It Was 30 Years Ago Today
I’ve written before about the newsletter I receive that presents news developments from around the world. It’s called “Foreign Exchanges,” and the author provides recaps on world events several times a week. I subscribe to this (it costs something like $5.00 per month) so I can get all the content, but even the free version is informative.
I was reading the June 12 newsletter (Monday of this week) and came across an entry in the “Today in History” section that interested me. I thought I would share this with you and then write a little about what was happening at that time in our history.
June 12, 1990: The Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia adopts the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, basically proclaiming Russia’s independence from the Soviet Union although “independence” may not exactly be the right term for this particular situation. This date is annually commemorated in Russia as “Russia Day.”
It's hard to remember this tumultuous time. The Berlin Wall had famously (and publicly) fallen in November of 1989. I remember watching Tom Brokaw cover the story during the evening of November 9 of that year, as the Wall – an infamous image of the East-West chasm that characterized the years since it was built in 1961 – was suddenly under siege. Three weeks later at a summit in Malta, the end of the Cold War was declared. Demolition of the Wall began six months later and German reunification occurred six months after that.
This was an important milestone that led to the break-up of the Soviet Union in December of 1991.
With the secession of the Russian Federation from the Soviet Union, the old USSR was essentially disbanded – all of its component parts had seceded. A successor organization called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was formed to be a kind of glue holding the former Soviet Republics together. This organization still exists, with nine member states as you can see below. It has little current significance.
When the final Soviet Republic seceded from the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev – at that point, the President of the USSR – was out of a job. He had written the terms of his ultimate obsolescence by encouraging three reform programs in the 1980s – glasnost (openness), perestroika (reform), and demokratizatsiya (democratization). When he encouraged the liberation of the Soviet people, he unleashed a genie he would not put back in the bottle. I was teaching Comparative Government while this was happening, and one of the countries we had to study was the Soviet Union. This was a bit of a moving target for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Here’s a little of what passes for Comparative Politics humor: Gorbachev’s problem was that he glasnosted before he perestroikad, so people were free to talk about how bad everything was. Upheaval followed.
[Pause for laughter.]
An unsuccessful coup attempt against him had weakened him in 1991. Boris Yeltsin defended Gorbachev and assisted in the defeat of the coup plotters. Gorbachev resigned from his position of leadership. Meanwhile, Yeltsin was organizing to take Gorbachev’s place as the leader of the newly independent Russian Federation
Hope for the emergence of real democracy in Russia was high in the 1990s. Yeltsin’s presidency, which lasted from 1991 to 1999, appeared to be heading toward democracy. The Russian Federation took the Soviet Union’s seat in the United Nations. But during this time, the Russian political culture was still unsuited to true Western-style democracy, and the country experienced serious unrest, including a series of Constitutional crises and foreign ventures that tried to assert Russian dominance in the areas of its former constituent republics.
One of Yeltsin’s reforms was to have far-reaching consequences. He encouraged “privatization,” meaning that ownership of many former state-owned enterprises would be spread out among private businessmen. This had the impact of encouraging the rise of the “oligarchs” – the wealthy (and largely corrupt) businessmen who came to dominate the Russian economy and ultimately Russian politics and international relations.
Yeltsin, ailing and under constant attack from the political forces around him, ran successfully for his second term as President in 1996. In a move that would have long-ranging consequences (consequences we are seeing today), he fired his Prime Minister in 1999 and replaced him with Vladimir Putin – relatively unknown at the time – and announced his wishes to see Putin as his successor.
We know the rest of the story.
When I used the blurb about today’s anniversary as an opportunity to look back over the last 30 years, my primary feeling is regret over the lost opportunity Russia presented for a few years in the 1990s.
It could have been otherwise.
We might never have heard “Hey, Russia, if you’re listening . . .” in 2016, and the history of the last six years might have been very different.