Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

Ten years ago, Time Magazine published an article marking the 20th anniversary of 1989, remarking that it “truly was one of those years that the world shifted on its pivot.”¹ One can easily summarize the evidence. From the perspective of readers of this journal, this was the year when the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan, held contested elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies, and decided not to intervene in Hungary and then the other satellite states. This last and truly humane decision—perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev’s greatest legacy—enabled the slow-motion and largely nonviolent collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Many of us have enduring memories of these unforgettable months—the cutting of fences between Hungary and Austria, crowds of people on the streets (and climbing into embassy compounds), violence in Prague and especially Bucharest, Andrei Sakharov’s televised rebuke to Gorbachev, and the glorious celebrations atop the Berlin Wall. Two years later, the Soviet Union would itself cease to exist.

Yet the year 1989 was also a global moment with many resonances and lasting echoes. In Latin America, Chile held elections that would soon mark the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the United States invaded Panama; in South Africa, F. W. de Klerk became president (and would release Nelson Mandela early the following year); in the United States, five black and Latino teenagers—the Central Park Five—were forced to confess to a brutal crime they did not commit, a moment that marked Donald Trump’s entrance onto the political scene with his full-page ads calling for their execution; in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie (and died several months later); and in Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević became president of Serbia. One of the most significant events—and the greatest contrast to Eastern Europe—occurred in China, where a student movement that culminated in peaceful demonstrations on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square [End Page 221] was met by the full force of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army: the enduring image remains that of the single protester confronting a tank.

In recalling some of these events in 2009—amid the economic collapse, protests in Iran, and the early months of Barack Obama’s presidency, Time actually lauded Francis Fukuyama’s infamous intervention: his 1989 piece, “The End of History,” published three years later in book form (to almost universal scorn among actual historians). Reading this article now, a decade later in 2019, its fundamental optimism and neoliberal faith in the power of markets seem positively quaint: the “unabashed victory of economic liberalism” has hardly led, shall we say, to the flowering of liberal democracy across the world. Instead, the rise of right-wing extremism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia as well as the growing climate disaster seem instead to be prompting a rediscovery of democratic socialism, from the Green New Deal to Kristen Ghodsee’s argument that women did in fact have better sex under socialism.² Another great irony, of course, comes from the historical comparison of the Soviet/Russian and Chinese cases: for many years, it was almost taken for granted that the Chinese path privileging economic over political liberalization had produced superior outcomes and would naturally culminate in democratization as China integrated into the global system. Instead, we are currently witnessing the mounting authoritarianism of Xi Jinping and the mass suppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Anniversaries—and we’ve had several significant ones of late, including 1914, 1917, and 1968—thus remind us of the importance of historical perspective and narrative. The judgment of a historical turning point often hinges on the concerns (and clichés) of the moment, allowing us to take stock by telling stories about where we are now and how we got here, who we are, and, more implicitly, where we might be going. Such stories need not be linear or triumphalist, though they often are—at least until sufficiently disrupted by the messiness of historical change. Nor should we assume that seemingly pivotal years necessarily mark deep structural breaks. The distance of time often allows us to see underlying continuities, including in the Russian case: after all, many late Soviet elites smoothly transitioned into new Russian ones. The value of anniversaries is thus not that there is any absolute or intrinsic importance to a given event or date, but rather that they provoke us to think historically. Indeed, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 invites us to ponder the importance of that seemingly almost accidental war and the ways in which it facilitated the formation of al-Qaeda, 9/11, the US-led [End Page 222] invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and—from the perspective of 2019—the seemingly inexorable decline of the US empire.³

Anniversaries also invite us to contemplate the complexity of historical agency. News magazines often feature headlines that elide the problem of agency that is so central to historical analysis. For Time, 1989 was thus the “Year That Changed the World,” but the more compelling and complicated question is who, exactly, did the changing? Students often reflexively answer that question by referring to the supposed yearnings for freedom, democracy, and the blessings of Western consumerism. Standing in long lines for toilet paper and supposedly frustrated by the absence of choice and voice in the political sphere, people power toppled the communist bogeyman.

While such ideas work well in news punditry and on the History Channel, they rarely hold up to historical analysis. For the 20th anniversary of 1989, Stephen Kotkin and Jan Gross argued that the “revolutions” of 1989 were not driven by the people in the streets, much less an emergent civil society. Instead, it was “the establishment … that brought down its own system.”⁴ Kotkin and Gross’s ideas, however, were less a thorough exploration grounded in primary sources than a provocation meant to spur further study of communist collapse in a broader, transnational context. Ten years on, we still lack a convincing account that attempts to sort out the tangled nexus of potential historical agents across the East European communist world, including national movements, frustrated consumers, the intrigues of political elites, US foreign policy, and the role of macroeconomic factors such as the decline in oil prices and massive indebtedness. Adding to the challenge of identifying agents of historical change is a basic terminological problem. Was the demise of communism in 1989 a revolution, a coup, a collapse, a transformation, or some combination of all those things and others? Was it a result of structural flaws or of the discrete decisions of individual leaders?

Within the more limited sphere of Soviet and post-Soviet history, thinking about the significance of the year 1989 also raises questions of chronological boundaries: when (and why) did the Soviet Union collapse? As compared to the broader, transnational question of communism’s collapse in Europe, historians have ventured many different answers to this question. Martin Malia maintained that it was all but built into the DNA of Marxist Bolshevik ideology, suggesting that the collapse began as soon as the Bolsheviks [End Page 223] attempted to put their ideology into practice.⁵ A very different answer came from Ronald Suny, who posited the impossibility of building nation-states within socialism. Soviet nationalities policies, constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, thus paved the way for the Soviet collapse by trying to create and transcend national identities (though just what detonated the ticking time bomb of Soviet nationalities policies in the late 1980s rather than earlier seems less clear).⁶ Kotkin, meanwhile, placed the Soviet Union into the broader context of choosing to compete ideologically and materially with the far wealthier American empire. That competition precipitated an economic crisis exacerbated by the collapse in oil prices in the mid-1980s and Gorbachev’s refusal to follow the Chinese example of Deng Xiaoping, who didn’t care what color the cat was so long as it caught mice.⁷

More recently, Serhii Plokhy has told a tale of Soviet unraveling that emphasizes the intrigues of communist political elites in combination with Ukrainian nationalists, which ultimately resulted in the 1 December 1991 referendum in favor of Ukrainian independence. After the referendum, communist leaders in the republics abandoned Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, becoming, alongside Boris Yeltsin, the leaders of new postcommunist nations.⁸ Among the various autopsies of the USSR’s end, Plokhy’s comes closest to examining and trying to understand the concrete intersection between popular will—in this case, the Ukrainian referendum—and the specific actions of political elites. A book prize surely awaits the historian who manages to connect all these dots, from oil prices to consumerism, national movements, and the relative rise and decline of Soviet power in the 1970s and 1980s.

Noticeably absent in the literature, however, is a sustained attempt to integrate the impact of traumatic events such as the Afghanistan War and Chernobyl into the story of collapse. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan came in that fateful year of 1989, ten years after the start of a war that Gorbachev had called a bleeding wound. Thirty years later, we still do not have a definitive history of the impact of the humiliating Soviet defeat on the declining fortunes of the Soviet system and its empire within Europe and [End Page 224] beyond.⁹ Beyond the military and strategic implications of the Soviet Afghan War, the debacle clearly represented a direct blow to a major source of Soviet political legitimacy—at home and abroad—especially considering the centrality of the war cult and victory culture in Soviet politics and society.¹⁰

As with the defeat in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster also attacked a key source of Soviet legitimacy: its claim to mastering science and technology for the benefit of humanity. Chernobyl thus at once destroyed a nuclear power plant and undermined a critical tenet of the Soviet system. Yet historians have focused less on the political effects of Chernobyl, including its role in the collapse of communist authority within the USSR and beyond in the global Cold War, and more on the long-term, global environmental and health impacts of the disaster.¹¹ Nevertheless, this very perspective also provides an apt reminder of the limits of conventional notions of historical time. Rather than focusing on the spectacle of particular events (much less anniversary years), they allow us to shift our gaze for a moment to a different temporal scale, to consider the intersection of human life and activity with the half-lives of radioactive isotopes. As Rob Nixon, a leading scholar in environmental humanities, has advocated, we must also—and urgently—pay attention to the comparatively invisible “slow violence” of environmental catastrophes that tend to be dispersed across both time and space.¹² As we look back on 1989, let us thus remember the year that produced moments of spectacular violence (in Beijing), equally spectacular nonviolence (in Berlin), and the multiple lines of historical storytelling a short segment of time can generate, including those that remain too often unseen and unremembered. [End Page 225]