HISTORY: JUDITH DEVLINreviews Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet UnionBy Conor O'Clery Transworld Ireland, 434pp. £14.99
TWENTY YEARS have passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an event that has been overshadowed by 9/11 but that Conor O’Clery aptly compares to the fall of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. It changed the world map and international politics. The collapse of one of the superpowers, the heir to the Russian empire, was anticipated by no one, not even by those who had devoted their lives to its study; nor, 25 years ago, would anyone have imagined that Russia, the nucleus of the USSR, would have been relegated to a secondary role in world affairs and eclipsed by China.
O'Clery explains how the dissolution happened, in a lucid account that abounds with cogent judgments, vivid portraits of the personalities involved and numerous well-chosen anecdotes, jokes and sobriquets. It is scrupulously researched and informed by a wide reading of memoir, literature and interviews, as well as by first-hand experience (as Irish Timesreaders will know: he was this newspaper's Moscow correspondent at the time). Historical perspective is thus infused with an intimacy and immediacy that make the book a riveting read.
O’Clery solves the problem of how to tell his story by focusing on December 25th, 1991, the day when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR. He cuts between episodes from that day and, in flashback, the events that led up to it. The two dominant figures are Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
Gorbachev, as O’Clery points out, liked to portray himself in later years as a man of destiny, whose mission was to transform the Soviet Union into a liberal and democratic state. He was brought to Moscow, however, not as a radical reformer but as a relatively young and vigorous apparatchik, who enjoyed the patronage of Mikhail Suslov, the blanched guardian of Soviet ideology, implicated – like most high officials of his generation – in the crimes of Stalinism. Gorbachev attended Moscow University during the post-Stalin thaw, when contact with foreign students from the “brother socialist” states, including the Czech intellectual Zdenek Mlynár, and the party’s policy of de-Stalinisation served to radicalise a generation that included many of Gorbachev’s aides.
Like many party men of his time, Gorbachev seems to have felt that some degree of renewal and reform was necessary, but what this might mean and where it might lead were far from clear. Some comrades, such as his much-put-upon colleague Alexander Yakovlev (who had spent many years in semidisgrace as ambassador to Canada) were finally ready to go beyond the permitted boundaries and embrace social democracy, as ultimately would Gorbachev. Others, such as the party’s second-in-command, Yegor Ligachev, were soon alarmed by the response to the limited measures initially entailed by perestroika and glasnost. The democratisation of which Gorbachev spoke early in 1987, for instance, hardly meant institutionalised political pluralism. Indeed, in 1937 Stalin’s henchman Andrei Zhdanov had also invoked internal party democracy, which, as with glasnost, was, in Soviet political practice, rather a tool for undermining critics and enemies in the party than one for opening the door to civic freedoms and political rights.
Gorbachev’s ambiguities and fears, principally about the breakup of the Soviet Union and the impact of market reforms, were to drive him towards the party conservatives. In early 1991 he failed to condemn military crackdowns in Vilnius and later Tbilisi, and he authorised the KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov to tap the phones of his former colleague and friend Yakovlev. Small wonder that the coup leaders imagined that he might sit back and let them do the dirty work. They underestimated him, however.
Even if Gorbachev rationalised his hesitations by referring to the need to hold the party and state together, he now understood himself – partly thanks tzo the international accolades he had earned – as a hero of liberalisation, democracy and peace. As O’Clery makes clear, however, he was no instinctive politician and he filled the role of democratic tribune uneasily. It was one thing to be an international statesman, but, unlike Yeltsin, he had no feel for the politics of the street. After the coup, when he was brought back to Moscow by Yeltsin’s victorious forces, he failed to go to the Russian parliament to thank the opponents of authoritarianism there and to join his cause unambiguously to theirs.
That omission suited Yeltsin, who couldn’t abide Gorbachev (the feeling was mutual). His antipathy to Gorbachev and what he represented (the Soviet system, the party, the USSR) had less to do with the politics of ideas than with temperament. O’Clery excels at capturing the personalities of the two principals. He cites an interesting observation by an official who remarked that if Yeltsin had been elected general secretary in 1985, instead of Gorbachev, there would have been no glasnost, no elections, no freedom in eastern Europe.
Yeltsin, as O’Clery shows, was a more instinctive character than Gorbachev. A party apparatchik plucked from relative obscurity in Sverdlovsk and promoted to a sensitive position (as Moscow party chief) in the top leadership, he was unable or unwilling to play the game. Accustomed to running his Siberian fiefdom largely as he wished, he found the negotiation, compromises, alliances and changing rhetoric and policies of the upper party echelons uncongenial and probably puzzling. When he used the party congress in early 1986 to criticise the party bosses’ sacrosanct privileges and followed this up by sacking well-connected underlings and later criticising Gorbachev’s own mini-cult, he had broken all the rules and become a political liability whom Gorbachev had to ditch.
Dragged in front of his party colleagues when ill and drugged, then humiliated and forced to recant, before being expelled from the golden circle of the Soviet leadership, Yeltsin developed a hatred for Gorbachev and the party that Gorbachev’s introduction of political freedoms enabled him to express. It was anti-communism, rather than any clear vision of the future, that motivated Yeltsin, the popular leader of emerging Russian democracy.
His finest hour came with his leadership of the opposition to the August coup. Few will forget the photograph of him on a tank outside the besieged parliament, defying the coup leaders. The coup was intended to prevent the recasting of the Soviet Union as a voluntary federation.
O’Clery gives an interesting account of Yeltsin’s evolving position on the breakup of the USSR. Ultimately the Soviet state and its president lacked the democratic mandate of the directly elected Yeltsin and the Russian parliament, so Yeltsin saw its abolition as the best way to secure the fullness of power hitherto denied him and of wreaking revenge on Gorbachev for past humiliations. Did he anticipate the complications, economic and military, that would follow? Did he realise what Russians would suffer when his young economic technicians applied shock therapy? Almost certainly not. Russia has yet to recover from the remedies administered by the IMF and Yeltsin’s reformers.
For Yeltsin, as for Gorbachev, O’Clery suggests, the exercise of power was to be a gruelling and destructive experience, in which many of their early ideals and principles were lost. Nonetheless, that the breakup of the Soviet Union was achieved relatively peacefully is a tribute, as O’Clery observes, to both men.
This is a superb account of one of the most dramatic historical processes of our time, rich in humour and humanity and replete with assured judgments. It can be warmly recommended to anyone interested in history and current affairs.
Judith Devlin lectures in Russian and European history at University College Dublin. Among her books are The Rise of the Russian Democrats(1995) and The Enemies of Democracy in Modern Russia(1999)
