Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
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jeremy smith
North Caucasus in 1992 (a result of the fall-out from the earlier deportations
of Ingush) and between Kirgiz and Uzbeks in the Osh region of Kirgizia in
1990.
58
The final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union came from the largest repub-
lic – the RSFSR (later renamed the Russian Federation). On his election as
chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet in March 1990, Boris Yeltsin sought to
use the republic as a power base in his personal struggle with Gorbachev. He
quickly assured the Baltic republics that he would not stand in the way of their
secession, and followed their lead in declaring sovereignty in the summer of
1990. Sensing the power of the national movements in his struggle with Gor-
bachev, Yeltsin encouraged this process by calling on the autonomous republics
to ‘take whatever helping of power that you can gobble up by yourselves’.
59
The RSFSR therefore became a major driving force in the break-up of the
USSR.
The failed coup of August 1991 served to strengthen Yeltsin’s personal stand-
ing and to make even more remote the possibility of keeping Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania, which now appealed for international recognition, within the
fold. The only remaining question was if any of the other union republics
could be retained within some sort of federal system. Fearing the possibility
of another coup, encouraged by Yeltsin and seeing how the Baltic bids for
independence had been welcomed in the West, the other non-Russians who
had voted overwhelmingly for retention of the Union in the March referen-
dum now moved quickly in support of independence. Political elites could no
longer be sure of their privileges and power being preserved by either Yeltsin
or Gorbachev, and moved to position themselves as leaders of potential new
states. As events unfolded at a dizzying pace, popular national movements
and Communist politicians engaged in a circular competition of demands,
reinforcing the radicalisation of each other in the process. Ukrainian President
Leonid Kravchuk was the key player in the Soviet endgame. When he refused
to send a representative to sign a Treaty on the Economic Commonwealth
on 18 October and the Ukrainian people voted for independence in a sepa-
rate referendum on 1 December, the fate of the Union was sealed. Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania and Georgia were by now in effect independent states. On
8 December the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus agreed to the for-
mation of a loose Confederation of Independent States (CIS) (see Map 12.1),
and when they were joined at the eleventh hour by Moldova, Armenia, Azer-
baijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan it was all over. The
58 Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict,pp.135–82.
59 Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 488–95.
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Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formally dissolved on midnight of 31
December 1991.
For most of the nationalities of the former Russian Empire the process of
nation-building was carried out not so much by their own efforts but on their
behalf by a multinational state which was, for a time, committed to reinforcing
and even creating national identities alongside a radical social and economic
agenda. Though the demands of modernisation, centralisation and geograph-
ical mobility undermined many of these measures, enough had been achieved
to laythe basis for the furtherdevelopment of modern nations. Propaganda and
policies that switched clumsily between promoting separate national feelings,
developing Soviet patriotism and celebrating the leading role of the Russians,
seemed to offer enough to everyone. The rise in urbanisation and education
contributed to the growth of personal and group awareness which could be
channelled into controllable paths so long as relative prosperity and national
elite co-operation was assured. But the crisis in the Soviet economic and polit-
ical system arrived at a time when three decades of dissident activity and
sporadic outbursts of broader national feeling suggested that the non-Russian
nations had matured politically to a degree which made separatism a viable
and eventually popular option.
For the fourteen new non-Russian states, the period since 1991 was a sec-
ond, independent, period of nation-building. Lacking alternative sources of
experienced political leaders, most of the states remained in the hands of
Communists-turned-nationalists who had already been in power locally for
many years before the break-up. Across the southern states and in Moldova, a
series of border disputes, civil wars and ethnic conflicts in the first part of the
1990s left the impression that independence might have been a mistake and
that the region would remain unstable for decades to come. But the resolution
of most of the conflicts by force, negotiation or inertia, combined with the
return of relative economic stability, made it clear that independence was there
to stay, with the possible exception of Belarus, whose overtures for some form
of renewed federation with Russia were rebuffed by Moscow.
The biggest controversy for the new states was how to establish a firm basis
of united identity and, in particular, how to deal with the substantial Russian
populations that remained within their borders. In 1989 over 25 million Russians
were living in other republics of the Soviet Union, and in the years after 1990
migration out of some of the republics, most notably in Central Asia, stood at
over 5 per cent of the total population each year.
60
Strict language laws were
60 Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (London: Hurst, 1995), pp. 2, 228,
293–300.
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introduced in all three Baltic republics which clearly discriminated against
Russians, who were further disadvantaged by constitutional moves basing
property and citizenship rights on the situation before 1939. Russian protests
and threats were backed up by international pressure, leading to revisions of
all the language laws by 1996. By the end of the decade, Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania had adapted so successfully to a free-market economy and West
European norms of citizenship and human rights that they were preparing for
entry into the European Union. The other states did not progress as rapidly
in the same direction, partly as a result of different cultural backgrounds
and a less sure economic base. In Central Asia, the clan-based patron–client
networks, which had become so firmly established in Brezhnev’s time, were
perpetuated into the post-Soviet period. But in other respects the break with
the Communist past was clear-cut, many observers’ fears of the potential of
Islamic fundamentalism proved unfounded and stable modern nation-states
were emerging.
61
The Russian Federation inherited the Soviet system of autonomous
republics and regions, and after the break-up of the USSR over 18 per cent
of its population remained non-Russian. Almost all had declared their own
sovereignty, with Yeltsin’s encouragement, in 1990. In March 1992 Yeltsin, now
head of an independent but still multinational state, devised a Federal Treaty
that recognised the rights that the republics enjoyed in practice anyway. Even
this was not enough for the largest republic, Tatarstan. A popular referendum
rejected the treaty and led Russia and Tatarstan to the brink of a secession crisis.
The imposition of a new constitution by Yeltsin following the consolidation
of his own power in December 1993 restricted the rights granted a year and a
half earlier and pushed Tatarstan ever further away. Although a strong Tatar
national independence movement, Ittifak, encouraged the brinkmanship of
the Tatar leadership, in the end the republic, surrounded by Russian terri-
tory and dependent on the Russian economy, could not afford to go it alone,
while the Russian Federation could not afford an open conflict with such a
large region. The result was a bilateral treaty signed in February 1994 which
granted Tatarstan virtual self-rule in return for remaining a loyal part of the
federation. In general the nationalities of the autonomous republics, who had
seen the status of their national languages seriously eroded from Khrushchev’s
time on, engaged in an intensive ethno-national revival under perestroika and
61 Gregory Gleason, The Central Asian States: Discovering Independence (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1997); for a survey of nation-building in all the post-Soviet republics, see
Bremmer and Taras, New States, New Politics.
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Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after
after. While this process fuelled ethnic conflict and disputes with the Centre
in some areas, notably the North Caucasus, in most cases it did not lead to
secessionist movements or present any serious threat to stability in the Russian
Federation (see Map 13.1).
On 11 December 1994, Russian armed forces crossed into the North Cau-
casian Republic of Chechnya, initiating a conflict which was to cost 40,000 lives
in the next eighteen months. The republic’s president, former Soviet air force
commander Johkar Dudayev, had come to power with Moscow’s backing.
But on 2 November 1991 the Chechen parliament declared full independence
and in June 1992 Dudayev expelled Russian troops from the region. By late
1994, Yeltsin faced a drastic decline in his own popularity which threatened his
chances in the next presidential election, due for the summer of 1996. This pro-
vided one of the motives for the invasion. In words attributed to the secretary
of the Security Council Oleg Lobov, ‘We need a small victorious war to raise
the President’s ratings.’
62
But Dudayev had also done a great deal to antago-
nise Moscow. Allegations of connections with organised crime groups in the
Russian capital, although greatly exaggerated at the time, were not entirely
without basis. The hijacking of a bus near the town of Mineral’nye Vody in the
North Caucasus by Chechens in July 1994 further reinforced the notion that
Chechnya was a threat to Russia’s internal security. Moreover, if Chechnya
was allowed to get away with a unilateral declaration of independence, what
would stop the rest of the North Caucasus and other republics following suit?
The presence of a small amount of oil and a major pipeline linking Russia
with the major oilfields of Azerbaijan were a further incentive for Russia to
re-establish control.
Whatever the motive, it is clear that Russia’s leaders and military com-
manders expected that the overthrow of Dudayev would be an easy task. In
November 1994 the defence minister, Pavel Grachev, famously boasted that
‘we would need one parachute regiment to decide the whole affair in two
hours’.
63
But the invasion was a disaster. The ill-equipped and demoralised
Russian army, for all its numerical superiority in manpower and weapons,
found the stubbornness and guerrilla tactics of Chechen fighters far more of a
handful than they had expected. After fierce fighting, Russian forces captured
the Chechen capital, Groznyi, on 26 January 1995, but the Chechen rebels
mounted effective resistance in the mountains despite Dudayev’s death from
62 Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War (London: Pan, 1997),
p. 161.
63 Ibid., p. 157.
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a Russian missile in May 1996.On6 August 1996, the day of Yeltsin’s rein-
auguration as Russian president, in a move of astonishing daring, Chechen
forces attacked and retook Groznyi from a Russian force supposedly three
times the size of their own. Yeltsin, faced with military humiliation, and con-
demned internationally for human rights abuses, sent his former presiden-
tial electoral rival General Aleksandr Lebed’ to Khasavyurt in Dagestan to
negotiate an effective ceasefire marking the end of the first Chechen war. In
January 1997, Aslan Maskhadov was elected president of Chechnya in mostly
fair elections.
64
Under the Khasavyurt agreement, the question of the future status of Chech-
nya was deferred for five years. For the next three years Chechnya enjoyed
virtual self-rule beyond Moscow’s reach, but was divided internally as com-
peting ‘warlords’ squabbled over influence and territory, leaving Maskhadov
an often helpless observer. In the summer of 1999, the bombing of apart-
ment blocks in Moscow, widely blamed on Chechen terrorists, was followed
by an incursion into Dagestan by a Chechen force under Shamil Basaev.
These events provided the pretext for a second Russian invasion, although
there is ample evidence that preparations had been under way since at least
the spring of that year. This time the Russian army was much better pre-
pared and benefited from the vigorous political leadership of Vladimir Putin,
who was soon to become president of the Russian Federation. Although not
without setbacks, the second invasion was more effective than the first, and
within a few months the Russian army had established control of Groznyi
and most of the Chechen lowlands. Chechen guerrillas continued to hold
out in the mountains, however, and a final end to the fighting seemed a
long way off.
Having apparently solved the Chechen question, Putin also moved to curtail
the powers of the autonomous republics by dividing the Russian Federation
into seven ‘super-regions’, each overseen by a personal appointee. The move
was accepted without much protest by the republics, underlining their depen-
dence on Moscow and the lack of will for further secession struggles. Putin
benefited from a revival in the Russian economy, as well as the weak founda-
tion of republican national identity. The policies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev
had ensured that the national minorities of the Russian Federation, apart from
the Chechens, would not be as vigorous in their pursuit of national demands
64 Anatol Lieven, Chechnya, Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1999).
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Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after
as the larger nationalities of the union republics. But the failure of the Russian
Federation to reach a consensus on a non-ethnic conception of Russian citi-
zenship
65
means the potential remains for the national question to continue
to pose problems for Russia’s leaders.
65 Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict,pp.272–93.
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19
The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus,
Moldova and the Baltics
serhy yekelchyk
The Soviet west, an arch of non-Russian republics extending from the Gulf
of Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south and separating Russia
proper from other European states, came to the attention of scholars during
the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Western sovietologists have long studied
each individual country in the region – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia/
Belarus, Ukraine and Moldavia/Moldova – before the 1960s, they did not think
of the Soviet west as an entity. But the region’s prominence in the dissident
movement during the 1960s suggested that the western fringe of the USSR
might become a catalyst of nationalist unrest and, possibly, a channel for the
spillover of democratic ideas from Eastern Europe. The region was now seen
as a place where the Soviet collapse might begin.
Yet, as North American scholars pioneered the use of the term ‘Soviet
west’, they soon discovered the difficulties of defining this region in economic
or social terms – which was at the time considered a clue for understand-
ing nationality perseverance there. In his lead article in the 1975 collection
The Soviet West: Interplay between Nationality and Social Organization, Ralph S.
Clem proposed that the area was characterised by ‘high to moderate levels
of economic development with relation to other areas of the USSR’, but had
to qualify this generalisation by excluding the republic of Moldavia, as well
as some areas of Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. Of the usual social con-
sequences of economic development, except perhaps for low fertility, neither
high educational level nor high urbanisation qualified as defining character-
istics of the region. In any case, European Russia displayed similar economic
and social trends. In the final analysis, history was the only factor unques-
tionably uniting the western republics and setting them aside from the rest of
the Soviet Union. All had historical ties to other European countries. In the
recent past, some had experienced independence, while others were divided
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The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics
territorially, with some of their territories forming part of another European
country.
1
Another contemporary collection, The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet
West on the USSR (1975), takes a more productive approach to the region as
defined more by its past and present links to Eastern Europe than by any soci-
ological criteria. Its editor, Roman Szporluk, suggests in his introduction that
the USSR’s post-1939 extension westward made the Soviet nationality ques-
tion much more pressing and sensitive.
2
In his subsequent work on Western
Ukraine, which was incorporated into the Ukrainian republic during 1939–45,
Professor Szporluk shows that, owing to the pre-existing high level of national
consciousness, the Soviet authorities never managed to fully absorb this area.
Western Ukraine remained the mainstay of popular nationalism, later con-
tributing greatly to the disintegration of the USSR.
3
Although this argument would not apply to all western republics, it under-
scores an important factor in their historical development. The vitality of
nationalities on the Soviet Union’s western fringe was to a considerable degree
determined by the successes or difficulties of their pre-Soviet nation-building.
The areas that were able to preserve a high level of national consciousness
were those where Sovietisation had come late and where during the twentieth
century nationalists had had a chance to mobilise the masses for their cause, as
was the case especially in the Baltic states and Western Ukraine. In contrast, in
countries where an early interruption of nationalist agitation or lack of infras-
tructure for such work had prevented nationalist mobilisation of the masses,
the population’s national identities remained frustratingly ambiguous. This
was the case in Belorussia, Moldavia and eastern Ukraine.
To be sure, the Soviet state actively interfered in nation-building processes.
Scholars have shown that the USSR institutionalised nationality as a form,
while attempting to drain it of its content. As a result, it created territorial
nations with all the symbols of nationhood but bereft of political sovereignty,
although Stalin’ssuccessors were to discover the fluid border in modern nation-
alism between form and content.
4
The Soviet nativisation programmes during
1 Ralph S. Clem, ‘Vitality of the Nationalities in the Soviet West: Background and Implica-
tions’, in Clem (ed.), The Soviet West: Interplay between Nationality and Social Organization
(New York: Praeger, 1975), pp. 3–5.
2 Roman Szporluk, ‘Introduction’, in Szporluk (ed.), The Influence of East Europe and the
Soviet West on the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1975), p. 10.
3 Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.:
Hoover Institution Press, 2000).
4 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 25–7; Yuri Slezkine, ‘The
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the 1920s made nationalities more articulate, and if Stalinist ideologues man-
aged to undo much of what had been achieved at that time, they never ques-
tioned the ethnic distinctiveness of non-Russian peoples. During the post-war
period, the non-Russians did not make much progress in their nation-building,
but managed to preserve many of their previous accomplishments. Thus, espe-
cially for the regions that had been incorporated into the USSR during 1939–
45, the pre-Soviet experience of nation-building remained a decisive factor in
national consolidation.
Nation-building in the age of revolution
The prominent Czech scholar Miroslav Hroch concluded in his study of
Europe’s non-dominant ethnic groups that these people usually undergo three
stages in their national revival – that of academic interest in the nation’s history
and culture, creation and propagation of modern high culture and political
mobilisation.
5
All the nationalities living on the western borderland of the
Russian Empire qualified as Hroch’s ‘small peoples’ because they lacked con-
tinuous traditions of statehood, native elites and literature in an indigenous
language. However, in the time of total war and global politics, these nations’
geopolitical location between Russia and Germany shaped their destinies no
less than did the Czech scholar’s objective historical criteria.
During the late nineteenth century, Estonians and Latvians were over-
whelmingly peasant peoples, albeit with the level of literacy that was one
of the highest in Europe – over 90 per cent. (This high level of literacy was
due to the spread of the Lutheran faith beginning in the sixteenth century and
the Church’s adoption of Estonian in its services.) Estonians, whose speech
belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of languages and is drastically different from
Indo-European languages, in a sense benefited from their cultural isolation.
The Russian imperial government encouraged conversion to Orthodoxy but
could not enforce serious assimilation of the peasantry. Instead, the centralis-
ing efforts of the last two tsars undermined the positions of the Baltic German
nobility, the land’s traditional ruling caste, while placing no restrictions on
the development of Estonian culture, the press and education. The decline of
Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic
Particularism’, Slavic Review 53, 2 (1994): 414–52; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the
Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1993), pp. 111–12 and 129–31.
5 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, trans. Ben Fowkes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
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The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics
the Baltic barons’ power, combined with rapid industrialisation and urbani-
sation at the turn of the century, allowed Estonians to challenge the German
domination of their cities, including Tallinn, which had become one of the
empire’s major ports. In 1897, Estonians constituted 67.8 per cent of urbanites
in their ethno-linguistic territory.
6
The Estonian bourgeoisie and Estonian pro-
fessionals were becoming increasingly prominent in public life and supported
national culture, most notably the tradition of all-Estonian song festivals that
began in 1869.
The Revolution of 1905 escalated the political and cultural demands of
Estonian activists. Moderate loyalists, led by Jaan To
nisson and the Estonian
Progressive People’s Party, put forward the demand for autonomy, while rad-
ical nationalists, headed by Konstantin P
¨
ats, combined this aim with that of
overthrowing the tsarist regime. But 1905 also marked the entry on the political
scene of Estonian socialism. As the peasants were destroying large manors in
the countryside, the Russian and Estonian Social Democratic Workers’ Parties
were recruiting followers among the working class. The suppression of the
revolution undermined the growth of the radical Left, but had little effect on
the development of Estonian society and culture.
During the First World War, Estonia remained outside the battle zone and
did not suffer wartime destruction. The fall of the tsarist regime in February
1917 led to the renewed demands of autonomy. Following an impressive Esto-
nian demonstration in Petrograd (St Petersburg), the Provisional Government
indeed agreed to unite the Estonian ethnic lands into a single province and
to allow elections to the provincial assembly. The assembly, known in Esto-
nian as Maap
¨
aev, was elected in May and represented all the major political
parties, including the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petro-
grad in November 1917, their leader in Estonia, Viktor Kingissepp, disbanded
the Maap
¨
aev but was unable to establish an efficient administration. More
important, the Bolsheviks alienated many Estonians with their attacks on the
Lutheran Church and failure to divide large landed estates.
On 24 February 1918, as the German army was marching into Estonia, the
underground representatives of the Maap
¨
aev proclaimed the country’s inde-
pendence. During the occupation, which lasted until late November 1918, the
German military and the local Baltic Germans openly considered Estonia’s
incorporation into Germany. But as Germany surrendered to the Allies and
withdrew its troops from Eastern Europe, Estonia became the scene of a civil
6 To ivo U. R aun , Estonia and the Estonians (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1991),
73.
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