Historical Events
The New Thinking and the End of the Cold War
Gorbachev recast Soviet diplomacy under the New Thinking: nuclear war could have no winner, and security was to be gained with one's adversary, not against them. Gromyko, foreign minister for twenty-eight years, stepped aside for Shevardnadze. Through the Geneva (1985) and Reykjavik (1986) summits came the 1987 INF Treaty, the first abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons, and in his December 1988 UN address Gorbachev announced a unilateral cut of half a million troops and freedom of choice for all nations. By February 1989 the withdrawal from Afghanistan was complete.
The Nineteenth Party Conference and the First Contested Elections
At the Nineteenth All-Union Party Conference in June 1988, Gorbachev pushed through a political reform shifting power from the party apparatus to elected soviets. For the first time in decades the conference became a stage for open debate, and Ligachev's rebuke to Yeltsin, Boris, you are wrong, became a national catchphrase. The March 1989 elections of people's deputies were the first contested elections in Soviet history. Dozens of regional party bosses lost to unknown challengers, and Yeltsin, disgraced two years earlier, returned with 89 percent of the vote in the Moscow at-large district.
The Nationalities Crisis and the Collapse of Central Authority
The sequence running from the Sumgait pogrom of 1988 to the killings in Vilnius in 1991 is the process by which the Soviet national order and Soviet central authority came apart together under perestroika. The four episodes were not of one kind. Sumgait was an anti-Armenian pogrom touched off by the Nagorno-Karabakh question and a failure of policing; Tbilisi in 1989 was the military dispersal of an unarmed national and independence movement; Baku in 1990 was a large military intervention where ethnic violence and the collapse of central power overlapped; Vilnius in 1991 was force used against the sovereign institutions of a republic that had declared independence. Yet they show one crisis. The centre could not protect people from ethnic violence, and still reached for the army whenever a republic moved politically away from it.
The Baltic Independence Movement and the Baltic Way
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remembered their 1940 annexation under the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and once glasnost opened, that memory became politics. The Hirvepark rally in Tallinn in August 1987 was the first public denunciation of the protocols; in 1988 popular fronts formed in all three republics: the Rahvarinne in Estonia, the Latvian Popular Front, Sajudis in Lithuania. Grown on the tradition of song festivals, the movement was called the Singing Revolution. In November 1988 Estonia issued the first declaration of sovereignty, and on 23 August 1989, the pact's fiftieth anniversary, two million people joined hands in the Baltic Way, a human chain of six hundred kilometres linking the three capitals. That December the Congress of People's Deputies acknowledged the secret protocols existed and declared them void: the legal basis of the annexation was repudiated by Soviet hands.
The Revolutions of 1989
In 1989 one-party communist systems fell in quick succession across Eastern Europe. Hungary opened its border, Poland reached free elections through round-table talks, the Berlin Wall came down, and in Romania Ceaușescu was executed. The decisive difference was that Gorbachev, unlike in 1956 and 1968, renounced armed intervention.
The Tiananmen protests and the crackdown of 4 June 1989
In April 1989 student gatherings mourning Hu Yaobang grew into protests against corruption and for press freedom; the 26 April editorial branding them “turmoil” and the May hunger strike brought a million people to the square. During Gorbachev’s visit the leadership decided on martial law and Zhao Ziyang, who opposed it, fell. On the night of 3–4 June the army fought its way into the city and hundreds to thousands died.
The Economic Reform Debate and the 500 Days Programme
The reforms begun with the 1987 Law on State Enterprises and the 1988 Law on Cooperatives produced an economy neither planned nor market. Enterprises gained the freedom to raise wages while prices stayed fixed; money multiplied as goods dwindled, and the budget deficit grew together with empty shelves. In the summer of 1989 hundreds of thousands of miners in the Kuzbass and Donbass struck, with even bars of soap on their list of demands. In 1990 Shatalin and Yavlinsky produced the 500 Days programme for a transition to a market economy, backed by Yeltsin's Russian republic, but Gorbachev chose a compromise with the Ryzhkov government's moderate plan.
The Novo-Ogaryovo Process and the New Union Treaty
When the March 1991 referendum returned 76 percent for preserving the union, Gorbachev made it his last political capital. On 23 April, at the Novo-Ogaryovo estate outside Moscow, he issued the 9+1 statement with the leaders of nine republics, Yeltsin's Russia included, opening negotiations on a new union treaty that would recast the USSR as a voluntary federation of sovereign republics; six republics, among them the Baltic states and Georgia, stayed away from the start. Through a summer of tugging over taxation and the division of powers a draft was completed, with signing set for 20 August. In a late-night meeting at the end of July, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev agreed that after the signing the hardliners, Kryuchkov and Pavlov among them, would be replaced; the KGB's microphones carried the conversation straight to its subjects.
The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSR
In August 1991, hardliners seeking to stop the signing of a new union treaty confined Gorbachev and set up a State Committee for the State of Emergency to stage a coup. Led by Kryuchkov, Yazov, Pavlov and others, the coup collapsed within three days as Yeltsin resisted atop a tank and citizens rallied. The coup’s failure only accelerated the dissolution of the union.