As expected, American media is recalling the end of the great rival superpower that the Soviet Union had been by highlighting contemporary Putinist Russia's attempt to resurrect it; meanwhile official Russian media is lambasting the West for grossly oversimplifying the 1991 putsch as a tyrannical attempt to reimpose totalitarian rule on a freedom-yearning populace, which rightly rejected it in the most unequivocal manner.
Neither end of the spectrum finds it particularly convenient to acknowledge the central fact of the events of a quarter century ago, though both would almost certainly have to agree: that it was Russia that ended the Soviet Union.
After the fall of its satellite eastern bloc in the revolutions of 1989, the USSR found itself with little choice but to decentralize and federalize its own constituent republics. It was this loosening of centralized Soviet rule from the Kremlin that propelled Boris Yeltsin to power in 1990-91 as the undisputed leader of a new power structure within the individual member republics which no longer really answered to the traditional Soviet hierarchy spanning all of them (even as it nominally remained part of it). As elected head of the new federated Russian socialist republic, in summer 1991 Yeltsin moved rapidly to mop up what little remained of real Soviet governing authority emanating from the Kremlin. In all but name, this was a rebirth of Russian nationalism: it was hardly a coincidence, too, that Yeltsin was by then an openly devout Orthodox Christian, cultivating close ties with a resurgent Russian Orthodox Church.
The August 19 plotters may have been incompetent and badly out of touch with the sheer bankruptcy of communism at that juncture in history, but they were sincere in their greatest fear, however exaggerated it turned out to be: that unless Soviet power was reestablished over the republics, the USSR would descend into the kind of ethnic warfare across its constituents' boundaries of the kind that was then engulfing Yugoslavia. Thus when they struck, the hardliners knew exactly what they were attempting to preempt: sectarian nationalist strife. What they didn't count on, however, was that the main nationalist opposition to their scheme would come from none other than the dominant member of the union: Russia itself.
That's because the former Soviet Union wasn't exactly the former Yugoslavia: historically, tensions between Russians and Ukrainians, to take the two core Slavic ethnicities, were far less acrimonious overall than that between their equivalent pair, the Serbs and Croatians, in the Balkan region. On top of this, whereas Titoist strongman Slobodan Milosevic badly needed a new source of legitimacy as communism crumbled in the late 1980s and thus found it in posing as the protector of Serb minorities, Yeltsin rode to power on that very wave of proto-democratization of the Soviet republics that was unleashed by the mass liberalization of the east European satellite region of 1989. And although Milosevicesque jingoists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky also appeared on the freer Russian political scene of 1990-91, it was these very sectarian elements that the communist hardliners were seeking to rein in.
Thus the coup's dramatic meltdown on August 21 was a natural byproduct of a Russian neo-nationalism which wasn't expansionist, but indeed anti-imperial: a perfect confluence of factors ensured that such a reawakening of pre-communist political identity would be progressive and not reactionary in nature. As Yeltsin rallied for Russia's freedom atop the iconic tank in front of Moscow's Duma building, he and his predominantly Russian supporters found themselves in effect rallying for the independence of their far smaller and weaker fellow republics, as well.
The Russian Orthodox Church, too, stepped up to the plate at a crucial moment: Patriarch Alexei II's radio broadcast in which the former KBG collaborator warned Soviet security forces that firing on unarmed demonstrators constituted a grave sin before God, coupled with the threat of retaliatory airstrikes against the Kremlin itself by dissenting Soviet officers, decisively tipped the scales of violent coercion against the putschists. And Yeltsin himself, by then a devout practicing Orthodox Christian, took special care to secure Church blessing for his resistance effort.
Without Russia turning against it, the Soviet Union could have ended far more violently - that it was in fact Russia's own role which was central to the death of the old order and the emergence of a new one, all with relatively little bloodshed, is beyond dispute.
What's fundamentally shifted during the 21st-century Putin era, however, is the broad understanding and perception of just what kind of reborn and reawakened Russia actually arose from the Soviet ashes 25 years ago.
In the immediate aftermath of the coup's collapse exactly a quarter of a century ago today, there was little doubt to most observers both within and outside the Soviet Union that an unequivocally free, democratic, Westernized and free-market new liberal Russian society was a sure thing. And yet underneath this bubbly surface, all was not well.
The fall of its satellite empire in eastern Europe and mushrooming of ethnic separatism among its own republics had already in 1990-91 triggered a reactionary Russian jingoism in the heart of the waning USSR that was at once a threat to its internal peace and stability in that twilight period of communist rule. Ostensibly this was precisely what the ill-fated August 19 junta was trying to contain, but in fact its repression of all expressions of autonomy from the Soviet center - i.e. including Russia's own - was most enthusiastically supported by these same right-wing Russian nationalists, and this association has never been broken in the intervening decades: the August 19 coup's failure is widely (if even by no means universally) mourned by the Putinist brand of Russian political identity to the present day (as well as its more extreme offshoots and variants).
What's intriguingly significant, though, is how quickly and dramatically the Russian parliamentary coalition that propelled Yeltsin to power in 1991-92 turned against the first post-Soviet Russian presidency: the showdown between the Kremlin and Duma of October 1993, which ended with a bloody siege of the parliament building, wasn't merely a result of the Yeltsin administration's badly bungled "shock therapy" program to get the Russian economy on a prosperous free-market footing; it was on a deeper level a reflection of just how provisional the lawmakers' alliance with the new chief executive was to begin with. Many of them, it turned out, wanted to do away with the old Soviet system merely so they could essentially privatize formerly state assets into their own pockets; in this they closely mirrored their ex-apparatchik counterparts in Ukraine and Belarus, whose own lukewarm support for independence in 1991 was sealed by assurances from the leaders of their newly autonomous republics that they could keep running their existing socialist factories and farms (i.e. effectively privatizing them by making themselves oligarchs). Instead Yeltsin, under heavy US and Western pressure to fully privatize to true entrepreneurs, not just cosmetically privatize by turning communists into capitalists, had to put the red managers out to dry.
In hindsight, Russia was fortunate that Yeltsin cracked down so hard, even undemocratically, on the resurgence of hard socialism that accompanied the resultant backlash: its post-Soviet economy hasn't been stellar, but it could easily have been even worse - neighboring Ukraine and Belarus, the former which has de-Sovietized more slowly than Russia, the latter which arguably hasn't even done so at all, are all the evidence one needs.
And that's the great paradox of post-Soviet Russia: from the virtual get-go, pure democracy failed. The West may point the finger all it wants at Putin, but the fact is that Putin simply capitalized on a new kind of centralized authoritarianism that was established in the Kremlin by his predecessor and his oligarch henchmen. They had their day in the 1990s - their critical role in history was to prevent the return of communism - but that day had run its course when the ex-KGB case officer rose to power in 1999-2000.
Today, the West and Russian liberals alike lament that such a bright Russian democratic spring in 1990-91 was apparently strangled by the dark scepter of reactionary ethnic and religious jingoism - and that this same disaster may be unfolding worldwide.
In fact, one could just as well argue that the democratic dream - that is to say, the most parochial and narrow Western liberal conception of it - died a long time ago. Not even democracy itself can be advanced or preserved through democratic means all or perhaps even most of the time. That was true for Russia in 1993, a full decade before the US put the same principle into practice in Iraq.
A few days ago, Mikhail Gorbachev himself recalled having given the US this tidbit of wisdom:
The fact that the Western hero who freed the slaves behind the Iron Curtain is saying this now, on what should have been the commemoration of the start of an unvarnished golden era of democratic freedom worldwide, is a testimony to how badly awry the whole project has gone.“I told the Americans: you are trying to impose your democracy on the people of different countries, spreading it around like coffee in bags, but we must give the people a chance to make their own choice.”
Democracy itself is never the problem: it's the self-professing democrats who exercise it that determine its success or failure. If there's any lesson that post-Soviet Russian history should impress on us 25 years on, it's that democracy is merely a means to an end - and if that end gets garbled or lost in the execution, it becomes as practically fit for the ash heap of history as any other political system. Freedom is never free, and if its entrusted guardians don't pay their special, even extraordinary dues, we're all in serious trouble.
No comments:
Post a Comment