Europe in 1989.

Free elections in 1989 and 1990 resulted in victories for the Popular Fronts,

and independence was declared in Lithuania on 11 March 1990, Estonia on 30

March and Latvia on 4 May.

Not far behind the Baltic republics in raising the demand for secession

was Georgia, where nineteen demonstrators were killed by the Red Army at

an independence rally in April 1989. Elsewhere, economic collapse and the

perception that the centre was losing its grip led sections of the population

not to demand independence, but to attack other ethnic minorities. Long-

standing disputes over territory, living space, access to jobs and resources and

the constitutional status of minority territories came to the fore. The most

serious and protracted case of ethnic conﬂict broke out between Armeni-

ans and Azeris over the status of the largely Armenian-populated region of

Nagorno-Karabakh in late 1987 and spread to large cities like Sumgait and

Baku by March 1988. While genuine grievances and irreconcilable claims lay

at the root of the conﬂicts, the population was goaded on by political lead-

ers in both the Armenian and Azerbaijani republics seeking a populist base

for their own positions, culminating in all-out war between the two follow-

ing independence.

Serious conﬂicts also emerged between Georgia and her

Abkhaz and Ossetian minorities in 1989, between Ossetians and Ingush in the

56 Graham Smith, ‘The Resurgence of Nationalism’, in Smith, The Baltic States,pp.121–43.

57 Audrey L. Altsadt, The Azerbaijani Turks (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1992),

pp. 195–219.

515