Midnight, 1989: the Crumbling Empire

CHAPTER 2

Future historians may well see the dissolution of colonial empires as the most important and lasting political development of the twentieth century.  First, and relatively successful, was the gradual change of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations.  Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese political and military elites dragged their colonialist feet, but after much bloodletting had to accept the inevitable defeat.

The Russian Empire (which is not often recognised as such because it was not created overseas by navies but overland by cavalry and infantry) has now reached an advanced stage of crisis, if not actual dissolution.  Usually, it is called the Soviet Empire, but the Bolshevik and Soviet leaders merely enlarged the empire inherited from the Czars and continued its domination and exploitation by Russians or russified non-Russians.  Not only Soviet political and military leaders, but even Russian dissidents have often found it hard to accept that Russian communists in the border regions acted as colonialists.  They made the typical colonialist claim that the imperialists brought cultural and other benefits to barbarous peoples who should be grateful for this civilising mission.

This view has until recently prevailed in the West for a variety of ideological, pragmatic and strategic reasons (not to mention a certain "know-nothingness").  This prevalence owes much to the way in which the Yalta and Potsdam accords assigned Eastern and Central Europe, "strategic" border lands, and the Balkans to Soviet domination.  What we are now witnessing is the dismantling of these accords, which underwrote the Soviet Empire.

CREATION OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Moscow established itself as an imperialist centre during the two centuries of Mongol domination.  Around 1450 it began to annex neighbouring territories, and in 1552 conquered the first non-Russian city of Kazan.  From then on, the Grand Duchy of Moscow behaved as a colonial power (British historian Sir John Maynard described the Russian as "a sort of land sailor").  Muscovite colonisation reached all the points of the compass:

Northwest:  Ivan IV (the Terrible, 1533-84) tried to reach the Baltic.  Although he could not take Tallin and Riga, his troops massacred, russified and deported the Baltic peoples.  Peter I (the Great, 1682-1725), adopting Western technological and military advances, was more successful.  He occupicd Estonia, Livonia, Karelia and other territories.  The newly founded St Petersburg became the capital of the All-Russian Empire.  Finland was seized in 1809.

Southwest:  Large parts of the Ukraine were annexed during the 17th century, Crimea was conquered before 1800 and Bessarabia in 1812.  Jewish populations were decimated by officially encouraged pogroms.  Many Jews were forced to leave the country.

East:  Ukrainian Cossacks with the Czar's mandate began colonising Siberia in 1582.  Often they moved up on Siberian rivers by boat.  It took them about fifty years to reach the borders of the Chinese Empire.

West:  Catherine II (the Great, 1762-92) took advantage of three partitions of Poland.  Belorussia also became part of the Russian Empire.  Central Poland, including Warsaw, fell to Russia in 1815.  Moldavia was annexed in 1848.

Southeast:  Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were gradually incorporated into the Russian Empire during the first half of the 19th century.  Between 1868 and 1885, the lands of the future Central Asian republics of Turkestan, Tadjikistan, Kirgizia and Uzbekistan, as well as Kazakhstan were acquired.  An attempt to seize Afghanistan failed and the British spoiled Russian imperialist dreams about India.

Large numbers of Russians moved into all the colonised countries.  Russification, especially after failed rebellions, and economic exploitation were normal imperial policies.  Hundreds of thousands of Tartars went into exile rather than benefit from Russian "civilisation".  One Russian general suggested that all Tartars be deported to Siberia.  The officially proclaimed ideology -- justifying the barbarous treatment of non-Russian peoples -- was (Russian) Orthodoxy, (Tsarist) Autocracy and (Russian) Nationality.

CHRISTIANITY

After the fall of Byzantium in 1453, it had been hoped that Moscow would inherit the world Christian empire.  In 1510 the monk Philoteos in the monastery of St Eleazar invented a very influential theory, according to which the Russian Czar would rule over all Christians from Moscow:  "It was written that two Romes fell, the third is standing and there will be no fourth one".  Such prophesies influenced Russian bureaucrats, militarists, the intelligentsia, and among others, even writers such as Pushkin and Dostoevsky.  Russia became the largest land-based colonial empire in the world.  The Czar ruled over more than 180 nations.  Lenin, who after 1917 saved the Empire from disintegration, called the Russian Empire a "prison of nations".

CREATION OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE

The Russian revolutions of 1917 stimulated national and religious hopes of liberation throughout the empire.  The Bolshevik government at first encouraged such aspirations.  On 3 December 1917, the Council of People's Commissars declared that a new world was born and that all the previously enslaved nations and peoples would have their freedom, beliefs, traditions and cultural institutions protected and guaranteed.  Under this solemn proclamation was the signature of the then Commissar of Nationalities, Josef Stalin.  In practice there were limits to this general principle:  only the workers could request independence, not the bourgeoisie.  Requests for independence were thus repressed as "bourgeois nationalism".

During the Civil War (1917-21), the Belorussian National Republic and independent Ukraine were soon crushed.  Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan declared their independence in 1918.  Although Lenin's government recognised their secession from the Russian Empire by international treaties, it worked towards their destruction.  Azerbaijan was occupied by the Red Army in April 1920, and Armenia was conquered in December.  After three years of independence under a Social Democratic government, Georgia fell to the advancing Russian armies in March 1921;  a mass uprising was crushed in 1924.  In 1922 the Siberian Far Eastern Republic was liquidated.  Only the Poles, Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians were able to defend their newly-won states.

The Moslem people of Central Asia were brutally re-colonised.  After an insurrection in Kirgizia, Bolshevik troops massacred 150,000 natives.  During the 1921 famine, a million Kirgizians and Bashkirs perished.  Anti-Soviet uprisings by the Bashkirs continued until the late 1920s.  In Turkestan, where Moslems tried to create autonomous regimes, the cities of Kokand and Bukhara were sacked by the Reds and countless people were massacred.  For years, partisan bands of Basmachi fought the Communists.  "Prerevolutionary Russian colonialism was back, only increased a hundred-fold in severity." ⁽¹⁾

In the mid-1920s, the Soviet government replaced the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, forcing thirty-six million people speaking seventy languages to change the way they read and wrote.  In Caucasian Daghestan, the Arabic language was first replaced by Turkish and later by Russian.  Secularisation was also energetically imposed.  A "second alphabetic revolution" in the 1930s introduced Cyrillic script in place of Latin.  The Russian language was taught in schools everywhere.  In the West, the Soviet regime was often praised for its success in abolishing illiteracy in non-Russian regions.  It was forgotten that the aim was to russify the peoples, and by suppressing their native habits and religion make new "Soviet" men and women out of them.

At the beginning of the thirties, the forceful collectivisation of agriculture and the bloody purges which followed liquidated tens of millions of people and eliminated several nations:  for instance, the Chechens and the Ingush.  Millions of Ukrainians and Belorussians perished.  Both before and after the Second World War, Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars, together with large numbers of Jews, were brutally uprooted from their homes and transported to Siberia.  Through murder and famine Kazakstan lost half of its population.  In Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan the Russian Communists pushed the cultivation of cotton at the expense of rice and grain.  (At the beginning of the twenties, Zinoviev, the "internationalist" bolshevik colonialist, said:  "We can't do without their cotton".)  The consequence was tragic:  mass starvation.

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE OUTER EMPIRE

In August 1939 Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide Poland and as part of the deal the Russians militarily occupied Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia and Bukovina.  Mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Balts took place before the start of the German-Russian war in June 1941 and again when Soviet armies pushed out German units.  Hundreds of thousands of Baltic people fled and lived then, often for years, in refugee camps in Germany before their diaspora all over the free world.  After the war, suppression and persecution of "bourgeois nationalism" continued in the Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere.  Soviet statisticians in the USSR in 1926 counted 194 nations;  in 1959 only 126;  and in the 1970s just 91.  Over one hundred nations were liquidated.  There are no marked mass graves.

Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Union used its victory in the "Great Patriotic War" to create an outer empire:  two hundred million Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Bulgarians and Rumanians disappeared behind the so-called Iron Curtain.  Their borders were guarded and fortified against escape from this huge Soviet "prison of nations".

Mass uprisings and revolutions in June 1953 in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, in October 1956 in Poland and Hungary, in 1968 again in Czechoslovakia were suppressed by military means.  In all, tens of thousands were killed, many more imprisoned, and in Hungary thousands of executions took place after the end of the fighting and during which there were over thirty thousand casualties.  Repeated insurrections in Poland in 1968, 1970, 1976 and in the 1980s were repressed by local Communists trained and encouraged by Moscow masters.  Hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans preferred exile, whilst many were killed crossing the borders.

After recent admissions by Russian communists that in the seventy-year history of the Soviet Empire the government was responsible for uncounted individual murders, mass deportations and mass murders, and even several instances of genocide -- one official Soviet source has put the total as high as 40 millions killed -- is it not time to reconsider President Reagan's often ridiculed claim that we had to face an "Evil Empire"?  It is now generally recognised that Nazi Germany was evil.  In the name of a Marxist, allegedly more humanistic and internationalist ideology, the Russian Communists managed to create an even more murderous regime than Hitler's National Socialist Germany.

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES IN THE OUTER EMPIRE

One hundred and forty-one years after the "spring of nations" of 1848 and seventy-one years after the second in 1918, the year 1989 was another "spring of nations".  Many people in the West were shocked by the vehemence and speed with which Central European nations liberated themselves from at least some of the many shackles imposed on them by their Soviet occupiers.

It is almost impossible for people living in more or less free countries to imagine what it meant to fall prey to Soviet imperialism.  The outer empire had an easier time than the nations that had been taken over by Lenin's and Stalin's soldiers and secret policemen years before.  Nevertheless, their lives were horrifying.  Thousands were tortured, thousands, including Communist leaders, were executed;  hundreds of thousands were arrested and sent to Siberia or local concentration camps;  millions lost their jobs, homes, offices, lands, shops and relatives.  Hardly a family was spared.  Life became miserable.  Shopping for meagre supplies of poor-quality goods and food took hours every day.  Books deemed to be challenging to the Party's views (Freud, Hemingway or Orwell, for instance) were destroyed.  All publications were strictly censored.  Lenin's and Stalin's monuments were built everywhere.  Religion was not tolerated.  Almost every official statement was a lie.  Even when one was not, no one believed it.  As we now know absolutely from recent events, only fear of omnipresent police, secret agents, informers and Soviet intervention kept people in check.

Although the nations learned to live in this environment, almost everyone cheated, lied, stole all that could be stolen, in short, became corrupted by the system under which they had no choice but to live and over which they had almost no influence.  Even those in power felt threatened, realising that they were hated by the population and suspected by other power holders.  They feared that in a rebellion, if they were not hanged or lynched, they would at least lose their positions and all the accumulated privileges.  Everyone felt misery, humiliation and bitterness.  Thus there was little loyalty, least of all among the privileged classes, the Nomenklatura.

Those who went into exile lost their homes, friends and often relatives.  Even those who managed to get to a free country felt as if they were walking on stilts and lived a borrowed life, not fully their own.  Though some of them could escape national limitations and embrace the cosmopolitan world (sometimes becoming more successful than if they had stayed home) the wounds of exile almost never completely healed, and they remained psychological prisoners of their experiences.

POLAND

The Polish rebellions against Czarist imperialism in 1830, 1848 and 1863 did not enjoy lasting success partly because the nation was divided between the large nobility and still larger peasantry.  The Russians could play one against the other.  Similarly, repeated Polish rebellions against Soviet imperialism in 1956, 1968, 1970 and 1976 also failed because there was no united support of workers, intellectuals and students.  Only when a coalition of workers, intelligentsia and the Catholic Church was organised could it successfully challenge the Communist government and in the 1980s force it to make concessions.  The creation of the union element of the Solidarity movement was endorsed by millions of workers, peasants and students.  Such was its challenge to Soviet imperialism that only "self-invasion" by the Polish communist government prevented a full-scale Soviet invasion and occupation.  Hundreds of Polish workers' leaders were arrested, including the charismatic electrician Lech Walesa, as the military junta vainly tried to "normalise" the country.

Meanwhile, dissidents managed to create an alternate society.  They devised non-communist school and university curricula and published thousands of books, journals and newspapers.  When the economy almost collapsed and new waves of strikes engulfed Poland, the Communist Party finally opened a dialogue with the democratic opposition and legalised Solidarity.  A new government, led by a non-Communist, with just a few Communist ministers in its ranks, is trying to liberate the country from the debilitating consequences of Russian imperialism and local Communist Party blunders:  material and spiritual hunger, a shattered economy, a huge foreign debt, decaying buildings and streets and general social malaise.

HUNGARY

Hungarians followed a different path away from Stalinism and Soviet imperialism.  For historical reasons, Marxism and Leninism had stronger native roots in Hungary than in Poland.  While the Bolsheviks were hoping to spread their world revolution to Warsaw on the bayonets of the Red Army, in Budapest the Hungarian Leninist Bela Kun was able to seize power and hold it for a few months by a combination of revolutionary jargon and revanchist nationalism.  When he antagonised native workers and peasants, he "declared the Hungarian working class to be unworthy of being ruled by the communists but he suggested that under the whip hand of White terror they would learn the proper lessons". ⁽²⁾  (Lenin, the Russian nobleman, also felt contempt for the working people.)

In 1956 -- to mention another of the many variations in Polish and Hungarian history -- Poland saw a contained revolution that would be slowly suffocated by its communist hero, Wladyslaw Gomulka, while in Hungary a national revolution was crushed in blood by the Soviet army.  But after a few years of Red terror (to teach the working class, intellectuals and students yet another lesson in loyalty), Hungary experienced relative economic and political relaxation under Janos Kadar, the traitor of 1956, and could be described as "the happiest barracks in the East".

After the death of Kadar, the rapid decommunisation of Hungary was shrewdly led by the local Communist Party, although neither this nor dropping the adjective "Communist" and the Marxist-Leninist slogans of class struggle and international solidarity saved them from defeat in the 1990 elections.

EAST GERMANY

The German Democratic Republic (so-called) enjoyed a higher living standard than the other satellite nations for three main reasons:  Germans are a traditionally hard-working and disciplined people used to living under authoritarian rulers;  special arrangements with the genuinely democratic West Germany made East Germany a silent partner in the European Community;  and large amounts of West German funds were given to the Communist regime as payments for the liberation of political prisoners.

Geographic proximity helped the economy but made the political system more vulnerable:  East Germans could watch West German television.  They envied not only the material progress of the West, but also its freedoms.  When the Hungarian communists opened their border with Austria, East Germans holidaying in Hungary crossed in hundreds, then in thousands, abandoning their possessions (in preference for less materialistic values, with only a prospect of future prosperity).  West German embassies in the East soon faced thousands of East Germans trying to emigrate.  The willingness of four Communist governments to let them go signalled that the outer empire was crumbling.  The Soviet Union was abandoning its satraps.

With hundreds of thousands of his subjects demonstrating for freedom in cities such as Leipzig and East Berlin, the East German dictator, Honecker, publicly expressed his willingness to follow the Chinese model of the Tienanmen massacre (but this was to be left to the Rumanian feudal lord Ceausescu).  Honecker was soon replaced by the more accommodating Egon Krenz.  Free elections were promised, a dialogue with the New Forum of dissidents was opened, and it was proposed to put the corrupt Honecker, who is sick and supposedly cannot understand what happened, on trial for treason.  Subsequent events saw the rapid crumbling of East Germany's economy, to a point where the only hope of averting total economic collapse seemed to be rapid reunification with West Germany.

BULGARIA

In Bulgaria the opposition movement could gather around ecological problems, which are alarming in all the present and former Communist countries.  Bulgaria is one country whose leaders might be able to claim that it benefited from the Soviet domination.  For historical reasons Russians were not hated there.  But the moment the long-lasting dictator, Todor Zhivkov, was toppled, Bulgarian cities were full of demonstrators welcoming the first signs of liberation.  Unfortunately, their hostility towards the large Turkish minority might, however, harm the prospects of the emergence of a truly democratic, civil society.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Czechoslovakia (where the 1968 program of "socialism with a human face" helped to inspire Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, but where Soviet tanks liquidated the short "Prague Spring") seemed to be the hardest country to liberate.  For more than twenty years neo-Stalinist hardliners succeeded in turning the state into a penal colony.  Material conditions were nowhere as bad as in Poland, but the oppression was more damaging and thorough.  Only some two thousand courageous dissidents, mainly intellectuals, dared defy the regime.  They published the Charter 77 and a long series of studies, manifestos and protests against continuing mismanagement and persecution.  They had only silent sympathy from a population that was just trying to survive without too much harm, but which felt constantly humiliated by the prevailing atmosphere of limited but effective terror.

After mass demonstrations in 1988 and 1989 during which many people were brutally beaten by the club-wielding police, hundreds of thousands of people, first in Prague and then in other cities, invaded the streets.  After ten days, discouraged by a successful general strike, the Communist leadership resigned and the new government entered talks with Civic Forum, representing the united opposition groups.  The sad hero of 1968, Alexander Dubcek, now triumphant, was able to proclaim the beginning of a new era, but expressed sorrow that people did not believe in Communism any more.  The dramatist Vaclav Havel, who for his long and courageous support of democratic and human rights had spent nearly five years in various prisons, led the non-Communists.  He pressed for a democratic, multi-party republic free to choose its economic base.  By the end of 1989 Dubcek was Speaker of the parliament and the professed Christian Havel president of the republic.  What in Poland took years, in Hungary months, in East Germany weeks, was achieved in Czechoslovakia in days.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE OUTER EMPIRE

The Soviet leaders had obviously decided that it was better to bend to reality, to stop forcing people to live under hated dictatorships -- and to allow the West to rescue -- if it can -- the collapsing communist economies, (including the USSR's own).  Once Moscow's guarantee of support was withdrawn, the corrupt and discredited system crumbled before people's power.  The largest and most peaceful revolution in human history, accomplished in several countries in the space of a few weeks, revealed the total failure of communism in Central Europe.

Previously, communists confronted with internal crisis had chosen either repression or strictly-controlled reform.  Without Moscow's guarantee, they now rushed to turn themselves into reformists, but were never able to find a position that was not outflanked, often within days, by continuing revolutionary change.  Everywhere, the democratic opposition found itself propping up the failing communist regimes until free elections could be held, to avoid the descent into chaos and violence that was threatened as the extreme corruption of the regimes was revealed.

With the Soviet leaders acquiescing in the profound changes taking place in the outer empire, it seemed that all they hoped to defend was the 1945 frontiers and some remnants of the Warsaw Pact and COMECON.  Western governments agreed to such an attempt to save appearances and, if possible, Gorbachev himself.  Initially, at least, general chaos was seen to be more dangerous than disgraced and disorganised communism.

TENSIONS IN THE INNER EMPIRE

Gorbachev's problems were now how to stop the anti-communist (and anti-Russian) revolution from penetrating -- and indeed threatening the dissolution -- of the Soviet Union itself.  Although at a slower pace than in the outer empire, similar, long-suppressed social and national aspirations -- stimulated by glasnost and the promises of perestroika -- are overtaking a succession of reforms always announced as final, but again and again proving to be too weak to contain them without the use of military force.

Without a blueprint prepared in advance and without a clear vision of a positive program for changing the empire into a federated commonwealth of nations living in constitutionally autonomous republics, threats, compromises and entreaties are not working.  The inner Soviet empire stumbles from crisis to crisis.  All fifteen Soviet republics are in turmoil.

The deep-seated causes are numerous.  Most prominent among them are the general malaise generated by seventy years of oppression.  These include ecological catastrophe, demographic warning signals, nationalist pressures for independence, social demoralisation, economic collapse (evidenced by increasing shortages of basic goods such as food and soap), over-centralisation, bureaucratic bungling and resistance to change:  all leading to horrific living conditions, boredom, alienation and exasperation.  It is an almost impossible task to solve in spite of President Gorbachev's and his supporters' efforts.  Gorbachev is much more popular west of the Soviet borders than to their east.

THE BALTIC NATIONS

The nations closest to separation from the USSR are the three Baltic republics.

LITHUANIA

In the 1970s and 1980s, many Lithuanian samizdat publications helped prepare the public for further developments.  When opposition groups attempted to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Lithuanian independence on 16 February 1988, the police measures were so violent that crowds could gather safely only in Catholic churches.  On 2 June 1988 there was a wave of protests after the Lithuanian government reported Moscow's decision to expand giant chemical industries in the already badly polluted region.  Shrewd use of the slogan "Perestroika", along with support from Communist Party members, led the next day to the creation of the "Lithuanian Reconstruction Movement", Sajudis for short.  Sajudis became the main organisation for change, at first spreading its message through meetings, demonstrations, "folk" and "rock" festivals, ecological marches and other public events.  By 2 August, an ecological protest against the installation of a third "Chernobyl"-type nuclear reactor in Kaunas attracted half a million people.

Other groups aspiring to radical change include the "Lithuanian Freedom League", whose principal demand is complete independence for Lithuania.  The Roman Catholic Church also supports the reform movement.  The Communist Party leadership has gradually embraced many of the demands of the opposition.

On August 23, a public meeting attended by some 250,000 people wanted to organise mass protests against the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.  One speaker declared:  "If Tsarism created a 'prison of nations', Stalinism established a slaughterhouse of nations". ⁽³⁾  National self-determination became the goal.

Also in August, the communist government made a series of concessions on advice from Moscow.  Lithuanians were permitted to use the old national flag and sing the old anthem.  Pre-school children were to be taught in their native language and the long-standing russification policy was called off.  The government ceased supporting the third nuclear reactor.  Members of the Communist Party were allowed to join Sajudis, at least in part in the hope of limiting its effectiveness and its impact on the other nations of the USSR.

Further demonstrations in September, at which many people were beaten by riot police and special military forces of the Ministry of the Interior, led to the installation of Algirdas Brazauskas as Party first secretary.  Brazauskas allowed the first Sajudis Congress (22-23 October 1988) to be televised.  The previous day, the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet passed a decree by which all deportees from the period 1941 to 1952 were to be rehabilitated and compensated for "economic damages". ⁽⁴⁾  Sajudis received legal recognition in March 1989.

ESTONIA

Before examining common actions taken by the Baltic states in their quest to secede from the USSR, it is necessary to review earlier developments in Estonia.

During 1987 the number and membership of opposition groups grew rapidly.  By 1988 the Estonian "National Front", representing the united progressive movements, had some sixty thousand active members.  The "Estonian Independent Social Forum" was formed to serve as a bridge between the opposition and Communist Party leaders who were willing to cooperate with the "National Front".

Growing demands for official recognition of national symbols were fulfilled on 23 June 1988 when Estonia's Supreme Soviet ratified the use of the pre-war national flag (blue, black and white tricolour) and emblems (cornflower and barn swallow).  The flags had been widely displayed on 14 June when large crowds commemorated Stalin's mass deportations of Estonians, and on 17 June in Tallin when 100,000 people publicly observed national independence day.

LATVIA

The Latvians faced a more difficult task of awakening than the other two Baltic republics.  During the forced incorporation into the Soviet Union, most Latvian government officials and representatives of state institutions were shot or deported to Siberia as were thousands of intellectuals, businessmen, farmers and skilled workers.  The purge continued into the 1950s.  Nearly 150,000 Latvians fled to the West.  They were replaced by so-called "latovichi", collaborators whose allegiance was to Russia and the USSR.  Another purge in 1959 punished nearly 2,000 Party and government officials who, taking Khrushchev's policy of the end of Russification seriously, had encouraged Latvian culture and language.

Since the war, over 700,000 people, mostly Russian, have moved or been moved into the small country.  As a consequence, barely half of the population is Latvian, ageing and living mostly in villages.  The national movement in Latvia began earlier than elsewhere.  Although folk-culture groups and requests for restoration of churches and monuments seemed innocent, they were sternly suppressed by the government (often with special police riot units, "Black Berets") since they were reviving feelings of national identity and restoring Latvian self-esteem.

The ecological issue also helped to coalesce opposition to the regime.  Latvians found themselves "in a zone of disaster or catastrophe as evidenced by the increase of several ecologically related illnesses". ⁽⁵⁾  Birth defects affected every fourth or fifth baby.  The "Environmental Protection Club" helped organise mass demonstrations against the construction of a hydro-electric dam on Latvia's largest river, with success:  in November 1987 the USSR Council of Ministers ordered its construction to be ceased.  Latvians also protested against a proposed nuclear power station.  Also in 1987, large-scale demonstrations commemorated both the mass deportations that followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the anniversary of Latvian independence, 18 November 1918.  The Latvians initiated the widely-imitated use of mass displays of lighted candles as symbols of grief and hope on such "calendar" days.  Such demonstrations became much larger in 1988.

In June 1988 a "Cultural Council" of creative unions in the republic was established.  It requested a historical review of the occupation of Latvia and its incorporation into the USSR.  It asked that national symbols be recognised and Latvian independence be guaranteed by the appointment of a Latvian foreign minister and diplomatic representation to the United Nations and other world organisations.  The resolution also requested equality of Latvian schools with their Russian counterparts.  Also in June, a Latvian "People's Front" and "Latvian National Independence Movement" were established.

BALTIC COOPERATION

From about this time, activists in the three Baltic republics increased their mutual encouragement and cooperation.  In September 1988, economists from state planning agencies and the various national academies of sciences, meeting in Riga, prepared a common program calling for eventual economic independence, with only defence and foreign relations delegated to the USSR government.  Preparations for new constitutions proceeded apace.  In November, all three Baltic Popular Fronts decided to oppose Soviet constitutional amendments since they did not guarantee their sovereignty.  The Kremlin put pressure on the leaders of the Baltic communist parties by sending Politburo emissaries to the capital cities of the three Baltic states.  When local Communists moderated their demands and accepted only concessions concerning the use of native languages, the opposition groups, supported by large crowds, put new pressures on them.

In December, Baltic cooperation began to include representatives of other discontented nationalities in the USSR.  Baltic educators met their Armenian and Georgian counterparts to coordinate their demands for replacing centralised, Russian education with local schools using national languages and teaching the historical and cultural traditions of the respective republics.  When the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel was again imprisoned, Latvian journalists and writers showed their solidarity by sending a telegram of protest to the Czechoslovak government.  In January 1989, representatives of eight national movements met in Vilnius.  In the name of the Balts, Armenians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Belorussians and the Crimean Tatars they adopted a "Freedom Charter of the Enslaved Nations of the USSR", declaring their right to independent statehood.  In an appeal to the Russian intelligentsia they called for an end to Soviet and Russian imperial ambitions.

The spring 1989 elections to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies saw successful campaigns by opposition movements in all three Baltic republics.

BALTIC ASSEMBLY

Given the degree of popular support for national sovereignty, communist leaders in all three Baltic states joined the movement towards autonomy if not genuine independence.  In May 1989, a Baltic Assembly of the three Popular Fronts in Tallin condemned the Stalinist genocide and requested political independence in a neutral, demilitarised "Baltoscandia".

The Baltic republics passed laws that went far beyond Soviet intentions, demanding economic and financial independence including the right to issue their own money, and accepting Soviet laws only if ratified by their own Supreme Soviets.  On 27 July 1989, the USSR Supreme Soviet endorsed their economic model.  As one observer remarked:

Together, the Baltic republics have a disproportionate impact on the evolution of changes in the USSR.  The popular fronts and the media in these three republics have become role models for those in other republics. ⁽⁶⁾

On 23 August 1989 -- the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact -- two million people formed a 600 km human chain connecting the three capitals.  Even Soviet television reported the shouts of "Freedom!  Freedom!".  The event produced a stern rebuke from Party leaders in Moscow, who criticised "nationalist extremism" and warned against the "push to the abyss" and an "impending disaster".  The Central Committees of the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian communist parties held emergency meetings to denounce "extremism" and "separatism".

But this setback was only temporary.  Dissatisfied with slow Soviet progress towards political and economic decentralisation, Baltic deputies and activists followed their own cautious but determined path of increasing independence.  Demonstrations continued in support of economic autonomy, withdrawal of Soviet armed forces, and secession from the Soviet Union.

On 14 November 1989, the Estonian Parliament annulled the 1940-enforced incorporation into the Soviet Union and introduced a national currency.  On the same day, only 25 votes saved the USSR Supreme Soviet in Moscow having to debate whether the Soviet Communist Party should retain its leading role in the USSR.  A week later, after a Lithuanian-led walkout protesting against lack of time to discuss a radical Baltic devolution plan, the USSR Supreme Soviet rejected the Soviet government's moderate relaxation of control in the Baltic republics.  The vote proved that many non-Baltic deputies, including Russians, wanted greater autonomy for their own republics.

After another week, the Soviet parliament finally granted broad economic autonomy to the three Baltic countries, allowing them among other things to introduce their own currencies and to exploit land and mineral resources "in the interest of the republic and the [Soviet] Union".  One Latvian deputy, Mr Yuri Boyars, declared, "If we can succeed in democratising the Soviet Union and agree on special legislation on sovereignty then maybe secession will not be a problem". ⁽⁷⁾

President Gorbachev had been reluctant to introduce a multi-party system in the USSR and managed to win the support of the majority of Supreme Soviet deputies against it.  The Baltic leaders, however, were more radical.  On 7 December 1989, following the example of the Central European countries, the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet voted 243 to 1 to delete from its Constitution the infamous Article Six which guaranteed the Communist Party the leading role in society.  The Latvians and then the Estonians soon followed suit.

In the multi-candidate, local government elections on 9 and 10 December 1989, Baltic citizens overwhelmingly supported members of the Popular Fronts demanding independence from Moscow.  In Latvia they won more than 90% of local government seats.

Despite these developments, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Mr Eduard Shevarnadze, pledged that Soviet armed forces would not intervene in the Soviet republics.  This promise was repeated even after the Lithuanian Communist Party's decision (by a majority of five to one) to leave the CPSU and when the Central Committee of the CPSU -- after a heated debate -- decided to send President Gorbachev as head of a Party delegation to try and persuade the Lithuanian Communists to change their mind.

BELORUSSIA

Belorussia was forcibly incorporated into the empire in the late 18th century.  An independent republic existed from March 1918 to January 1919.  The policy of russification, intensified by Stalin, was only recently relaxed.  During the Great Terror more than two million Belorussians perished.  In 1941 the invading Germans were welcomed as liberators, but another 2.2 million Belorussians were to die by the end of the war.

In December 1986, twenty-eight eminent scientists, writers and artists overcame the ingrained fear of terror and signed a petition to Gorbachev, protesting against the ongoing Russification programmes.  "Save the Belorussian people from spiritual extinction", they pleaded. ⁽⁸⁾  With no reply, a second letter to Gorbachev on 4 June 1987 was signed by 134 intellectuals.  It protested against physical genocide and cultural ethnocide.

The discovery near Minsk in mid-1987 of the mass graves of 300,000 Belorussian victims of Soviet terror strengthened national feeling.  A society dedicated to their memory gave itself the name "Martyrology".  As elsewhere in the inner and outer empire, young people energised the patriotic groups, giving the lie to the official line that the renaissance of patriotic feeling was the work of a reactionary gerontocracy nefariously linked to Nazism.  By late 1988 there were almost 600 informal groups in Minsk.  The Belorussian Popular Front for Restructuring ("Renewal") was founded in Minsk's House of Cinema in October.

Many samizdat publications began to appear, two periodicals having print runs of 200,000.  Some all-USSR publications, such as Ogonek, Pravda, Izvestia, and Moscow News occasionally supported Belorussian claims.  Local bureaucrats, however, subjected the movement to vitriolic condemnations, often using lies and distortions.  Despite some concessions concerning the use of Belorussian in schools, police dogs, tear gas and water cannon were used against peaceful demonstrators.  Patriotic movements held their congresses in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius since they were not allowed to hold them in their own republic.  As noted above, Belorussians participated in the congress of the "National Democratic Movements of the Peoples of the USSR" in Vilnius in January 1989.

On 19 February 1989, a mass meeting was permitted in the Minsk municipal stadium.  Political, ecological and language issues dominated the agenda.  It was decided to push for the repeal of the leading role of the Communist Party.  The Belorussian white-red-white flag replaced the Soviet flag.  But when more than four hundred delegates decided to form the "Belorussian Popular Front" they had to meet again in the neighbouring Lithuanian city of Vilnius.  The Moscow exhibition of paintings by the exiled Marc Chagall (who came from the Belorussian city of Vitebsk) provoked a sharp controversy in Minsk, where he was denounced by officials as a Zionist (i.e. a Jew).

UKRAINE

The Ukraine, the second most populous area of the Soviet Union, with over fifty million people, had problems similar to Belorussia's, but in more acute form.  Soviet crimes in the Ukraine reached ferocious proportions.  According to the British historian, Robert Conquest, at least seven million Ukrainians -- among them three million children -- died in the Stalin-made famine of 1932-33, some twenty per cent of the population.  Not surprisingly, the Ukrainians too welcomed German soldiers in the (soon-to-be-disappointed) hope that they came to liberate them from Stalinism.  As in Belorussia, discoveries of mass graves fomented growing hatred for the Russians.  On 4 March 1989 the Ukrainian "Memorial Society" was founded and a public rally called for the investigation of political repression in the Ukraine from the 1920s to the 1980s.  "Memorial" also asked the authorities to release the names of people responsible for the genocide.

Inspired by the Baltic states' renewal, Ukrainian activists fought for the restoration of Ukrainian as the official language of the republic.  The memoirs of a retired Party First Secretary, Shelest, revealed that in 1968 Moscow was concerned about Ukrainian aspirations, and that the policy of Brezhnev and his chief ideologist, Suslov, was to speedily merge nations, languages and cultures into a Soviet super-nation (which of course would be Russian).  So desperate were the rulers that grotesque "blood" theories linking all Slavs under the superiority of Russian "blood"-types were being officially promoted and published.

In November 1988, prominent Ukrainian writers called for the foundation of a popular front.  At the beginning of 1989, religious groups openly began to push for the restoration of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (with ties to the Vatican).  In the summer of 1989, the Donbass miners went on strike, greatly alarming Soviet leaders.  The strikers complained mostly about shortages of basic supplies, low wages, brevity of vacations, small pensions, high prices, bad housing, poor relations with the administration, poor working conditions, lack of social justice, and poor medical practices, in that order, as revealed by a survey done by the Donetsk Scientific Centre.  The miners did not even have soap with which to wash themselves.

When the founding congress of the "Popular Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika" finally met in September 1989 in Kiev, it was addressed by Adam Michnik, the former Marxist, Polish Solidarity spokesman and by then a Deputy of the Polish Sejm and editor of Poland's most popular newspaper, the Solidarity daily, Gazeta Wyborcza ("Election Gazette").  On 27 November 1989, over 150,000 Ukrainians marched in Lvov carrying portraits of Pope John Paul II.

To a greater degree than in other republics, ecological problems, including the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, became a rallying point for protesters.  (In 1989, when official studies finally revealed the frightening consequences of the high levels of radiation, many more villages and towns had to be evacuated than even a few days after the accident.)  Other pollution is also extremely serious.  In the city of Zaporozhe, for instance, 400,000 tons of toxic substances are released into the atmosphere every year.  The water is badly contaminated and residents are ill with respiratory diseases.  In Chernovtsy, children lost their hair as a result of exposure to thallium.  In Dnepropetrovsk, pollution by carbon and nitrogen oxides is two to three times the "permissible" norms.  Infants are often sick and the mortality from congenital diseases in the area is exceptionally high.  In the city of Kommunarsk the falling snow is black.  Agricultural land is contaminated with cadmium.  The Black Sea and its shores are polluted with sulphuric acid.  The heavy concentration on, and clusters of, metallurgical, chemical and armaments industries devastated large parts of the republic and undermined the health of the population.  Even in neighbouring Poland, the communist authorities were forced to take precautionary health measures against radiation and other forms of actual and potentially lethal pollution from across the border.  As bad as chemical and industrial pollution is in Poland, even the old pro-Moscow communists agreed that in comparison with the USSR, Poland was "clean".

MOLDAVIA

Moldavia is the smallest Soviet republic.  It was created in 1940 as part of the deal with Germany that divided Eastern Europe.  In 1918 Moldavian students complained that "Under Russian rule, we had no schools, no church, no language".  Seventy years later, exactly the same complaints were heard about Soviet rule.  Of 1,120 churches and monasteries that existed before 1940 only 300 remained.  In order to create an artificial separation between the Moldavians and Rumanians -- they share the same language and a common history -- Soviet authorities in Moldavia replaced the Roman with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.  Many Moldavians were deported to Siberia and supplanted by Russian and Ukrainian migrants.  Ethnic Moldavians now make up 64 per cent of the republic's population while 13 per cent are Russians.  On 1 September 1988, after a series of protests, the Moldavian Supreme Soviet made Moldavian the state language and reinstated the Latin script.  Russian workers, however, went on strike, refusing to learn the local language.  Thus there is the distinct possibility that in order to try and save the Empire Gorbachev will resort to the dangerous policy of playing-off the Russian minorities in the republics against the dominant ethnic populations, encouraging claims of persecution, just as Stalin did in the Baltic states in the early 1940s.  However, if the empire strikes back in such a manner, the results will be catastrophic for all concerned.

Like so much of the USSR, Moldavia faces ecological catastrophe.  The soil is eroded and contaminated.  The water in wells and springs is foul.  The population has been gradually poisoned.  By 1988 Moldavian Greens were organised into a formidable social and political force.  Unlike many Greens in the West, they, like other protest groups throughout the inner and outer rims of the empire, eschew the philosophical basis of Marxism and Leninism, arguing that its application to the governance of the empire was the basic cause of the ecological and other disasters afflicting their societies.  Other protest groups mobilised students and creative workers.

A general strike in November 1989 demanded the replacement of the Moldavian communist government by democratic forces and independence from Moscow.  Thousands of Interior Ministry troops were airlifted to Kishinev.  Many activists were beaten and arrested when the Moldavian Popular Front, officially recognised only a month before, displayed banners with the slogan:  "Down with the mafia" -- the most common epithet for communists throughout the empire, and used even by reformist communists.  (In July 1988, Colonel Aleksander Gurov wrote in Literaturnaya gazeta that there exist some two hundred criminal mafias, often including policemen and Party officials, mainly in Central Asia, the Caucasian republics and Ukraine but also in Moscow, Leningrad, Lvov and other cities.)

ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN

In these territories the most difficult problems involve the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which according to the USSR Constitution belongs to the Azerbaijani Republic but where the vast majority of the population is Armenian.  More of this later.

Armenia has its own ethnic and cultural ideality reaching back more than two millennia.  Christianity was adopted 1,500 years ago.  After the Turkish massacres of Armenians, the nation was grateful to the Russians for milder treatment when Soviet power was established in 1920.  But by the 1960s nationalist feeling was mounting.  In the spring of 1967, a leaflet entitled Paros proclaimed the creation of the "National United Party".  Its program was simple:  the people have the right to solve their national problems and a national referendum is necessary to discover the people's will.  Several of the leaders did not survive arrests, beatings and penal colonies.

More recently, an "Armenian Survival Committee" was formed to call attention to the ecological crisis.  According to T. Zegualov, a laboratory head of the "Azerbaijan SSR Ministry of Health Scientific Research Institute of Epidemiology, Hygiene and Occupational Diseases", the average quantity of pesticides applied per hectare in his republic is twenty times larger than in all of the USSR.  The over-use of DDT affected the whole population which will never be able to rid itself of dangerous residues.  The consequences for the health of the nation are horrific. ⁽⁹⁾

Post-Khrushchev, demands for reunification of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia were denounced as manifestations of "bourgeois ideology".  Under Gorbachev, Armenians hoped to achieve unification peacefully, but Muslim Azerbaijanis strongly objected, with the support of the communist officials in power in Nagorno-Karabakh.  On 12 February 1988, the First Secretary of the District Committee declared:  "I will turn Karabakh into an Armenian graveyard." ⁽¹⁰⁾  The pogroms started on 21 February and continued for several days.  Armenians were attacked in their homes, dragged through the streets and beaten, often to death.  Women in a maternity hospital had their bellies split by bayonets and babies were thrown out of windows.  Tens of thousands fled.  In Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, hundreds of thousands of Armenians demonstrated against the slaughter and the disinformation campaign in both Azerbaijani and Soviet media.  There were also organised strikes, including a general strike.  Nevertheless, the authorities refused to change the established borders, afraid that such a precedent could create a chain reaction in other republics.

The Kremlin sent military forces, temporarily took over the administration of Nagorno-Karabakh and with little success tried to bypass the Azerbaijani blockade that threatened the Armenians with starvation.  But the danger of a civil war, often acknowledged in Moscow, remains.  In December 1989, mass demonstrations in Yerevan called -- in vain -- for the release of political prisoners and the suspension of Soviet laws unless and until confirmed by Armenia.

One reason for Moscow's preferring Azerbaijani over Armenian interests might be that the fifty million Muslims in the southern USSR outweigh three-and-a-half million Christian Armenians, especially given concerns about Muslim fundamentalism.  The central government started to reopen mosques that had been closed down since the 1930s.  Demonstrations that began on 17 November 1988 in the Azerbaijani capital Baku swelled in a few days into half a million people, some displaying green Islamic flags and portraits of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

As in other non-Russian republics, the Azerbaijanis demand restoration of their language and alphabet, religious freedom, autonomy if not independence, full truth about historical events, including the crushing of the independent republic in 1920 by Soviet forces, and resolution of the ecological crisis.  Both the unofficial "Popular Front" and a more radical group, the "Dirchelinsk Party", published their first newsletters in 1969.  The Dirchelinsk Party shares the ideals of other Pan-Turkic and Pan-Islamic movements.  Worthy of attention is their claim that Russian agents tried to incite Azerbaijanis into inter-ethnic clashes as an excuse for bringing more Russian troops into Baku. ⁽¹¹⁾  (Between November 1988 and January 1989 three thousand pogroms and cases of arson took place in the territory).  Large-scale strikes took place in Baku again in September 1989 when enraged Azerbaijanis kept three Soviet generals hostage for five hours in Nagorno-Karabakh and released them only in exchange for Azerbaijani prisoners.

GEORGIA

The citizens of Georgia have never forgotten the Soviet military invasion of February 1921 and the subsequent illegal annexation of Georgia after a brief independence which the USSR had accepted in a 1920 treaty.  Stalin visited Georgia in 1951.  He suspected a separatist conspiracy and on his orders one night 35,000 Georgians were arrested and sent to concentration camps. ⁽¹²⁾

On 9 April 1989, large crowds demonstrated peacefully in the main square in Tbilisi.  Military forces attacked them with machine guns, beat them with sharpened shovels and sprayed them with poisonous gas (which later, after much resistance and delays, was identified by Georgia's chief toxicologist as phenyl chloride, which causes headaches, eye irritation and serious damage to internal tissues).  Many people died or were badly wounded.  It was never announced who gave the orders for the massacre and no one has been punished.

As a concession to Georgian feeling after strikes in June, young married men were allowed to do their military service in, or not far from, Georgia.  In July, Georgian writers sought from the Georgian Supreme Soviet a declaration condemning the Russian Soviet Republic for violation of the 1920 treaty by which the Bolsheviks had recognised Georgian independence.  They also demanded the implementation of genuine Georgian sovereignty.  On 20 November such a proclamation was made by an extraordinary congress of the Georgian Supreme Soviet but it has not yet been supported by the USSR Supreme Soviet.

Georgians have their own problems with minorities.  Since July 1988 the population of the Abkhaz autonomous republic, within Georgia, has campaigned for secession from Georgia, complaining that their economic, cultural and social needs were neglected.  Some Georgians were murdered.  In another part of the republic, the Ossetians, represented by a Popular Front, disarmed some Georgians when 50,000 of them wanted to demonstrate in the town of Tskhinvali.  Georgians retaliated by seizing sixty local hostages together with an Ossetian police chief.  It was claimed that Georgian nationalists distributed weapons to their compatriots.  The Ossetians are more anti-Georgian than anti-Russian and are therefore often labelled as "the children of Lenin".  This is yet another part of the Soviel Union which is on the brink of civil war.

KAZAKHSTAN

Kazakhstan is the second largest republic in area.  Of its sixteen million people only about 35 per cent are native Kazakhs.  Many Russians were moved in during the colonisation of "virgin lands" under Khrushchev in the fifties, but even they are not always pro-Moscow, as proved by the 1959 Komsomol uprising in Temir-Tau.

Like most other Central Asian peoples, the Kazakhs are Muslim.  Islamic solidarity, though a nightmare for the Kremlin, still seems more potential than real.  In December 1986, the replacement of a Kazakh Party First Secretary with a Russian triggered mass demonstrations in Alma Ata, but only nationalist passions were involved.  In February 1989, however, the Kremlin had to respond to large demonstrations in Tashkent by removing the mufti they had appointed to supervise the whole region and allowing the election of a new mufti, who was then elevated to the Congress of Peoples' deputies in Moscow.  The ticking bomb is now a potentially lethal mixture of religious and nationalist ingredients.

In 1989 the Kazakhs exploited glasnost to remove "black spots" in their history, achieving the posthumous rehabilitation of national heroes condemned and executed by Russian and Soviet rulers (for instance, the Kazakh poet Jumabaev, who was executed on the basis of a poor translation of his verses into Russian).

TURKMENISTAN AND TADJIKISTAN

In the "far-eastern" republics and autonomous regions, inter-ethnic violence hinders the unity of the local population against Moscow.  In June 1989, a conflict at a dance led to a rampage during which a few people were killed and many wounded.  Military units restored order, but the tensions continue.  Locally settled ethnic Germans claim that their autonomous district, abolished in 1940, should be restored.

On the economic front, Caucasian merchants demand high prices for their products on the free market.  The high prices charged by Caucasian cooperatives for food not available in government shops led to riots in May 1989 in Askhabad and Nebit-Dag in Turkmenistan.  As in other Central Asian republics the population is extremely poor, unemployment rates are high and centrally organised family-planning programs have provoked great resistance.  Turkmenistan, however, has the highest infant mortality rates in the Soviet Union (and among the highest in the world).

For years, Soviet demographers have been worried about the discrepancy in birth rates between the Russians and the Muslims of the USSR.  In the 1970s the non-Muslim population of the USSR grew by only 5%, whereas the Muslim population increased by 25%.  During the fundamentalist regime of Khomeini and the unsuccessful Afghan war against the Muslim mujahideen, Uzbeks and Tadjiks living on the borders of both states increased by a dramatic 36%.  In the 1980s the Russian republic's population grew by 7.2% while the Uzbeks added 29.3% and the Tadjiks 34.5%.  The Persian-speaking inhabitants of Tadjikistan are closely related ethnically and linguistically to the populations of Iran and Afghanistan.

Intensive, anti-religious propaganda, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, failed to prevent Muslims, including members of the Communist Party, from continuing their religious practices, often in "underground" mosques.  Because it was controlled by Russians (and until recently was very crude) the propaganda was resisted on both religious and nationalist grounds.  Central Asia, however, lacks political unity and Turkic identity is often broken up by clan, tribal and even geographic loyalties.  Such conflicts have been encouraged and exploited by Soviet authorities.

KIRGIZIA

Intelligentsias in all the Central Asian republics now face the problem of recovering their past and renewing a sense of national history disfigured by the imposition of a mythical, unified Soviet nationhood.  Many Soviet crimes have yet to be revealed.  In March 1989, a new light was thrown on the death in 1980, in suspicious circumstances, of Sultan Ibraimov, chairman of the Kirgiz Council of Ministers.  The monthly Literaturnyi kirgiztan published a fictionalised account of his murder at the hands of Turdakun Usabaliev, who at the time was First Secretary of the Kirgiz branch of the Communist Party.  The murdered prime minister was popular for his defense of Kirgizian interests against Moscow domination.  After several other republican officials also died in mysterious circumstances, Usubaliev lost his position at the end of 1985 but his crimes were never publicly revealed.

The poor housing, poor nutrition and lack of care of homeless people which distressed the murdered Sultan Ibraimov persist in Kirgizia and the other Central Asian republics.  The low educational levels of local teachers and the lack of laboratories and other modern facilities in the schools are now frequent targets of the new Soviet investigative journalism.

UZBEKISTAN

Since its incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1924 as a constituent republic, Uzbekistan has been treated as a colony.  It has the third largest population in the USSR with over twenty million people.  Russians account for ten per cent of the population, although in Tashkent they are 30 per cent.  Russians occupy the most powerful administrative positions at all levels.  Here too, nationalism, language and religion are much stronger than either Marxism-Leninism or alleged Soviet nationality.  The degree of Russian imperialism is shown, among other things, in the large number of non-Uzbek names of places and streets, and the omnipresent slogans and statues.  At the beginning of 1988, resistance was still cautious and couched in "regime-speak".  It was claimed, for example, that poor and dirty places do not deserve such "great" names as "Communism", "Socialism", "Lenin", and so on.  Modestly, it was suggested that local people would better understand names such as "Dostlik" instead of "Druzhba".  Turkic and Iranian roots would be more appropriate than Russian.  Sporting clubs should use local names and stop using Moscow ones.  By December 1988, Uzbek students were openly calling for the use of the Uzbek language and displayed green Islamic banners.  In April 1989, at a demonstration in Tashkent, the poet Gulchehra declared:

The full heart cries:
My mother tongue should be the language of the country.

Courses in Arabic script were soon opened in Tashkent.

The word "colony" is no exaggeration.  Another poet, Muhammad Salih, wrote in Literaturnaya gazeta (No.4, 1989):

Under the Tsar we exported to Russia all the cotton in the form of raw material, and this structure of the economy was called colonial.  Today we export ten times as much of this raw material, and we do not know what to call this structure.  It is time finally to recognise that the so-called cotton independence [of the Soviet Union] keeps a whole people dependent on cotton. ⁽¹³⁾

A professor of the Tashkent University complained that after a few days in school students have to spend two months in fields harvesting cotton.  Their professors have to do the same.  The pro-Glasnost, all-union journal Ogonek characterised the Uzbek cotton-growers as "cotton-slaves".  The cotton monoculture has caused enormous ecological and health problems.  Streams and wells are polluted by herbicides and pesticides.  Infant mortality is extremely high at 111 deaths per thousand live births.  The Aral Sea during the last twenty-five years has lost one-third of its surface area and the shores have retreated by eighty kilometres.  Due to irrational use of irrigation of cotton fields the climate is dramatically changing.  The once thriving fishing industry has been ruined.

Two thirds of the population of the Kara-Kalpak Autonomous Republic south of the Aral Sea are sick with hepatitis, typhoid or cancer of the oesophagus.  Eighty-three out of every 100 children suffer from some serious illness.  One reason for such a tragedy is that 45% of Uzbekistan's population has an average income of 75 rubles or less a month. ⁽¹⁴⁾  Also according to Soviet sources, consumption of basic foodstuffs is between a third and a half of the Russian norm and there are a million people unemployed in the republic.

The never-ending pressure of Moscow planners to achieve higher and higher production of cotton led to wide-spread corruption and falsification of statistical data.  Since 1984, however, the Kremlin has been waging a campaign against corruption.  Hundreds of functionaries and thousands of employees lost their jobs.  In 1986 one minister responsible for the cotton industry was executed.  In 1987 the same punishment was meted out to the First Secretary of the Communist Party in Bukhara.  Many state and Party officials disappeared in prisons and concentration camps.  Even Brezhnev's family was involved in the trials.  It was admitted that some seven hundred organised and armed criminal groups were put out of action between 1985 and 1988.  There were 160 "underground millionaires".  At the end of December 1989, the former First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party was sentenced to twelve years' jail for bribery.  The First Deputy Minister of the Ministry for Internal Affairs of the Uzbek SSR asserted that the local gangsters, as he called them, enjoyed good contacts in Moscow. ⁽¹⁵⁾  Several recent murders of inquisitive journalists demonstrate the powerful hand of the local mafias, with their KGB connections.  For instance, in July 1989, Vladimir Glotov, son of a well-known editor of the journal Ogonek, was murdered in Moscow.  He had been investigating economic crimes in the Caucasian republics and Uzbekistan, and had written a series of articles exposing the criminal incitement of bloody ethnic clashes.

In the first two weeks of June 1989 in the Fergana oblast, riots caused at least 87 deaths.  748 houses were burned down.  The rioters shouted slogans such as "Uzbekistan for the Uzbeks" and "We'll strangle the Turks, we'll strangle the Russians".  Thousands had to be evacuated and tens of thousands of Meskhetians of Turkish origin left Uzbekistan.  Tadjiks numbering 700,000 complain about discrimination by the Uzbeks.  The violence in Fergana revealed the helplessness of the authorities:  even after Ministry of the Interior (MVD) troops were deployed, systematic murder, arson, rape and kidnapping of Party leaders remained unpunished. ⁽¹⁶⁾  On the other hand, genuine religious and nationalist associations, such as "Islam and Democracy", created in October 1988 in Alma Ata, are treated by Russian officials with undisguised hatred and contempt.  In an interview published in Tashkent, General Eduard Alekseevich, the Slavic First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, described all informal groups in the republic as "camouflaged criminals" and "pathological nationalists". ⁽¹⁷⁾  In reply, the Uzbeks described the Russians as "two-horned devils".

Soviet feudal "socialism" in the Brezhnev era was described by Vladimir Sokolov of Literaturnaya Gazeta (No.3, 1988), using the image of Dante's nine circles to contrast the oft-praised economic successes of socialist heavenly happiness with the actually existing nine circles of hell.  The central figure is a much-decorated "Hero of Socialist Work" named Akmadyan Adylov, Soviet deputy and director of Lenin's agro-industrial collective PAPO.  His father was arrested in the Great Terror and died in prison.  Until his own arrest in 1984, Adylov ruled some thirty thousand Fergana people with an iron fist.  His feudal (or fascist) management was officially celebrated for alleged economic successes in the cultivation of rice, cotton, fruit and grapes as well as medicinal herbs, and for his production of fish, cattle, sheep, yaks and angora goats -- the nine circles of heaven.  But, according to Sokolov, the most important circle was underground:  a network of cells, torture chambers and prisons.  Anybody who dared to disobey or question Adylov's orders was tortured, threatened with violence ("with this knife I will cut your head off!") or killed, often by the director himself.  In the winter his goons liked to pour icy water behind the collar of unwanted witnesses.  Hot irons and whips were other useful educational tools.  Pregnant women were not spared.  Young girls had to be at his disposition.  People had to work from twelve to fifteen hours a day.  The feudal master lived in a huge house, owned some fifteen other estates with swimming pools, and fifty pure-bred race horses, each worth tens of thousands of rubles.  He stole half of his investments, literally millions of rubles.  When the article was published, the investigations had been going on for four years, and the case was still sub judice.

THE "TERRITORYLESS" NATIONALS

Nationalities that do not have their own republic or even an autonomous region find it hard to press their demands.  This concerns a million Germans, another million Poles, and large groups of Crimean Tatars and Koreans.  Jews are particularly vulnerable since in many parts of the Soviet Union there exists a tradition of anti-Semitic hate and pogroms.  In the Soviet North several small nations are threatened by extinction.  The Eskimos, Evenks and Khantia together with other native peoples, numbering up to two hundred thousand, suffered under a cruel pan-Russian regime and ecological disaster caused by the merciless exploitation of natural resources.  Their average life expectancy is 45 years for men and 55 years for women.  In January 1989, twenty-eight such nationalities formed themselves into the "Association of Small Peoples of the North".

SIBERIA

People living in the vast area of Siberia are also beginning to search for their own identity, further illustrating the increasing meaninglessness of the concept of Soviet citizenship to the peoples of the USSR.  In Novosibirsk a "Siberian Independent Information Agency" was established in April 1989 in order to replace the "colonial dependence on Moscow authorities".  Its main goal is the creation of a distinct identity of the "Siberian people" (Sibirsky Narod). ⁽¹⁸⁾  When the writer Victor Astaf'ev spoke in Washington as part of a mission to the USA by four Soviet deputies, he said:

We have confronted an immense economic and spiritual disaster. ... [Siberia] is a colony which no past century has seen ... a huge basin of raw materials ... despoiled in a disorderly and barbarous fashion. ... Siberia needs ecological, physical, and moral defence. ... When it comes to the task of defending Moscow and defending the motherland, that's usually the Siberian divisions first, but when it comes to feeding the Russians, they come last. ... We Russians have to shout as we did during the war that the motherland is in danger. ... We have lived to see the times when the word "Russian" is a term of contempt in our country. ⁽¹⁹⁾

THE RUSSIAN REPUBLIC

That brings us to the problem of the largest nationality in the USSR, namely the Russians.  With the collapse of Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology, the "spiritual" vacuum is being replaced by nationalist aspirations of colonised peoples.  The Russians themselves are divided.  Some recognise only imperial culture and identity, others are trying to liberate themselves from it and rediscover a Russian, non-imperial culture and political mission of their own.

The most vociferous and feared is the ultra-nationalist movement Pamyat whose members often see in Jews the greatest threat to the mythical "Russian soul" and whose youthful bands publicly celebrate Hitler's birthday every 20 April.  They allege that the Soviet regime's crimes were not committed by Stalin, but by Jews who surrounded him.  Palestinians are portrayed as the Slavs' ancestors.  For them, the salvation of Russia and their "holy" Empire is dependent upon a return to Russian Orthodoxy and Czarism. ⁽²⁰⁾

Many Russians reject and fear this extremist group although they may share some of its aims, such as preservation of old monasteries and churches.  A serious discussion has been going on about what constitutes Russian identity and what is positive and what is negative in the fixed unification of the State, the Party and the multinational empire.  A growing number of Russian intellectuals claim that under the Soviet system the Russian nation suffered most of all since it did not even have its own institutions separate from the all-union structures.

Some Russians argue that the longevity of the empire has stultified the development of democratic thought and traditions in Russia proper and a Russian "Anticolonial Society' was founded in Leningrad. ⁽²¹⁾  Its aim is to encourage the abandonment of imperial ambitions and to support independence for the other nationalities.  Although the Gorbachev-inspired tolerance of non-Russian nationalities, particularly in their reassertion of rights to independent development and even to secession, is weighty, there are limits to it precisely in the interest of the preservation of the empire's unity.  Thus at the beginning of 1990 the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies declared the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 illegal, but it did not condemn the subsequent incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSR.

At the end of 1989, it seemed difficult to imagine that the Moscow leadership could prevent -- as a minimum -- separation of the Baltic states from the USSR without the use of force.  The survival of both "glasnost" and "perestroika", if not of the Gorbachev leadership itself, depended on the outcome of the contradictory policy of promising free development of the constituent republics and, at the same time, preserving the USSR with its centripetal power structures, albeit in a reformed manner by shifting of the locus of power from the Party to the quasi-constitutional Congress of People's Deputies.

Ominous signs appeared on the horizon at the beginning of the new decade:  people seized power in the Azerbaijani city of Dzhalolabad;  Moldavian nationalists demanded an end to separation from Rumania (once the Ceausescu massacres were over);  Russian conservatives joined forces against "Gorbachevian Leftists", calling for the People's Army to restore order and an authoritarian regime;  and the Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians were pushing for total independence from the Soviet Union.  In all, the Soviet Union had become a "melting pot" of bottomless discontent to such a degree that Moscow began to consider a "new Treaty of Union" in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to keep the union intact.

CONCLUSION

The contemporary Soviet leadership is paying the historical and political debts contracted by Lenin and Stalin when they liquidated not just whole nations but also foreign communists and democratic socialists at home and wherever they could reach abroad, all in the name of an internationalism which merely masked the reality of Soviet imperialism.  They overestimated the creative power of their faulty ideology and its dogmatic and centralised directives which could be enforced only by totalitarian means.  Nationalism and demands for self-preservation and self-rule proved to be much stronger.

Following the departure of the central European states from the Soviet bloc, a reinvigorated search for national identity and independence immediately began to threaten the inner walls of the empire.  Local communists in the Baltic states and elsewhere in the USSR learned the lesson of Tito, Gomulka and Dubcek, that only those communists can become popular who publicly associate themselves with local beliefs, traditions and the aspirations of the people.  Meanwhile the non-communists who constitute the vast majority of the people want to get rid of communism altogether.  The so-called "revolution-from-above" is now being challenged by a genuinely popular revolution from below.  At stake is not only communism but also the USSR.

POSTSCRIPT -- AUGUST 1990

In 1990 the developments in the previously satellite outer empire of the Soviet Union diversified, while in the inner empire the disintegration continued.  President Gorbachev, however, has at least so far managed to stave off total collapse.

The situation in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland is better than in Bulgaria and Rumania.  The last two states did not enjoy the benefit of a relatively compact and well-prepared group of intellectuals and budding politicians to lead them through quite free elections into more or less constitutional channels.  Too many parties tried to win votes, but only a few were able to attract sufficient support to be able to participate in the governing bodies.  The communists still have influence, but most of it is rather secret and negative.  Hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, police agents and informers, not fully reconciled to the new self-rule, foment trouble.

The economies are very weak;  with the approach of reunification, East Germany -- once thought to be the most economically successful -- faced total collapse and had to be rescued by massive Deutschmark subventions and by bringing reunification forward.  (It is said that not a single East German Trabant car was sold in the month of June.)  Herren Kohl and de Maizière symbolise quite well the difference of well-being in the two parts of Germany.  Hungarians and Czechoslovakians complain about East German non-fulfilment of commercial treaties and non-payment of debts.  They might ask the West Germans to take care of these obligations.  Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia are eagerly establishing contacts with the European Community, the International Monetary Fund and other organisations that can help them find their way back to one Europe.

The Soviet Union might be better called the Soviet Disunion.  Most of the federal (in name only) republics have used their own -- now almost freely elected -- parliaments to declare degrees of independence ranging from total separation from the Union (the Baltic states) to substantial autonomy including powers over legislation, education, some armed forces, and economic matters in a loose confederation.  When the Russian republic asserted its own sovereignty, wits likened the position of Gorbachev and the Kremlin to that of the Pope and the Vatican;  I suspect that Gorbachev envies the Pope his followers:  not much of a political faith remains in the Soviet Union.

Excesses of nationalist fervour have regrettably continued to lead to clashes between and within Soviet republics.  Having managed to get rid of most of the remaining hard-liners in the Politburo, and then to sideline the Politburo itself, Gorbachev was able to propose a new constitutional arrangement -- which is disliked by the generals and distrusted by many nationalities including Armenians, Balts, and Ukrainians, and even by Russian nationalists.  Central proposals for economic reform were also being left far behind by demands from the republics.

The major Soviet problem -- for them and us -- is this:  will Soviet leaders allow the dangerous and moribund system to change into a genuine confederation of some twelve almost completely sovereign states (the Baltic states regaining their lost independence), or will there be a serious -- perhaps military -- attempt made to clamp down and put the clock back?  Only in the first case will democracy and lasting peace have a real chance.

---

ENDNOTES

1.  Donald W. Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia (5th edn, Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), page 286.

2.  Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller, Hungary 1956 Revisited:  The Message of a Revolution -- A Quarter of a Century Later, London:  George Allen & Unwin, 1983, page 131.

3.  V. Stanley Vardys, "Lithuanian National Politics", Problems of Communism XXXVIII, 4 (July-August 1989), page 62.

4.  Ibid. 65.

5.  Juris Dreifeldds, "Latvian National Rebirth", Problems of Communism XXXVIII, 4 (July-August 1989), page 80.

6.  Ibid. 94.

7.  The Australian, 29 November 1989, 7.

8.  Jan Zaprudnik, "Belorussian Reawakening", Problems of Communism XXXVIII, 4 (July-August 1989), page 38.

9.  Yasin Aslan and Elizabeth Fuller, "Azerbaijani Press Discusses Link Between Ecological Problems and Health Defects", Report on the USSR I, 31 (4 August 1989), pages 20-21.

10.  "A Chronicle of Events 1920-1988 in Nagorno-Karabakh", Glasnost 16-18 (January 1989), page 12.

11.  Mirza Michaeli and William Reese, "Unofficial Publications in Azerbaijan", Report on the USSR I, 37 (15 September 1989), page 21.

12.  Elizabeth Fuller, "Filling in the 'Black Spots' in Georgian History", Report on the USSR I, 13 (31 March 1989), page 21.

13.  Quoted by Ann Sheehy, "Uzbeks Requesting Further Reduction of Cotton Target", Report on the USSR I, 8 (24 February 1989), page 20.

14.  Annette Bohr, "Health Catastrophe in Karakalpakistan", Report on the USSR I, 29 (21 July 1989) pages 37-39;  Ann Sheehy, "Social and Economic Background to Recent Events in Fergana Valley", Report on the USSR I, 27 (7 July 1989), pages 21-23.

15.  James Critchlov, "The Growth of Organised Crime in Uzbekistan", Report on the USSR I. 7 C17 February 1989), pages l6-17.

16.  James Critchlov, "Uzbekistan:  The Paralysis of Political Power", Report on the USSR I, 30 (28 July 1989), pages 32-35;  Annette Bohr, "Violence Erupts in Uzbekistan", Report on the USSR I, 24 (16 June 1989), pages 23-26.

17.  James Critchlov, "The Growth of Organised Crime in Uzbekistan", Report on the USSR I, 17 (28 April 1989), pages 13-15.

18.  Roman Szporluk, "Dilemma of Russian Nationalism", Problems of Communism XXXVIII, 4 (July-August 1989), pages 15-35 at 34.

19.  Stephen E. Deane, "Soviet Deputies:  A Range of Views", Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies -- Meeting Report, 26 October 1989.

20.  Thomas Johnson, "Ils sortent tous du placard" [The March of Dead Souls], Actuel 5, 1989;  Czech translation in Svedectvi (Paris) XXII, 88 (1989), pages 817-830.

21.  For a detailed survey see Paul A. Goble, "Gorbachev and the Challenge of Russian Nationalism", in Joseph K. O'Brien (ed.), German-American Papers on the Gorbachev Reform Program, Washington:  Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1989, pages 129-133;  his "Ethnic Politics in the USSR", Problems of Communism XXXVIII, 4 (July-August 1989), pages 1-14;  and also the study by R. Szporluk cited in note 18 above.  See also Gail W. Lapidus, "Gorbachev's Nationalities Problem", Foreign Affairs 68, 4 (Fall 1989), pages 92-108.

Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in "Post-Communist Nationalism":  "In any case, a genuine confederation or commonwealth would be the best option for everyone concerned;  the Russians, most of the non-Russians and certainly the entire world":  Foreign Affairs 68, 5 (Winter 1989-90), pages 1-25 at 21.