History never ends

Lenin statue at the center of the Lenin square, in the center of Dnipropetrovsk in 2011. In March 2014 this Lenin Square was renamed "Heroes of Independence Square" in honor of the people killed during Euromaidan and the statue of Lenin on the square was removed. (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

At the same time, West Germany watched the Solidarity movement not with admiration, but rather with fear and disapproval. Leading politicians, journalists and writers spoke about “the Polish crisis”, and complained about “a very Polish remoteness from reality” (eine sehr polnische Realitätsferne). They viewed Solidarity as a danger to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and peaceful relations with Moscow. From this perspective, Poland was denied full historical subjectivity or, at least, subordinated to “strategic relations” with the Soviet Union.

Prophecy

In 1985 Timothy Garton Ash ended his essay “The German Question” with an observation: “anyone can see that the road to an eventual European reunification must lead via Germany… We must be serious about overcoming the division of Germany. But how?” Interestingly, the Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik already approached this issue from a different angle in 1969. In his provocative essay “Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984?”, he amazingly foresaw the reunification of Germany and the inevitable “de-Sovietisation” of the socialist bloc. He even correctly diagnosed the increasing “passive dissatisfaction” of Soviet citizens with the regime and its decision to “rely on Great Russian nationalism”. Amalrik predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union as a result of a war with China that he expected to break out “between 1980 and 1985”.

As we know today, the Soviet Union deliberately engaged in another war, which happened in Afghanistan. This brutal and senseless war began in 1979 and lasted until 1989. Together with the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986 and growing economic problems, the conflict contributed enormously to the USSR’s loss of legitimacy. Societal dissatisfaction also became less and less passive.  

How could Amalrik come so close to foreseeing the tragic events to come? Perhaps, among other things, he learned a lot from watching Soviet movies. Since the late 1960s, a careful observer could see a vague sense of impasse in many new releases. It was not a coincidence that in Gennady Shpalikov’s incredibly sad A Long Happy Life (1966), a central motive was the theatrical staging of The Cherry Orchard. It was Chekhov’s screen adaptations that were particularly good in late-Soviet cinema. They generally seemed to correspond to the mood of hopelessness and deadlock pervading the air. It is no surprise then that the psychological drama Success (1984), starring the remarkable Leonid Filatov, revolves around a staging of Chekhov’s Seagull. Filatov’s character, an experimental theatre director, notes in the film that it is Chekhov who is “strikingly in tune with the present day”. One might add that Chekhov, like no one else, subtly described the crisis present in Russian society on the eve of the 1905 revolution – a revolution that the playwright did not believe in and did not live to see.

Andrey Amalrik was also destined not to see most of his bold predictions about the dissolution of the Soviet Union come true. He died in a car accident in Spain in 1980. In 1985 (just one year before Amalrik believed that the USSR would experience a turning point) the newly appointed Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed that Soviet society would be reconstructed on the basis of “socialist values”, a self-sustained and competitive economy, limited political pluralism and peaceful foreign politics. The word perestroika would soon become an internationally recognised term.

Sovereignty from whom?

For a lot of analysts, the so-called “nationalities problem” in the Soviet Union seemed to be non-existent. This ultimately proved to be more than just wishful thinking. Indeed, it seemed to resemble blindness. As early as April 1978, Soviet Georgia saw massive (and successful) protests in favour of preserving Georgian as the sole official language of the republic. In 1983, the former head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who replaced Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet state, famously confessed that “We barely know the society we live and work in.” Apparently, Andropov was aware of the numerous failures and internal contradictions of the Soviet system. One of Andropov’s unrealised ideas was a plan for a “new slicing up of the country”, in particular, the division of Ukraine into two republics along the Dnipro river.

  In December 1986, Kazakhstan experienced youth protests against an attempt to appoint an ethnic Russian with no ties to the republic as the first secretary of the local branch of the Communist Party. In August 1987, the three Baltic republics witnessed the first demonstrations that condemned the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. This agreement’s secret protocol enabled the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In February 1988, an anti-Armenian pogrom broke out in Sumgait in Azerbaijan. How could this have happened in a country that had proudly proclaimed to have solved the national question, and to have established “friendship among the people of all nations?”

Scholars of the collapse of the Soviet Union agree, as Serhii Plokhy put it, that it was the insistence of Ukrainian elites on the independence of their republic, as well as the inability of the Russian elite to offer an attractive alternative to complete domination by Moscow, that led to the dissolution of the “last European empire”.

One should not forget the important, if not decisive, role played by the Russian elite gathered around its first president, Boris Yeltsin, in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Supreme Council of the Russian Federation adopted its own Declaration of State Sovereignty before Ukraine on June 12th 1990. Who did this body declare sovereignty from? Ultimately, they were separating themselves from the Soviet centre that was, and still is, often equated with Russia itself. But the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was one of the 15 Soviet, formally equal, republics. Certainly, it was one of the 15, but not exactly the same as the others. The RSFSR was a federation inside a federation and this crucial point explains the logic of the Chechen wars, as a significant section of the local elites claimed that Chechnya would like to enjoy the same level of independence as Estonia or Tajikistan.

As Yuri Slezkine put it, the Soviet Union could be described as a communal apartment with no proper room for Russia itself. One could add that the apartment itself was often treated and perceived as “just Russia”.  

Imaginable future

It is often forgotten that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the miners of Donbas – the industrial region in eastern Ukraine – were among the most devoted protesters against central planning and centralised Soviet economic policies. In July 1989, up to 500,000 miners took part in protests whilst their leaders maintained rather good relations with the national movement and the leading Narodnyi Rukh group. Future economic prosperity was viewed as closely linked to Ukraine’s state sovereignty and independence from the planned economy with its centre in Moscow.

The myth of immediate economic prosperity promoted by the national democrats appeared to be one of the principal traps of early post-Soviet development in Ukraine. Instead of “reaching the level of West Germany” (as the proponents of independence promised), the country experienced a full-scale backsliding of the economy and infrastructure, a gradual loss in population and a decline in national income. Another issue came as a result of the fact that an independent Ukraine emerged from a compromise made between the national democrats and a large part of the communist nomenklatura. This compromise made a complete change of elites impossible, but it contributed immensely to the peaceful nature of the country’s post-Soviet transformation.

People never know exactly how to change history. However, they should try, and try hard. History is very much unpredictable, it loves to surprise and is often ironic in a bitter, even cruel way. But – and this is the good news – history never ends. It does not matter that some distinguished philosophers may want it to end.

Back in 1981, something like the European University Viadrina, with buildings on both the German and Polish sides of the Oder river, was simply unthinkable. Even when I came to Warsaw to do my second master’s degree in 2001, it was unimaginable for me to become a professor of Ukrainian history at a German university with my office in Poland. But that is where I work now. I cannot stop thinking of a similar university that could one day appear on the Polish-Ukrainian border, which will be as easy to cross as our bridge in Frankfurt (Oder). In the spirit of making this future possible, it is clear that the word “solidarity” still has profound meaning today.

A shorter version of this text was first presented at the international forum “Europe with a View to the Future” on September 1st 2021 at the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk.

 Andrii Portnov is a professor of the Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder).

Collapse of the USSR, Ukraine