On both counts, Mr. The former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were both vast, multinational empires that defined themselves by ideological principles, not ethnic or national ones. Russia, stripped of empire and basically reduced to its 17th-century borders, is a newly minted nation-state — much bigger but otherwise a lot like its fellow ex-Soviet republics — that has yet to find a clear post-imperial identity. Other newly independent states like Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan could reinvent themselves in terms of their own local ethnic and historical traditions.
But none of these options was available to Russia. All that takes some getting used to. When the soviet union collapsed nearly three decades ago, the news reverberated around the world. But it was mostly greeted with apathy in the streets of Moscow and other Russian cities. The end was not brought on by war or popular revolution, but by a secret deal signed by the Communist-era leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, which declared the USSR dead and replaced by an unfamiliar new entity, the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Most of those states, in the Caucasus and Central Asia especially, were not party to the arrangement and woke up the next day to discover that they were now independent nations. Though the Soviet Union was legally dissolved, the realities of life under it persisted. As the example of Belarus shows, most post-Soviet countries were deeply entwined by decades, in some cases centuries, of being part of the same empire.
Russian remained the language of communication between the new states, and in many cases still is. Their economies had been systematically integrated by central planners in Moscow, and they are far from disentangled to this day. The free flow of people within the former Soviet Union left big diasporas of Russians in many former Soviet republics, while millions of people from those new states woke up to find themselves living in independent Russia.
Belarus elected a new president in , Alexander Lukashenko, who stressed nostalgic Soviet-style political and economic policies. In practice, he depended heavily on Russian subsidies like cheap oil and gas to keep his regime afloat. Thanks to those arrangements, and with the help of repeated rigged elections, Mr. Lukashenko is still in power, 26 years later. Shushkevich, bitter and angry, says that the pull of Soviet-style economic and political dependency continues to thwart the aspirations of people throughout the region.
The greatest fear in Moscow is that these former Soviet republics will break ties with Russia and join the European Union and NATO, as the three former Soviet Baltic states did, thus isolating Russia completely from its own backyard. Since Mr. In , a Russian army invaded Georgia to prevent pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili from staging a military reconquest of the breakaway Georgian territory of South Ossetia, a Russian protectorate.
Had Mr. Saakashvili succeeded in reuniting his fractured country, he might have gotten much closer to his stated goal of making Georgia a viable candidate to join NATO. Similarly in Ukraine in , after a pro-Western street revolt unseated Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow intervened militarily to annex the mainly Russian-populated Crimean Peninsula, and to back anti-Kyiv rebels in the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine.
Not so many in the West may like Russia, but few today will deny that it plays an important role. Russia acted forcefully to prevent what it feared would be a precipitous leap by its most important post-Soviet neighbor, Ukraine, into the Western camp.
As with Georgia, those actions likely succeeded in that immediate goal. But it also came at a heavy long-term cost. Markedonov says. Putin may have achieved his goal of making Russia more respected and even feared in the world, but he is further from finding a sustainable post-Soviet place for Russia in the global order, in which it would be treated as an acceptable and equal partner, than he was when he began talking about that goal 20 years ago.
The relationship with China is complicated, with many economic and other complexities, while it looks much easier to sanction, isolate, and blame Russia.
His predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev , squandered the profits from a two-decade oil boom on an arms race with the United States, neglecting a golden opportunity to raise standards of living before Gorbachev had arrived. Meanwhile, changes were rumbling across Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall fell and the move toward German reunification began.
By the time Gorbachev tried to dial back his reforms, it was too late. Broader social forces had been unleashed. In particular, he succeeded in weakening a totalitarian regime in favor of individual rights, despite resistance from within the governmental party-state. Presidents Bush and Gorbachev shaking hands at the end of a press conference about the peace summit in Moscow.
After that, Plokhy says, the United States government actively sought to keep the Soviet Union together, seeing it as a favorable alternative to a nuclear power dissolving into more than a dozen nation-states. By , the Bush administration reconsidered policy options in light of the growing level of turmoil within the Soviet Union.
Three basic options presented themselves. The administration could continue to support Gorbachev in hopes of preventing Soviet disintegration. Alternately, the United States could shift support to Yeltsin and the leaders of the Republics and provide support for a controlled restructuring or possible breakup of the Soviet Union.
The final option consisted of lending conditional support to Gorbachev, leveraging aid and assistance in return for more rapid and radical political and economic reforms. Unsure about how much political capital Gorbachev retained, Bush combined elements of the second and third options.
The Soviet nuclear arsenal was vast, as were Soviet conventional forces, and further weakening of Gorbachev could derail further arms control negotiations.
To balance U. Bush administration officials also, however, increased contact with Yeltsin. The unsuccessful August coup against Gorbachev sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. He resigned his leadership as head of the Communist party shortly thereafter—separating the power of the party from that of the presidency of the Soviet Union. This, in turn, sparked peaceful revolutions across Eastern Europe.
This atmosphere of possibility soon enveloped the Soviet Union itself. On August 18, , concerned members of the Communist party in the military and government placed Gorbachev under house arrest. Leaders of the coup declared a state of emergency. The military moved on Moscow, but their tanks were met with human chains and citizens building barricades to protect Russian Parliament. Boris Yelstin , then the chair of parliament, stood on top of one of those tanks to rally the surrounding crowds.
The coup failed after three days. On December 8, a newly-free Gorbachev traveled to Minsk, where he met with leaders of the Republic of Belarus and Ukraine, signing an agreement that broke the two countries away from the U. R to create the Commonwealth of Independent States. Georgia joined two years later. An end has been put to the Cold War and to the arms race, as well as to the mad militarization of the country, which has crippled our economy, public attitudes and morals.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in as the newly formed Soviet Union.
After more than 40 years of the world seeming to teeter on the However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one.
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