History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)
Although reform in the
Soviet Union stalled between
1969 and
1982, a generational shift gave new momentum for reform. Changing relations with the
United States might also have been an impetus for reform. While it was
Jimmy Carter who had officially ended the policy of
Détente following
Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, East-West tensions during the first term of U.S.
President Ronald Reagan (
1981–
1985) increased to levels not seen since the
1962 Cuban missile crisis.
After years of stagnation, the "new thinking" of younger Communist apparatchiks began to emerge. Following the death of the elderly
Konstantin Chernenko, the
Politburo elected
Mikhail Gorbachev to the position of
General Secretary of the Soviet Union in March
1985, marking the rise of a new generation of leadership. Under Gorbachev, relatively young, reform-oriented technocrats, who had begun their careers in the heyday of "de-Stalinization" under
Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964), rapidly consolidated power within the
CPSU, providing new momentum for political and economic liberalization, and the impetus for cultivating warmer relations and trade with the West.
By the time Gorbachev ushered in the process that would lead to the dismantling of the Soviet administrative
command economy through his programs of
glasnost (political openness),
perestroika (economic restructuring), and
uskoreniye (speed-up of economic development) announced in 1986, the Soviet economy suffered from both hidden
inflation and pervasive supply shortages aggravated by an increasingly open
black market that undermined the official economy. Additionally, the costs of superpower status — the military,
KGB, subsidies to client states — were out of proportion to the Soviet economy. The new wave of industrialization based upon information technology had left the Soviet Union desperate for Western technology and credits in order to counter its increasing backwardness.
Reforms
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Perestroika poster featuring Gorbachev |
The
Law on Cooperatives enacted in May 1988 was perhaps the most radical of the economic reforms during the early part of the Gorbachev era. For the first time since
Vladimir Lenin's
New Economic Policy, the law permitted private ownership of businesses in the services, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors. Under this provision, cooperative restaurants, shops, and manufacturers became part of the Soviet scene.
Glasnost gave a greater freedom of speech. The press became far less controlled, and thousands of political prisoners and many dissidents were released. While Gorbachev's primary goal in undertaking
glasnost was to pressure conservatives who opposed his policies of economic restructuring, he also hoped that through different ranges of openness, debate and participation, the Soviet people would support his reform initiatives. Soviet social science became free to explore and publish on many subjects that had previously been off limits, including conducting public opinion polls. The All-Union Center for Public Opinion Research (
VCIOM) â€" the most prominent of several polling organizations that were started then â€" was opened. State archives became more accessible, and some social statistics that had been embargoed or kept secret became open for research and publication on sensitive subjects such as income disparities, crime, suicide, abortion, and infant mortality. The first center for gender studies was opened within a newly formed Institute for the Socio-Economic Study of Human Population.
In January 1987, Gorbachev called for democratization: the infusion of democratic elements such as multi-candidate elections into the Soviet political process. In June 1988, at the CPSU's Nineteenth Party Conference, Gorbachev launched radical reforms meant to reduce party control of the government apparatus. In December 1988, the Supreme Soviet approved the establishment of a
Congress of People's Deputies, which constitutional amendments had established as the Soviet Union's new legislative body. Elections to the congress were held throughout the USSR in March and April 1989. On
March 15,
1990, Gorbachev was elected as the first executive
President of the Soviet Union.
Unintended consequences
Gorbachev's efforts to streamline the Communist system offered promise, but ultimately proved uncontrollable and resulted in a cascade of events that eventually concluded with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Initially intended as tools to bolster the Soviet economy, the policies of
perestroika and
glasnost soon led to unintended consequences.
Relaxation of
censorship under
glasnost resulted in the Communist Party losing its absolute grip on the
media. Before long, and much to the embarrassment of the authorities, the media began to expose severe social and economic problems the Soviet government had long denied existed and actively concealed. Problems receiving increased attention included poor housing,
alcoholism,
drug abuse,
pollution, outdated
Stalinist-era factories, and petty to large-scale corruption, all of which the official media had ignored. Media reports also exposed crimes committed by
Stalin and the Soviet regime, such as the
gulags, his treaty with
Adolf Hitler, and the
Great Purges ignored by the official media. Moreover, the ongoing
war in Afghanistan, and the mishandling of the
1986 Chernobyl disaster further damaged the credibility of the Soviet government at a time when dissatisfaction was increasing.
In all, the very positive view of Soviet life which had long been presented to the public by the official media was being rapidly dismantled, and the negative aspects of life in the Soviet Union were brought into the spotlight. This undermined the faith of the public in the Soviet system and eroded the Communist Party's social power base, threatening the identity and integrity of the Soviet Union itself.
Fraying amongst the members of the
Warsaw Pact nations and instability of its western allies, first indicated by
Lech Wałęsa's
1980 rise to leadership of the
trade union Solidarity, accelerated, leaving the Soviet Union unable to depend upon its satellite states for protection of its borders, as buffer states. By 1989, Moscow had repudiated the
Brezhnev Doctrine in favor of non-intervention in the internal affairs of its
Eastern European allies, thereby fatally depriving the Eastern European regimes of the assurance of Soviet assistance and intervention in the event of popular uprising. Gradually, each of the Warsaw Pact nations saw their communist governments fall to popular elections and, in the case of
Romania, a violent uprising. By 1991 the communist governments of
Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia,
East Germany,
Hungary,
Poland and
Romania, all of which had been imposed after
World War II, were brought down as revolution swept Eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union also began experiencing upheaval as the political consequences of
glasnost reverberated throughout the country. Despite efforts at containment, the instability in Eastern Europe inevitably spread to nationalities within the USSR. In
elections to the regional assemblies of the Soviet Union's constituent republics,
nationalists as well as radical reformers swept the board. As Gorbachev had weakened the system of internal political repression, the ability of the USSR's central Moscow government to impose its will on the USSR's constituent republics had been largely undermined. Massive peaceful protests in the
Baltic Republics such as
The Baltic Way and the
Singing Revolution drew international attention and bolstered independence movements in various other regions.
The rise of nationalism under
glasnost soon reawakened simmering ethnic tensions in various Soviet republics, further discrediting the ideal of a unified Soviet people. One instance occurred in February 1988, when the government in
Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian region in the Azerbaijan SSR, passed a resolution calling for unification with the
Armenian SSR. Violence against local Azerbajanis was reported on Soviet television, provoking massacres of Armenians in the Azerbaijani city of
Sumgait.
Emboldened by the liberalized atmosphere of
glasnost, public dissatisfaction with economic conditions was much more overt than ever before in the Soviet period. Although
perestroika was considered bold in the context of Soviet history, Gorbachev's attempts at economic reform were not radical enough to restart the country's chronically sluggish economy in the late 1980s. The reforms made some inroads in decentralization, but Gorbachev and his team left intact most of the fundamental elements of the
Stalinist system, including price controls, inconvertibility of the ruble, exclusion of private property ownership, and the government monopoly over most means of production.
By 1990 the Soviet government had virtually lost control over economic conditions. Government spending increased sharply as an increasing number of unprofitable enterprises required state support and consumer price subsidies to continue. Tax revenues declined as revenues from the sales of vodka plummeted during the anti-alcohol campaign and because republic and local governments withheld tax revenues from the central government under the growing spirit of regional autonomy. The elimination of central control over production decisions, especially in the consumer goods sector, led to the breakdown in traditional supplier-producer relationships without contributing to the formation of new ones. Thus, instead of streamlining the system, Gorbachev's decentralization caused new production bottlenecks.
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Gorbachev accused Boris Yeltsin, his old rival and Russia's first post-Soviet president, of tearing the country apart out of a desire to advance his own personal interests. |
On
February 7,
1990 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union agreed to give up its monopoly of
power. The USSR's constituent republics began to assert their national sovereignty over Moscow, and started a "war of laws" with the central Moscow government, in which the governments of the constituent republics repudiated all-union legislation where it conflicted with local laws, asserting control over their local economies and refusing to pay tax revenue to the central Moscow government. This strife caused economic dislocation, as supply lines in the economy were broken, and caused the Soviet economy to decline further.
The pro-independence movement in Lithuania,
Sąjūdis, established on
June 3, 1988, caused a visit by Gorbachev in January 1990 to the Lithuanian capital,
Vilnius, which provoked a pro-independence rally of around 250,000 people. On
March 11 1990, Lithuania, led by Chairman of the Supreme Council
Vytautas Landsbergis, declared independence. However, the
Soviet Army had a strong presence in Lithuania. The Soviet Union initiated an economic blockade of Lithuania and kept troops there "to secure the rights of ethnic Russians."
On
March 30,
1990 the Estonian Supreme Council declared Soviet power in
Estonia since
1940 to have been illegal, and started a process to reestablish Estonia as an independent state. The process of restoration of independence of
Latvia began on
May 4,
1990, with a Latvian Supreme Council vote stipulating a transitional period to complete independence.
On
January 13,
1991, Soviet troops, along with
KGB Spetsnaz group Alfa, stormed the
Vilnius TV Tower in Vilnius to suppress the free media. This ended with 14 unarmed Lithuanian civilians dead and hundreds more injured. On the night of
July 31, 1991 Russian
OMON from
Riga, the Soviet military headquarters in the Baltics,
assaulted the Lithuanian border post in Medininkai and killed seven Lithuanian servicemen. This further weakened the Soviet Union's position, internationally and domestically.
On
March 17, 1991, in a Union-wide
referendum 78 % of all voters voted for the retention of the Soviet Union in a reformed form. The Baltics, Armenia, Georgia and
Moldova boycotted the referendum. In each of the other nine republics, a majority of the voters supported the retention of the Soviet Union.
In June 1991, direct elections were held for the post of president of the
Russian SFSR. The populist candidate
Boris Yeltsin, who was an outspoken critic of Mikhail Gorbachev, won 57% of the vote, defeating Gorbachev's preferred candidate, former Premier
Nikolai Ryzhkov, who won 16% of the vote.
The August Coup
Faced with growing republic separatism, Gorbachev attempted to restructure the Soviet Union into a less centralized state. On
August 20,
1991, the republics were to sign a new union
treaty, making them independent republics in a federation with a common
president, foreign policy and
military. The new treaty was strongly supported by the
Central Asian republics, who needed the economic power and common markets of the Soviet Union to prosper. However, the more radical reformists were increasingly convinced that a rapid transition to a market economy was required, even if the eventual outcome included the disintegration of the Soviet state. Disintegration of the USSR also accorded the desire of local authorities, such as Yeltsin's presidency, to establish full power over their territories. In contrast to the reformers' lukewarm approach to the new treaty, the conservatives and remaining patriots of the USSR, still strong within the CPSU and military establishment, were completely opposed to anything which might contribute to the weakening of the Soviet state.
On
August 19,
1991, Gorbachev's vice president
Gennadi Yanayev, prime minister
Valentin Pavlov, defense minister
Dmitriy Yazov, KGB chief
Vladimir Kryuchkov, and other senior officials acted to prevent the signing of the union treaty by forming the "State Committee on the State Emergency." The "Committee" put Gorbachev (vacationing in
Foros,
Crimea) under house arrest and attempted to restore the union state. The coup leaders quickly issued an emergency decree suspending political activity and banning most newspapers.
While coup organizers expected some popular support for their actions, the public sympathy in Moscow was largely against them. Thousands of people came out to defend the "White House" (Yeltsin's office), then the symbolic seat of Russian sovereignty. The organizers tried but ultimately failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin, who rallied mass opposition to the coup.
After three days, on
August 21, the coup collapsed, the organizers were detained, and Gorbachev returned as president of the Soviet Union. However, Gorbachev's powers were now fatally compromised as neither union nor Russian power structures heeded his commands. Through the autumn of 1991, the Russian government took over the union government, ministry by ministry. In November 1991, Yeltsin issued a decree banning the CPSU throughout the Russian republic. As a result, many former
apparatchiks abandoned the Communist Party in favor of positions in new government structures.
After the coup, the Soviet republics accelerated their process towards independence, declaring their sovereignty one by one. Their local authorities started to seize property that became available to them. On
September 6,
1991, the Soviet government recognized the independence of the three Baltic states, whose sovereignty had already been recognised by Western liberal democracies. Then on
December 1, 1991, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR after a popular referendum wherein 90% of voters opted for independence.
Formation of the CIS and official end of the USSR
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Map of the CIS |
On
December 8,
1991, the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian, and
Belarusian republics met in
Belavezhskaya Pushcha to issue a
declaration that the Soviet Union was dissolved and replaced by the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Gorbachev described this as a constitutional coup, but it soon became clear that the development could not be halted.
Twelve of the fifteen republics signed the
European Energy Charter in the Hague on
December 17,
1991 as if they were sovereign states, along with 28 other European countries, the European Community, and four non-European countries.
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The Soviet flag as it was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. |
On
December 25,
1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR. By
December 31,
1991 all official Soviet institutions had ceased operations as individual republics assumed the central government's role. The Soviet flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin.
The four principal elements of the old Soviet system were the hierarchy of soviets, ethnic
federalism, state
socialism, and Communist Party dominance. Gorbachev's programs of
perestroika and
glasnost produced radical unanticipated effects that brought that system down. As a means of reviving the Soviet state, Gorbachev repeatedly attempted to build a coalition of political leaders supportive of reform and created new arenas and bases of power. He implemented these measures because of economic problems and political inertia that clearly threatened to put the Soviet Union into a state of long-term stagnation.
But by using structural reforms to widen opportunities for leaders and popular movements in the union republics to gain influence, Gorbachev also made it possible for nationalist, orthodox communist, and populist forces to oppose his attempts to liberalize and revitalize Soviet communism. Although some of the new movements aspired to replace the Soviet system altogether with a liberal democratic one, others demanded independence for the national republics. Still others insisted on the restoration of the old Soviet ways. Ultimately, Gorbachev could not forge a compromise among these forces and the consequence was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In order to restructure the Soviet administrative command system and effect a transition to a
market-based economy, Yeltsin's
shock program, employed days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, cut subsidies to money-losing farms and industries, decontrolled prices, moved toward convertibility of the
ruble, created opportunities for his circle and other entrepreneurs to seize the former people's property and moved toward restructuring the largely state-owned economy. After obtaining power, the vast majority of idealistic reformers gained huge possessions using their key positions in government structures. Preexisting institutions had been abandoned before the legal structures of a market economy that governed private property, oversaw the financial market, and enforced taxation had been made functional.
Market economists believed that the dismantling of the administrative command system in Russia would raise
GDP and living standards by allocating resources more efficiently. They also thought the collapse would create a movement outward towards production possibilities by eliminating central planning, substituting a decentralized market system, eliminating huge distortions through liberalization, and providing incentives through privatization.
Since the USSR's collapse, Russia has been facing many problems that the planners in 1992 did not expect: among other things, 25% of the population now lives below the poverty line, life expectancy has dropped, birthrates are low, and the GDP has plunged by half. In the eyes of many of the older generation in Russia, life under the old Soviet system was better and more secure than it is today. These problems led to a series of crises in the 1990s, which nearly led to election of Yeltsin's Communist opponent in the
1996 presidential election.
*
Autumn of Nations*
Predictions of Soviet collapse*
Reform, Coup and Collapse: The End of the Soviet State by Professor Archie Brown.
*
Soviet Archives collected by
Vladimir Bukovsky*
Candid photos of the Eastern Bloc Sept-Dec 1991, in the last months of the USSR
*
The Soviet Union Disintegrates by
Frank E. Smitha* Helene Carrere D'Encausse,
The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, Basic Books, 1992, ISBN 0465098185
* Ronald Grigor Suny,
The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Stanford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0804722471
