The Nationalities Crisis and the Collapse of Central Authority

Before 1988: A Structure Built to Explode

When the soviet of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast voted on 20 February 1988 to petition for transfer to Armenia, the Soviet centre possessed no institutional tool with which to process the demand. Yet the resolution had not come from nowhere. Since the 1920s the Soviet Union had divided territory along ethnic lines and institutionalized national languages, national bureaucracies, and national cultural institutions. The republics that made up the federation were, on paper, sovereign units whose constitutions even guaranteed a "free right of secession," and within the republics nested further ethno-territorial units: autonomous republics and autonomous oblasts. Under this architecture, national identity was not suppressed; it was institutionally preserved and strengthened, and the "titular nationality" of each republic came to regard its territory and language as an entitlement. The problem was that the system had developed no procedure whatever for actually resolving inter-ethnic territorial disputes or redrawing inter-republican borders. Article 78 of the 1977 Union Constitution stated only that a republic's territory could not be altered without its consent; it said nothing about what should happen when an autonomous area inside one republic asked to be transferred to another. That silence was the anatomical cause of the crisis of 1988.

Nagorno-Karabakh was the tragic miniature of this structure. In July 1921 the Caucasian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party (the Kavbiuro), with Stalin's intervention, placed the mountainous region, whose population was roughly 94 per cent Armenian, inside Soviet Azerbaijan as an autonomous oblast. Over the following six decades Karabakh Armenians sent repeated petitions and appeals to Moscow, in 1945, 1965, 1967, and 1977, each time blocked by an Azerbaijani veto. After Heydar Aliyev became First Secretary of the Azerbaijan party in 1969, Baku's control was systematized. In 1973–74 Aliyev purged the entire NKAO leadership as "Armenian nationalists" and installed Boris Kevorkov, an Armenian from outside Karabakh, as the oblast's party First Secretary. At the same time, policies encouraging Azerbaijani in-migration and pressuring Armenian out-migration reduced the Armenian share of the oblast's population from 89.2 per cent in 1926 to 76.9 per cent by 1989. Armenian-language education and cultural exchange were systematically constricted, and the 1981 law on the NKAO removed the provision that had listed Armenian as a working language of local authorities. Among Karabakh Armenians, the phrase "white genocide" began to circulate.

What allowed these grievances to erupt was Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, which loosened the party's censorship and control. Yet until early 1988 Gorbachev's reform agenda was focused on economic reconstruction and administrative efficiency; the nationalities question was essentially a blind spot. When protests broke out in Alma-Ata in December 1986 over the replacement of the Kazakh party leader Dinmukhamed Kunaev with the ethnic Russian Gennady Kolbin, Moscow read the events as intra-elite friction, not as a harbinger of ethnic mobilization. In the summer of 1987 some 75,000 Karabakh Armenians sent a petition directly to Gorbachev, and by October of that year environmental demonstrations in Yerevan were beginning to turn into national demands. On 13 February 1988 the first large rally was held in Stepanakert; a week later, on 20 February, the oblast soviet voted 110 to 17 for the transfer. The resolution was, in Soviet history, the first occasion on which one soviet institution had demanded against another soviet institution that its own jurisdiction be changed. Exactly one week afterward, the killing began in Sumgait.

From Resolution to Pogrom: Karabakh Thrown into a System Without Procedures

On 20 February 1988, the soviet of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast passed a resolution that, on its face, followed what the Soviet constitution appeared to guarantee. Voting 110 to 17, the deputies petitioned for transfer from the Azerbaijan SSR to the Armenian SSR, citing Article 70 (the right to national self-determination) and Article 78 (prohibiting changes to a republic's territory except with that republic's consent). The problem was that no institution actually existed to make these constitutional provisions work. No part of one Soviet republic's territory had ever been transferred to another, and the centre had no answer beyond declaring the resolution 'unacceptable.' Genrikh Poghosyan, first secretary of the Stepanakert oblast party committee, was fired immediately: the centre was trying to seal the breach with a personnel measure.

But sealing it was already too late. In the Armenian SSR, hundreds of thousands filled the streets of Yerevan demanding unification with Karabakh; in the Azerbaijan SSR, the same demand was received as an attempt to dismember the republic. On 22 February, near Askeran, a clash broke out between a crowd of Azerbaijanis heading for Stepanakert and police cordons and local residents. Two Azerbaijanis were killed. Five days later, that news would be the match that lit Sumgait.

Sumgait was an industrial city 25 kilometres north of Baku, packed with a quarter of a million chemical- and metal-plant workers. One in five residents had a criminal record, the average age was twenty-five (figures Interior Minister Vlasov reported to the Politburo on 29 February), and roughly 18,000 were Armenians. On 26 February, a group of several dozen Azerbaijanis gathered on Lenin Square to protest the Karabakh events. The next day, the 27th, the crowd had swollen to several thousand, and speaker after speaker called for revenge against Armenians. Melek Bayramova, second secretary of the city party committee, was among them.

That evening, USSR Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Katusev appeared on central television and Baku radio and confirmed that the two killed in the Askeran clash were Azerbaijanis. Witnesses describe the violence that followed as a 'hum like millions of bees' that descended on the Armenian quarter. From the night of the 27th through the 29th, gangs found Armenian homes, burned them, killed residents with axes and sharpened steel bars, and gang-raped women, several times and in front of their families. The city police, almost entirely Azerbaijani, did not intervene.

The centre's response was shockingly slow. Not until the evening of 28 February did Grigory Kharchenko, deputy head of the Central Committee's organisational-party work department, and Filipp Bobkov, first deputy chairman of the KGB, arrive on the scene. Kharchenko later told Thomas de Waal: 'Gorbachev is entirely wrong when he says we were three hours late. We were late by a day!' Only on the afternoon of the 29th did the Politburo convene to discuss martial law. At that meeting Gorbachev asked, 'Is a curfew really necessary?' while Defence Minister Yazov proposed issuing weapons without ammunition, the ammunition to follow in a separate armoured vehicle. Finally, on the evening of the 29th, paratroopers and naval infantry were deployed and brought the killing to an end. The official death toll was 26 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis, though Armenian accounts hold the real figure to be far higher (historian Geoffrey Hosking estimates hundreds).

The judicial aftermath showed no political will. The Procuracy broke the case into roughly 80 separate episodes scattered among courts across the country. Of the 94 people charged, most were teenagers and young men whose crimes were listed under 'hooligan motives.' The speakers who had incited the crowd from the platform were not charged; neither were the police commanders and party officials whose inaction had let the violence run. By late 1988, demonstrators in Baku were carrying placards hailing the 'Heroes of Sumgait.' In a single week the Soviet system had revealed three failures at once: no constitutional procedure existed for handling a territorial claim, the state's basic duty of protecting its residents went unperformed, and accountability after the fact was replaced by political whitewash.

From the Street to the Republic: The Popular Fronts That Perestroika Spawned

From the summer of 1988 through the spring of 1989, popular fronts or equivalent organizations formed in rapid succession across the Soviet republics. In Estonia, Edgar Savisaar proposed the idea of a "Popular Front for the Support of Perestroika" on live television on 13 April 1988; its founding congress followed on 1 October. The Latvian Popular Front was founded on 9 October 1988 and quickly became the largest organization with 250,000 members. In Lithuania, Sąjūdis began as an initiative group of 35 intellectuals on 3 June 1988; at its October founding conference, the musicologist Vytautas Landsbergis was elected chairman. In the Caucasus, the Azerbaijani Popular Front held its founding congress in July 1989.

These organizations followed a common pattern. They began by supporting Gorbachev's perestroika and demanding broader autonomy for their republics, but within months the goal shifted to full sovereignty, then to independence. Sąjūdis declared in February 1989 that Lithuania had been forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union; the Latvian Popular Front announced on 31 May 1989 that independence was the only option. The fronts used the existing republican institutions as the infrastructure of mass politics: they fielded candidates in Supreme Soviet elections, allied with reformist Communists inside republican councils of ministers, and operated through state-owned republican media. The system of national republics the Soviet Union had spent decades constructing became, in its own institutional forms, the stage for the movements that would dismantle it.

This was not simply an "outburst of national feeling." Conditions varied by republic. The Baltic states could draw on the history of interwar independence and the narrative of forced annexation under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocol; organizing had already begun in 1987 through environmental campaigns and Helsinki groups. In the Caucasus, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict catalyzed national movements on both the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides. But a shared structural condition obtained everywhere: once glasnost removed fear and censorship, the national units the Soviet Union had institutionalized (republics, autonomous republics, national languages, national cadres) turned into the framework of political mobilization.

The republican party apparatuses split in the face of these movements. In Lithuania, a reformer like Algirdas Brazauskas aligned with Sąjūdis, while the hardline first secretary Ringaudas Songaila was forced out. In Georgia, the situation radicalized further. On 18 March 1989, over 30,000 Abkhaz gathered in the village of Lykhny to demand secession from Georgia and restoration of union-republic status. In response, an Independence Committee led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Merab Kostava launched mass protests and hunger strikes in Tbilisi from 4 April. The demonstrators saw Moscow's hand behind Abkhaz separatism and demanded the restoration of Georgian independence. The demands turned anti-Soviet, and the crowd occupied Rustaveli Avenue in front of the House of Government.

First Secretary Jumber Patiashvili of the Georgian Communist Party feared the republican government would be overthrown. On 7 April, with Gorbachev in London, the Politburo chaired by Ligachev agreed to send army and MVD troops to Tbilisi. That same day, Defence Minister Yazov dispatched his deputy Konstantin Kochetov and Transcaucasus Military District commander Igor Rodionov to the Georgian capital. At a meeting of the Georgian Defence Council on the evening of 8 April, Kochetov pressed for immediate action: "Moscow does not fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation. The decision must be taken here on the scene." The Defence Council resolved to disperse the demonstrators, and at around 4 a.m. on 9 April, troops under Rodionov attacked the unarmed crowd with sapper shovels, truncheons and tear gas. Twenty-one people died, seventeen of them women; most deaths were from crowd crush and gas inhalation.

The shock that followed was as significant as the event itself. Gorbachev, who had returned from London late on 7 April, claimed he had no advance knowledge of the operation. Kramer's research shows this denial is plausible: the effective decision was taken by Yazov and Kochetov on the ground, not by the full Politburo. On his return Gorbachev blamed the military and condemned the bloodshed, a stance that helped spread what became known among officers as the "Tbilisi syndrome": a refusal to act without clear political backing from the top. In December 1989, the Sobchak commission reported to the Second Congress of People's Deputies, condemning the excessive military response and noting the absence of legal procedures for the use of armed force. But no one was punished. Tbilisi was the first large-scale military crackdown on a national movement, and it marked the watershed at which central authority began to drift, without principle, between negotiation and violence.

A State That Let a Pogrom Burn, Then Sent Tanks Against the Political Challenge

On 13 January 1990, tens of thousands filled Baku's Lenin Square to protest the Armenian SSR Supreme Soviet's vote to include Nagorno-Karabakh in its budget. The Azerbaijani Popular Front announced the formation of a National Defence Council and began organizing branches in factories and offices. Someone with a megaphone spread the unverified report that an Azerbaijani had been killed by Armenians, and the rumour acted as a fuse. Groups broke away from the rally and headed for Armenian neighbourhoods.

What followed over seven days was methodical terror. The attackers carried lists of Armenians with their addresses. Victims were thrown from high balconies, pushed into burning furniture, beaten to death in the street. Human Rights Watch confirmed 48 killed; Thomas de Waal estimates about 90. Five rapes, 2,044 apartment raids, and 191 robberies were reported. The Armenian Orthodox cathedral was burned to a shell while firefighters and police watched.

Baku had 12,000 USSR Interior Ministry troops stationed in the city, plus Soviet Army units and the Caspian Flotilla. They did nothing. Eyewitnesses told Helsinki Watch that they "approached militiamen on the street to report nearby attacks on Armenians, but the militiamen did nothing." Popular Front deputy chairman Etibar Mammadov himself saw two Armenians doused in petrol and set alight near the railway station, with 400–500 interior troops 200 metres away who "did not attempt to circle the area and dissolve the crowd."

On 15 January, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet declared a state of emergency in parts of Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Baku was omitted. The city where the pogrom was raging was excluded from the emergency decree. By this point the Popular Front, fearing Moscow's military intervention, had begun barricading access routes and barracks.

At 7:15 p.m. on 19 January, the power unit of the Baku television centre exploded. Broadcasting went dead. Independent investigators from the Shchit group and the Azerbaijani Supreme Soviet commission concluded that Soviet Army or KGB special forces had caused the blast. That same evening, Popular Front leaders met with Second Secretary Viktor Polyanichko. "The troops are coming," he told them. Mammadov offered to dismantle the barricades and make a televised appeal to calm the city; Polyanichko refused.

Around midnight, 26,000 Soviet troops with tanks, armoured vehicles, and naval vessels entered Baku. The operation was code-named "Udar" (Strike) and Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov commanded it personally. But the people of Baku, cut off from television and radio, had no idea what was happening. The state of emergency was not announced until 5:30 a.m., by army radio and leaflets dropped from helicopters: five and a half hours after the assault began.

The army attacked Baku as if it were an enemy position. Tanks crushed cars and ambulances alongside the barricades. Soldiers fired on fleeing people and on residents who stepped onto balconies. The Helsinki Watch/Memorial investigation concluded that "the violence used by the Soviet Army on the night of January 19–20 was so out of proportion to the resistance offered by Azerbaijanis as to constitute an exercise in collective punishment." Officially 131–137 were killed, more than 700 wounded. Many of the dead were passers-by with no connection to the barricades or protests.

Yazov initially cited the protection of Armenians as the reason for the military operation. But in an interview with Izvestia on 26 January he gave a different account: "We came to destroy the political structure of the Popular Front, to prevent their victory in the elections scheduled for March." Documents from the Baku military procurator's office obtained by Human Rights Watch indicate that the operation had been planned before the pogroms. Some Azerbaijani Interior Ministry officials had even supplied weapons and intelligence to the Popular Front activists.

Moreover, Moscow disregarded its own legal procedures. Article 119(14) of the USSR Constitution required consultation with the republic's Supreme Soviet Presidium, but Elmira Kafarova, chair of the Azerbaijani Presidium, broadcast her protest that the decree had been made without her knowledge. The next day the Azerbaijani Supreme Soviet convened an emergency session, suspended the state of emergency decree, and declared that if Moscow ignored this, the question of Azerbaijan's secession from the USSR would be raised.

On 22 January, nearly the entire population of Baku turned out for the funeral procession. Tens of thousands of Azerbaijani communists publicly burned their party cards. Heydar Aliyev held a press conference at Azerbaijan's permanent mission in Moscow, denouncing "this tragedy as a result of the great fault of the political leadership of the Soviet Union, namely Gorbachev and his dictatorial ambitions." The events in Baku destroyed what remained of the Soviet state's legitimacy in one republic. And they were a preview: when a similar pattern repeated in Vilnius one year later, the world press was watching.

From Declaration to Tanks: Ten Months of Stalemate and Bloodshed

When the Lithuanian Supreme Council voted 124-0 to restore independence on 11 March 1990, Moscow treated it not as secession but as a frontal violation of constitutional order. Gorbachev told the Congress of People's Deputies two days later that the declaration was void, and on 18 April the Kremlin imposed an economic blockade, cutting energy and raw-material supplies. Oil stopped flowing to the Mažeikiai refinery, gas deliveries fell by 84 percent, and fuel, medicines and foodstuffs joined the embargo list. Under Chairman Landsbergis, Lithuania did not rescind the declaration, and economic pressure, contrary to Moscow's calculation, did not produce political capitulation.

Two political miscalculations underlay the blockade's failure. First, it damaged not only Lithuania but also Kaliningrad and roughly 100 all-Union enterprises inside the republic. Second, it hardened Lithuanian resolve. On 26 April, 52-year-old Stanislovas Žemaitis set himself on fire outside the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in protest. Western governments, reluctant to endanger Gorbachev's reform course, remained passive, but the contagion was spreading: inside the RSFSR, Yeltsin was preparing his own sovereignty declaration.

On 29 June, the Lithuanian Supreme Council agreed to suspend the independence act for 100 days, and on 2 July the USSR lifted the blockade. Both sides sat down to negotiate, but Landsbergis held that 'independence itself is not a subject of negotiation,' while the Soviet side insisted talks could proceed only within the framework of restoring the constitution. The delegations were not agreed upon until October, and the first meeting, set for 30 November, collapsed when the Soviet side failed to appear. On 28 December, the Lithuanian parliament ended the moratorium.

As January 1991 opened, Moscow's approach changed fundamentally. Paratroopers from the Pskov Airborne Division and the KGB's Alpha Group were flown into Lithuania. On 8 January, Prime Minister Prunskienė met Gorbachev to seek a guarantee that no military action would be taken; he refused, and she resigned that day. Her fall removed the last negotiating voice from the Lithuanian leadership, leaving only Landsbergis's uncompromising line. Two days later, on 10 January, Gorbachev sent the Supreme Council an ultimatum demanding restoration of the Soviet constitution and revocation of the independence act.

On 11 January, Jermalavičius of the pro-Moscow Lithuanian Communist Party (CPSU platform) announced the creation of the 'National Salvation Committee of the Lithuanian SSR' and declared it the sole legitimate government. That same day, Soviet forces seized the National Defence Department building and the Press House. On 12 January, Deputy Defence Minister Achalov arrived in Vilnius and took command of all military operations. Tens of thousands of civilians gathered around the parliament and the television tower, building barricades.

At 1:50 a.m. on 13 January, tanks and armoured vehicles surrounded the TV tower and opened live fire on the crowd. Fourteen people died that night: most from gunshots, two crushed by tanks, one from a heart attack. Alpha Group officer Viktor Shatskikh also died from friendly fire. The broadcasting centre was seized, but a small studio in Kaunas immediately went on air, transmitting in multiple languages to tell the world what was happening. The parliament building was never taken.

Afterwards, Gorbachev, Yazov, and Pugo all asserted that no one in Moscow had ordered the use of force; Pugo claimed the demonstrators fired first. Amnesty International directly contradicted this, reporting that '13 peaceful, unarmed demonstrators were killed by Soviet troops.' In 2019, a Lithuanian court convicted 67 former Soviet officials and officers, including Yazov, of war crimes. Where the chain of command finally led has never been fully established.

Everyone Voted Yes, but Each Imagined a Different Country

On 24 December 1990, the Fourth Congress of People's Deputies resolved to hold a referendum on preserving the Union. For Gorbachev it was meant to be a popular mandate with which to pressure the republic leaderships. As the US Helsinki Commission (CSCE) noted at the time, it was "an attempt to use democratic methods to undermine the results of democracy."

By the time voters went to the polls on 17 March 1991, six republics had already distanced themselves. The three Baltic republics had each held their own referendums on independence in February and March, with 74 to 93 percent voting to leave. Georgia had scheduled its own independence vote for 31 March and Armenia for September. Moldova also refused. In these republics no central referendum commissions were formed; military units, individual local soviets and factory committees opened their own polling stations. Across the USSR, 148.57 million of 185.6 million registered voters turned out, and 113.51 million (76.4 percent) answered "yes." But what "yes" meant differed from republic to republic.

The question asked: "Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?" Critics said this was indistinguishable from asking "Do you want everything to be good?" People's Deputy Arkady Murashev recalled: "Nobody knew how, or whether, those rights and freedoms would be guaranteed."

What mattered more was that the republics rewrote the question to suit themselves. Kazakhstan replaced "federation of sovereign republics" with "Union of sovereign states." Russia held a parallel vote on creating the Russian presidency; 70 percent voted yes. Gavriil Popov, then chair of the Moscow city soviet, said later that "people believed the two processes could be made compatible," but the presidency vote produced the more durable result: in June Boris Yeltsin was elected president of Russia, creating a rival centre of power with greater democratic legitimacy than the Soviet president. Ukraine asked voters simultaneously whether they supported the Union and whether Ukraine should join a Union of Soviet sovereign states on the basis of its sovereignty declaration; 80.2 percent answered yes to both. One voter, one day, officially endorsing both the Union and Ukrainian sovereignty: a contradiction captured in the official statistics.

On 21 March the Supreme Soviet declared the result "final and binding across the entire territory of the USSR." But the text of the referendum law could not reach the six republics that had refused the vote. Instead the result made two contradictory readings possible at once. Gorbachev claimed a mandate to hold the Union together; Yeltsin and Kravchuk read their own republics' sovereignty as equally ratified. What the referendum confirmed was not a desire for the Union, but the fact that the word "Union" already meant something different to everyone who said it. A month later Gorbachev signed the "9+1 agreement" with nine republic leaders at Novo-Ogaryovo, but the absence of the six, exactly the ones that had refused the vote, demonstrated that the extent of any new union was itself the question in dispute.

The Federation Fell. The Ethno-Territorial Units, and the Unanswered Questions, Remained.

The crisis settled two things and left at least two unsettled.

What it settled was the Soviet Union as a state form. The question the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast soviet had posed in February 1988, can one ethno-territorial unit change the republic it belongs to, never got an answer from the Soviet system, and that absence of an answer became the precedent for every sovereignty claim from the Caucasus to the Baltics. But what was settled more fundamentally was not the ethno-territorial units themselves but rather the political frame of the federation that overlay them. When the USSR was dissolved in December 1991, what vanished was the central government and the party's centralized control, not the territorial subdivisions of republics, autonomous republics and autonomous oblasts. The fifteen republics became independent states under international law, and their borders followed precisely the administrative boundaries that the Soviet constitution had drawn. The ethno-territorial units that Soviet nationality policy had institutionalized over decades shed the shell of the federation and walked out as sovereign states.

The largest of the unsettled questions was the status of the smaller, nested units inside those ethno-territorial bodies. Nagorno-Karabakh remained an Armenian-populated autonomous oblast within the Azerbaijan SSR; Abkhazia and South Ossetia remained an autonomous republic and autonomous oblast within the Georgian SSR; Transnistria remained a problem inside the Moldovan SSR. All of these conflicts had already entered a violent phase during the 1988–1991 nationalities crisis, and the Soviet centre resolved none of them. After the federation disappeared, they continued as armed conflicts between the successor states. This inheritance, the so-called 'frozen conflicts', defined the security landscape of the Caucasus and Eastern Europe for more than thirty years after 1991. Nagorno-Karabakh endured until 2023, when an Azerbaijani military operation dissolved the self-declared republic at a stroke.

Two large questions remain unsettled among historians. The first is inevitability versus contingency. Mark Beissinger explained the process by which the seemingly impossible in 1987, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, became the seemingly inevitable by 1991 through the concept of 'thickened' history: the pace of events outstripped the movement of institutions and the understanding of leaders, and nationalist mobilization spread from republic to republic as a tidal wave, making collapse inevitable only through the process of protest itself. Against this, Vladislav Zubok argued in his 2021 book Collapse that the Soviet Union was not structurally doomed. He maintained that Gorbachev's specific policy failures, particularly the 1987 Law on Socialist Enterprises and the catastrophic handling of the New Union Treaty negotiations, brought the state down, and that other choices were available.

The second is the question of command responsibility. When the military moved at Tbilisi (1989), Baku (1990) and Vilnius (1991), how far up the political chain the orders reached was never established for any of the three episodes. The commission of the Congress of People's Deputies headed by Anatoly Sobchak concluded that the Tbilisi bloodshed resulted from unlawful orders but could not identify who gave them. This experience produced inside the military what contemporaries called 'Tbilisi Syndrome': an attitude, which spread among officers, that if no one would take political responsibility, then neither would they make operational decisions. The syndrome shaped the Baku and Vilnius operations and, ultimately, the refusal of units to suppress demonstrations during the August 1991 coup. Whether Gorbachev approved the Vilnius operation in advance has remained disputed for more than three decades. Lithuanian prosecutors sought to summon him as a witness; Russia refused.

The deepest mark left by these events lies at a point more fundamental than any institutional lesson. When a hegemon losing its grip oscillates between negotiation and force, what gets sacrificed first in that intermediate space is not force itself, but the political accountability that controls it.

What Was Settled, and What Still Has No Answer

One thing was definitively settled by this cascading crisis. The administrative borders of the fifteen Union republics became borders under international law, and the titular nations within them were reborn as the 'source nations' of independent states. The national-territorial units the USSR had spent seventy years constructing became the legitimate vessels of secession: the final working-out of what Rogers Brubaker called 'institutionalized ethnicity.'

But for the minorities who lived inside those borders, it meant the opposite. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Abkhaz, the South Ossetians, the Russian-speakers of Transnistria: they inherited the full weight of Soviet boundary-making, where one republic's majority was another republic's minority. After 1991, armed conflicts over the status of these 'internal minorities' erupted in four theatres. Only Nagorno-Karabakh was militarily closed, in 2023; the rest remain frozen conflicts to this day. The Soviet Union collapsed, but the ethno-territorial borders it had drawn did not. If anything, they hardened, now sheltered by international law.

The point on which historians still do not agree is this: was nationalism the cause of the Soviet collapse, or its consequence? Ronald Suny places the emphasis on the fact that the Soviet Union itself created its own nations. Korenizatsiya cultivated ethnic elites; the institutional shell of the republics was the ground on which secessionist movements stood once glasnost removed the lid. Mark Beissinger disagrees. His dataset of 6,663 protest demonstrations and 2,177 mass violent events tracked from 1987 to 1992 shows that there was no 'latent demand' for secession; national identity was itself produced inside the event cascade. Baltic successes triggered Caucasian mobilisation, and Caucasian failures reshaped the tactics of other republics. For Beissinger the collapse was the work not of a structural logic but of a 'tide of nationalism,' what he calls 'eventful history.' Valery Tishkov takes a still more radical view: nationalism was simply an instrument wielded by political elites in a struggle over the redistribution of power, and the Soviet Union would not have collapsed had the right bargains been struck.

The debate cannot be separated from the question of what the Soviet collapse itself was. For Stephen Kotkin, 1991 was the end not of an empire but of a regime, and the decisive actors were not street-level protesters but elite bureaucrats in Moscow. From this perspective, the nationalities crisis was not the 'terminal symptom of empire' but a political opportunity that flourished inside the vacuum left by elite abandonment of communism. Suny and Beissinger start from different premises, but both accept that the Soviet system did not suppress nations: it institutionalised them, and this institutional architecture was the structural condition of the crisis.

Thirty years on, two questions remain open. One is factual. Who gave the order to fire at Vilnius? Did the commanders in Baku fail to stop the pogrom on instruction, through incompetence, or by design? The relevant files are still closed in the Russian Presidential Archive. The other is interpretive. Was ethno-territorial federalism a structure that had collapse built into it, or did political choices after 1985 simply close off other paths? If Gorbachev had handled the Karabakh Soviet resolution differently in February 1988, or had proposed a new Union treaty earlier in the spring of 1990. This counterfactual can be neither proved nor disproved, but it stands behind every assessment of Soviet nationalities policy.

What Historians Still Dispute: The Chain of Command, Inevitability, and Nationalism

The facts of the four episodes have largely been established, but three large questions remain open among historians.

First, the chain of command. Who ordered the troops to fire? At Tbilisi, the Sobchak commission established that Transcaucasus Military District commander Igor Rodionov gave the operational order, but the trail stopped there. There is a record of Georgian Communist Party First Secretary Jumber Patiashvili requesting military intervention, but whether he intended live fire is unclear. At Baku, Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov and Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin were at the command post on the city's outskirts, yet where the order to shoot civilians originated was never specified. At Vilnius, Deputy Defence Minister Vladislav Achalov commanded on the ground and KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov's Alpha Group formed the operational core, but whether the chain reached Mikhail Gorbachev was never established. Ainius Lasas's 2007 study presented circumstantial evidence contradicting Gorbachev's claims of ignorance, but Russia's refusal to release records has blocked definitive proof. A Lithuanian court convicted 65 defendants of war crimes in 2019, but most were tried in absentia, and Gorbachev never gave testimony before his death in 2022.

Second, historians divide sharply over the causal weight of nationalism in the Soviet collapse. Ronald Grigor Suny, in The Revenge of the Past (1993), argues that the Soviet ethno-federal structure itself created the structural conditions for dissolution. Republics, autonomous areas, national languages and national bureaucracies had been institutionalised for decades, so when glasnost weakened party control, those units immediately became the base of sovereignty movements. Mark Beissinger, in Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (2002), counters that this structural account is insufficient. Nationalism, he argues, was not latent demand but a 'tide' generated by events themselves. After Sumgait in the Caucasus, after Tbilisi in the Baltics, national movements radicalised by watching each other's successes and the centre's failures, until separatism, unthinkable in 1987, seemed inevitable by 1991. Vladislav Zubok, in Collapse (2021), goes further: more decisive than nationalism or economics, he argues, were Gorbachev's personal choices. These three positions look at the same events and place the centre of gravity in different places.

Third, beneath all these arguments lies a larger question: was the Soviet collapse inevitable? The gap between those who locate the outcome of 1991 in the genetic code of the 1988 system (Suny, Martin Malia) and those who see it as a contingent path produced by the cascade of events across 1988–1991 (Beissinger, Zubok, Serhii Plokhy) remains unbridged. This gap is not merely academic. Today's territorial conflicts across the former Soviet space, from Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia to South Ossetia and Transnistria, all run along fault lines formed between 1988 and 1991, and in each dispute the logic of who was 'the original owner of the land' ultimately turns on how one characterises the nature of the Soviet collapse. The chain of command, the weight of causation, inevitability: these three questions are therefore not only problems of historiography but problems of ongoing politics.