The disintegration of the Soviet Union is still going on and it is not peaceful

Photo by Aleksander Medvedev

If we look at different countries, the degree of the state limitations to the principle of private property and control over the market is different, and the way it is controlled is different, yet the foundations are basically the same. We have to have some form of private non-state property and some form of market in order to survive and move ahead.

The fall of the USSR signalled another change of global significance as it brought an end to the history of European empires in the modern era. The disintegration of these modern empires started with the First World War and the Soviet Union was the last major European empire to fall. This process started even earlier if we include the gradual collapse of the Ottoman Empire which began in the 18th century, and which underlines even more the importance of the Soviet collapse as the last chapter in that part of history. It can of course be claimed that the empires did not disappear, per se, as empires can exist in a metaphorical sense. Yes, the core countries of these empires, which are now often great powers, did not disappear. However, it is clear that empire as a form of organisation of a multi-ethnic space with centralised control did not survive the 20th century. The strongest signal that this era receded in the past was made during the fall of the Soviet Union.

So we can look at the USSR as a continuation of the Russian Empire into the 20th century – in the sense that it had this central control and many different nations within its territory?

The most obvious continuity between these states is the shape of their borders on the map. If you compare the map of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, there is huge overlap. But there are also differences on the map and otherwise. These are related to the fact that many borders were adjusted to fall along ethnic lines. The Curzon Line in particular is present on today’s map and certainly was there before 1991. This is really an indication that the Soviet Union was an empire that integrated and accumulated some elements of nationalism and recognised some of its claims in order to manage it. The last Soviet leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev, till the very end did not see the collapse coming because they were absolutely convinced that the USSR had solved the nationality question. They believed that the level of accommodation given to each nationality was sufficient and that the multi-ethnic state would continue. Well, history proved that this whole line of thinking was wrong.

I mentioned in the beginning some of the processes that took place immediately after the declared end of the Soviet Union, some of which were quite negative. I wanted to ask from your perspective what can we say have been the most tragic consequences of the collapse?

The most tragic outcome of the fall of the Soviet Union is the violence and wars, which continue till today. For a long period of time there existed a belief or mythology of a peaceful disintegration of the USSR. In my opinion, it was mostly the result of the surprise of the western leaders and publics that Eastern Europe was allowed to leave the Soviet bloc without conflict and that coloured the perception of what was really happening within the borders of the Soviet Union before and after the collapse. The exodus of Russian and other Slavic populations from non-Slavic republics was provoked by the fear of violence and it started even before the fall. There were major inter-ethnic clashes in Baku, as well as the larger Azeri and Armenian conflict. Meskhetian Turks had to flee Uzbekistan after the Fergana massacre of 1989. The fact that Gorbachev ordered troops onto the streets of Vilnius and the Baltic states was conveniently overlooked. Russia not having enough political will or the resources to use force at the moment of disintegration was another reason why the whole thing was viewed as peaceful. In reality, Boris Yeltsin had already ordered troops to Chechnya in the autumn 1991. The problem was that those troops were actually immediately surrounded by Chechens. They were simply not able to fight and so the conflict was postponed by a few years. The subsequent two Chechen wars fit the paradigm of the violent fall of empires and certainly do not resemble peaceful disintegration. The frozen conflict in Moldova and the frozen conflicts in the Caucuses that deteriorate in the hot wars like the Russia invasion of Georgia and Azeri-Armenian war in Nagorno-Karabakh do not fit the model of the peaceful disintegration. The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea are basically a part of the long-term consequences of this collapse. So, the disintegration of the Soviet Union is still going on and it is not peaceful.

You mentioned these long, drawn out processes of conflicts and wars. Is this in line with historical precedence, if we look at the fall of other empires? Does this match up with the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire, for example? Can we see some historical similarities?

The Soviet Union is collapsing along ethno-national lines and borders are drawn and redrawn on their basis. From that point of view there is no doubt that it is dying the death of a classic empire. What is not present, or less obvious however, is a collapse of an imperial polity in the middle of a major war with other empires or great powers. This partially explains the myth of the peaceful disintegration of the USSR. The First World War spelled the end for Austria-Hungary and Ottoman empires. The Second World War set out the path for the disintegration of the British and French empires. Even before that, it put an end to the Japanese Empire in the Pacific and the projected German empire in Eastern Europe and parts of Russia. The USSR arguably lost the Cold War, but it never lost a military confrontation with the United States. That is because the fall of the Soviet empire took place in a different context, and that was the context of the nuclear age. This was an era of nuclear weapons, which made it difficult for any leader to believe that there could be another world war and that any country had good chances of surviving it.

We talked about this long process of the collapse, with the conflicts in the South Caucasus, Ukraine and Moldova. I am curious at what point can we say that this process is over? Will there be a point where we can say this collapse has finally ended?

Everything comes to an end at some point. If we continue this line of comparing the history of the Soviet collapse with the collapse of other empires, it is very clear that at some point the former metropolis will decide that the costs are too high to continue. The former imperial centre will then adjust accordingly. Plus the new colonies can become over time more powerful than the former metropolis. The best known case of this change is of course the relationship between Britain and the United States. The tensions associated with the disintegration of the British Empire persisted on a psychological and cultural level all the way up until the Second World War, when the United States replaced the United Kingdom as the dominant power that controlled the world’s waterways. At that point, resentment of the imperial nature of Britain became much less central to the American identity. So things change. Former colonies or peripheries become new centres in their own right, and this is what will happen in the post-Soviet space as well. It is difficult to say when exactly it will happen, but it will happen. Russia after all emerged as an empire after conquering the Tatar khanates that had ruled over it.

I would like now to shift focus a little bit and look specifically at Ukraine – one of the countries that you specialise in and which in August celebrated its 30 years of independence. Various events that unfolded soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union were crucial in forming the system that Ukraine has today, which has elements of a strong oligarchic presence, as well as an inherent system of corruption. I wanted to ask you from your perspective, what is the Soviet legacy there today?

One of the key international issues related to Ukraine in the last few months has been the controversy over Nord Stream 2. One of the major issues that comes with Nord Stream 2 is that Russia will be making less use of the Soviet infrastructure that goes through Ukraine. So we are still dealing with the issue of the Soviet legacy in very practical terms, with the physical pipeline that is there. This line goes to Europe and is at the centre of international debate. Overall, the pipe really can serve as a metaphor for Ukraine being tied to the Soviet legacy. In a sense, the pipe is to a great degree also responsible for the creation of the oligarchic class, whose money in one way or another has been associated with gas and oil since the start of the 1990s. A lot of corruption is also associated with that oil and gas. So, again, this is just one but maybe the most obvious example of the country being a hostage of Soviet legacy.

Another big issue associated with the Soviet legacy is certainly the creation of Ukraine in cultural terms as a Russo-Ukrainian condominium. The Second World War, the Holocaust and Stalin’s policy of forced resettlement and state-sponsored ethnic cleansing made Ukraine less multi-ethnic than it was before the war. As a result, it was turned into a Russo-Ukrainian entity to a degree that it was never before, largely through the processes of industrialisation, labour force migration and so on. In the last decades of the Soviet Union, state policies were really promoting the ethnic, linguistic and cultural unity of Russia and Ukraine, with cultural unification being a major factor. All of these issues are now at the centre of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas. None of these issues can be understood just in the context of the last 30 years, there are deep roots to these processes.

Last but not least, I will return to the critical infrastructure associated with the Soviet Union in Ukraine. Overall, the war in Donbas reminds us of another part of the legacy of Soviet industrialisation. It is the pipe so to speak that stopped working a long time ago and by that I mean the coal mining industry that has not been profitable for decades and decades. This is the fate faced by many “rust belts” all over the world, which are often associated with social dislocations, drama and tragedy. However, Ukraine offers perhaps the only case in the world in which the rust belt goes down by producing not only social tensions but also facilitating a war, creating conditions for a foreign invasion. The social issues produced by the collapse of old infrastructure of the 19th century, which was exploited by the USSR and then passed on to an independent Ukraine are an important component of the war in Donbas. 

Certainly there is this physical element that is very interesting to consider. You mentioned Russification during the Soviet period – this promotion of Russian unity with Ukraine. I am reminded of the recent essay from July that Vladimir Putin penned that was titled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, where he made the argument that “modern Ukraine is entirely a product of the Soviet era … that it was shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia”. Is this still the attempt of the metropolis to maintain an imperial narrative? As a Ukrainian historian, what was your reaction when you read this essay?

Well, certainly there are two levels to this issue. One involves the actual policies conducted and the other relates to the arguments used to justify such actions. Russia historically, for centuries and centuries, linked the concept of national security or imperial expansion to the creation of “friendly” states on its periphery. No state was friendly enough not to be integrated or incorporated into the empire and eventually the next candidate for a friendly state would emerge. So there is no difference in that sense between Uzbekistan and Ukraine, for example. Yet, on another level there is a huge difference between these two countries and that is what Putin’s article was mostly about. For a long period of time, especially in the 19th century, Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians were viewed as parts of one big Russian nation. Due to this, people like Prince Vladimir or Bohdan Khmelnytsky were imagined as key figures in Russian history. Go to Kyiv today and there are monuments to these personalities, who are now perceived as Ukrainian national figures. But they were built in the 19th century by the Russian imperial authorities. They were built on the initiative of people who believed in one indivisible Russia.

What Putin says in fact is that he wants to go back to the pre-1917 model of the big Russian nation. He rejects the Soviet experience and blames the Soviet nationality policies for actually creating today’s divisions. Of course, this is just the result of Putin’s rejection of the parts of history that do not fit his paradigm. The Soviet Union was trying to preserve the empire by accommodating the national movements that were already there. It is not that the Soviet Union appeared first and the Ukrainian national movement or the idea of Ukrainian independence came second. It was the other way around and anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of the history of the region understands that. Otherwise we would have to assume that the USSR was also responsible for the creation of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists.

Looking at the trend in Ukraine’s political development since the Soviet collapse, we can see this back and forth between a more pro-western path versus a kind of stepping back, which can be characterised as more pro-Russian. That was probably the case up until Petro Poroshenko’s victory after the Revolution of Dignity. But I was wondering how we should understand Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rise in this process. Zelenskyy seems to lie a little bit outside this East/West tug of war…

There are really two Ukraines – one before the war that started in 2014 and then another one that is currently being forged by the war in Donbas. If you look at the presidential elections before 2014, you see that Ukraine was almost divided down the middle. This division was very clearly defined in geographic terms between east and west Ukraine. The electoral border could move a little bit here and there and different presidents would be elected with the support of one of these sides. But the war changed that, as well as the entire political map of Ukraine. First of all, the loss of Crimea and a part of Donbas resulted in the absence of millions of voters who had a post-Soviet identity and would be oriented toward Russia. Another difference came with the fact that the rest of Ukraine that remained under Kyiv control became increasingly mobilised in an attempt to protect itself against Russian aggression. So both processes contributed to Ukrainian society and the electorate becoming much more homogeneous than they were before. The first sign that this was really happening came in 2014, when Petro Poroshenko won the presidency with an unprecedented majority. It was not clear whether this was the start of a new trend or not because there was of course the shock of war and many unusual things were happening at that time. The election of President Zelenskyy actually demonstrated that we are probably dealing with a new tendency in the country because he also gained an absolute majority. Whilst Poroshenko lost a little bit in the east, Zelenskyy lost a little bit in the west. But basically we have had both presidents since 2014 elected by an overwhelming majority of the electorate. That is the new reality. This increase in homogeneity also resulted in the fact that for the first time in Ukraine’s history since Soviet times a majority in the parliament belongs to one party. Because of that, accusations of authoritarianism are becoming a part of Ukrainian political vocabulary to a degree that they were not before. It is the new reality formed by the changes in Ukrainian geography and society that came with the war.

Certainly the war played a huge role in consolidating Ukrainian society and identity and pushed Ukraine even further away from the Soviet legacy and the imperial past…

Ukraine is being pushed away from Russia to a degree that was really unimaginable before 2014. And there is a real disconnect between what Vladimir Putin is saying in terms of Russian-Ukrainian unity and the impact that his actions have on Russian-Ukrainian relations.

In the context of our conversation about the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seems that Belarus is a bit of an outlier in terms of developments. Yet, something has changed with the most recent forged election and the outbreak of mass protests and demonstrations. Is this also part of these processes that we have been talking about?

Belarus in many ways is catching up basically with the rest of the region. The original push there for a more nationalising state that started in 1991 and 1992 was stopped partially by the arrival of Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The refusal to nationalise led to Belarus becoming a kind of relic of the Soviet period. The others in the neighbourhood – Russia and Ukraine in particular – were progressing on the path of nationalisation. Ironically, Belarus was becoming more and more different to those republics by refusing to nationalise. What we see now especially in the last year or two is actually a major step in this nationalisation process, which has been triggered by two factors. The first factor is the rejection by the society of Lukashenka’s authoritarian regime, which is associated with this “anti-national” position. Almost by default the pre-Soviet national flag of Belarus became the flag of the protesters brining along all the values, myths and other things associated with Belarusian national project. This is somewhat similar to the Ukrainian story and political importance of national symbols and elements if national culture. The Ukrainian language was quite marginal on the streets of Kyiv through the 1990s to early 2000s. However, Ukrainian would always be the language of the revolution, the opposition and Maidan. Now we are dealing with a form of Belarusian Maidan. Various Belarusian national values and symbols are closely associated with this movement. The second factor is Russia. Russia continues to be a very important factor in the whole post-Soviet space, influencing the processes that are taking place there. Russia’s backing of the discredited Lukashenka regime has now created disillusionment in the circles of Belarusian opposition, who were oriented in one way or another to Russia. Now they have little choice but to embrace the Belarusian identity. Again we will see in time whether current events turn out to be just a moment in history or this is the beginning of a trend, which will set that country onto the same track as the rest of the region.

For the last question I wanted to ask about terminology and approach to the region. It is now 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and I wonder what you think about this expression “post-Soviet”? This is something I have been asking myself and others… Do you think this term is outdated? Is it time that we abandon this expression “post-Soviet”?

Like Soviet, post-Soviet is becoming – and this should be encouraged more and more – part of the vocabulary of historians. Post-Soviet and Soviet legacies are still with us, but they become less and less important with each passing day. Just look at the different former republics of the Soviet Union, with various groups embarking on very different tracks and directions. On the one hand, you have the Baltic states, which are a part of the European Union and NATO. They are successful democracies and, at this point, even more successful than some democracies of the former Eastern Bloc, including Poland and Hungary. Then you have mostly Authoritarian Central Asia and a mix bag in terms of democracy in the South Caucasus. Ukraine and Moldova are democratic, but have huge economic challenges. In many ways, all of these countries have a common Soviet legacy but have chosen different paths of development. Less and less things can be explained now by reference to the Soviet legacy alone. What we also see now is that pre-Soviet history is becoming more and more important in explaining what is happening in the region and the choices that are being made today. So I would not say that the term is illegitimate, but it loses a lot of legitimacy when it comes to explaining contemporary developments in the region.

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He is the author of numerous books, including The Last Empire, which received the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations.

Adam Reichardt is the editor in chief of New Eastern Europe.

belarus, Collapse of the USSR, Russia, Serhii Plokhy, Ukraine