Nationalism and the Collapse

of Soviet Communism

MARK R. BEISSINGER

Abstract
This article examines the role of nationalism in the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, arguing that nationalism (both in its presence and its absence, and in the various
conflicts and disorders that it unleashed) played an important role in structuring the way in which
communism collapsed. Two institutions of international and cultural control in particular
the Warsaw Pact and ethnofederalism played key roles in determining which communist
regimes failed and which survived. The article argues that the collapse of communism was not
a series of isolated, individual national stories of resistance but a set of interrelated streams of
activity in which action in one context profoundly affected action in other contexts part of a
larger tide of assertions of national sovereignty that swept through the Soviet empire during this
period.

That nationalism should be considered among the causes of the collapse of

communism is not a view shared by everyone. A number of works on the end
of communism in the Soviet Union have argued, for instance, that nationalism
played only a minor role in the process that the main events took place within
official institutions in Moscow and had relatively little to do with society, or that
nationalism was a marginal motivation or influence on the actions of those involved
in key decision-making. Failed institutions and ideologies, an economy in decline,
the burden of military competition with the United States and instrumental goals
of self-enrichment among the nomenklatura instead loom large in these accounts.1
In many narratives of the end of communism, nationalism is portrayed merely as a
consequence of communisms demise, as a phase after communism disintegrated
not as an autonomous or contributing force within the process of collapse itself.

237 Corwin Hall, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA;
mbeissin@Princeton.edu.
See, for instance, Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 19851991 (Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution, 1997); Steven Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet
Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted:
The Soviet Collapse, 19702000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
C 2009 Cambridge University Press
Contemporary European History, 18, 3 (2009), pp. 331347 
doi:10.1017/S0960777309005074 Printed in the United Kingdom

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Contemporary European History

Such a story, however, leaves a number of critical issues unaddressed. For one
thing, it completely ignores the critical mobilisational dimension of politics during
the 198792 period. Within the Soviet Union enormous mobilisations involving
millions of people occurred during these years, with nationalist demands being
the most prominent among the banners under which people mobilised. Indeed,
in the Soviet case regime change and the break-up of the Soviet state were not
entirely separable phases in the unfolding events that brought about the end of
communism, but were rather more overlapping and interrelated than many analyses
portray them to be. In 1988 and 1989 institutional opening politicised nationalism
across multiple contexts in the Soviet Union. These conflicts in turn magnified
divisions within the Communist Party over how to deal with them, encouraged the
spread of contention to other groups, created enormous disorder within institutions
and eventually led to the splintering of the Soviet state into national pieces. This
was an outcome that seemed utterly unimaginable to the vast majority of Soviet
citizens (and even most Soviet dissidents) when glasnost began in late 1986. It was
the unintended result of Mikhail Gorbachevs policies one that was made possible
not just by the widening political space that glasnost afforded, but also by the social
forces that moved into that space and utilised it to reconfigure regime and state.
Agency and contingency, not just structural determination, were important elements
of communisms demise. Moreover, where nationalist mobilisation was weak (as in
Central Asia), communist elites survived the end of the Soviet Union, even while
the Soviet state collapsed around them. Indeed, to say that communism ended in
these cases begs the question, in what respects? None of the post-Soviet states were
entirely new. They were all fragments of pre-independence state authority, and the
extent to which governing elites and bureaucracies were reconfigured in the postcommunist period ultimately depended on the degree to which they were challenged
from below by society during the glasnost period, principally through nationalist
mobilisation.2
But the argument that nationalism was marginal to communisms demise also
provides an inadequate answer to the question of why some communist regimes
(China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Cuba) survived the 198792
period. Many of these communist regimes also experienced ideological crises and
failed economies, were moving decisively toward market reform or were facing the
threat of increased military competition with the United States in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. Their economies were just as irrational, their governments just as
repressive and their bureaucracies just as corrupt as those European and Eurasian
communist regimes that failed. Yet Asian and Latin American communist regimes
survived while European and Eurasian communist regimes did not. Of course,
the chief reason why Asian and Latin American communist regimes survived is
that they never initiated the kind of political liberalisation undertaken inside the
Soviet Union, unleashing political forces that eventually overwhelmed the state.
2

Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse, The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the
Communist Collapse, World Politics 59, 1 (October 2006), 83115.

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

333

But another important difference has been the ability of Asian and Latin American
communist regimes to harness the nationalism of dominant national groups as a core
legitimating force, enabling these communist regimes to stigmatise foreign influences,
to marginalise more easily the oppositional challenges they have confronted and to
maintain their legitimacy within key sectors of society.3
By contrast, within European and Eurasian communist regimes in the late 1980s
nationalism largely failed as a legitimating force for communist regimes and served
instead as a major source for delegitimation and opposition.4 Whereas Russian
nationalism was long considered the linchpin of Soviet power, sustaining the Soviet
regime since the 1930s and mobilising critical support within Soviet society for
Soviet political domination throughout eastern Europe and Eurasia,5 for the most
part Russian nationalism failed to come to the defence of either communism or
the Soviet empire in the late 1980s. Instead, many Russians joined in the attacks,
ironically coming to identify themselves as victims of Soviet imperial domination
and declaring Russian sovereignty vis-`a-vis the Soviet government. In this sense,
Soviet communism was brought down in part by what Roman Szporluk perceptively
termed the de-Sovietisation of Russia6 that is, the growing dissociation of Russians
and of Russian national identity from a state with which they had been routinely
identified in the past.
But it was not only the weakening Russian identification with the Soviet state
and its imperial project that facilitated communisms collapse. The struggle against
what were widely viewed as repressive alien regimes imposed from without by Soviet
power was also a central animus underlying the events of 198991, both within
the Soviet Union and among its east European satellites. Communism in Europe
and Eurasia was more than just tyrannical rule, an idiotic economic system and a
ritualised ideology. It was also an international and multinational hierarchy of such
polities established and managed by Moscow an interrelated structure of control that
replicated patterns of politics, economics and social organisation across geopolitical
space. Within Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, calls for popular sovereignty could
not easily be disentangled from those for independence from Muscovite tutelage,
3

5
6

See Martin K. Dimitrov, Why Communism Didnt Collapse: Exploring Regime Resilience in China,
Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba, paper presented at a conference on Why Communism
Didnt Collapse: Understanding Regime Resilience in China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and
Cuba, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 2526 May 2007.
The major exception was Yugoslavia. Minority nationalisms obviously played a major delegitimating
role in the collapse of Yugoslav communism and in the unmaking of the Yugoslav state. But Serbian
commitment to maintaining Yugoslavias territorial integrity and to Serbian communists who peddled
such an undertaking remained considerably stronger than the commitment of Russians to maintaining
the territorial integrity of the USSR, accounting for the outbreak of ethnic civil war in Yugoslavia
persistence of communist control in Serbia (in the guise of the Socialist Party) over the decade of the
1990s. See Veljko Vujacic, Historical Legacies, Nationalist Mobilization, and Political Outcomes in
Russia and Serbia: A Weberian View, Theory and Society 25, 6 (December 1996), 763801.
David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian
National Identity, 19311956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
See, in particular, Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Break-up of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA:
Hoover Institution Press, 2000).

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since these regimes had largely been imposed and maintained through intervention
and externally imposed controls. Thus behind the desire in 1989 for freedom stood
the desire for national sovereignty. In this sense, 1989 in eastern Europe was not merely
a series of revolts against communism as a repressive political and social system; it was
also a series of national revolts against Soviet domination, and as such closely related
to the same revolt that, by autumn 1989, had already become widespread within
Soviet society itself.
Precisely because nationalism was an underlying factor in the demise of
communism, the process of collapse largely spread along the two institutional forms
that were used to structure multinational and international control: ethnofederalism
and the Warsaw Pact. Both of these institutions utilised faux forms of sovereignty
to mask centralised control, so that the collapse of communism revolved in
significant part around making genuine the bogus sovereignties of communist-style
ethnofederalism and the Warsaw Pact. With the exception of Albania (explicable as
a simple case of regional spillover effects, and in fact the last of the east European
communist regimes to collapse), the other nine communist regimes that collapsed
in the late 1980s and early 1990s were either members of the Warsaw Pact, were
under the strong political domination of the USSR (Mongolia) or like the USSR
were ethnofederal states (Yugoslavia). By contrast, the six Asian and Latin American
communist regimes that survived stood outside the system of Soviet institutional
control, had established themselves independently from Soviet power and did not
employ ethnofederalism as an institutional form for mediating relations with their
own internal minorities.
In what follows I develop three arguments related to the role of nationalism in
the collapse of communism.7 First, nationalism (both in its presence, in its absence
and in the various conflicts and disorders it unleashed) played an important role
in structuring the way in which the collapse of communism unfolded. Of course,
to argue that nationalism was an important factor in structuring the collapse of
communism should not be interpreted as saying that nationalism caused the collapse
of communism. History involves complex causation, and we would be fools to
constrain a series of events as complex as the collapse of communism within the
confines of any single causal factor. But, as we shall see, we would also be foolish
to ignore the national dimension to communisms demise, not only because it was
central to the dynamic by which this demise materialised, but also because we would
seriously misunderstand post-communist politics and societies without elucidating
its national dimension. Second, nationalist mobilisation during this period was not
a series of individual nationalist stories. Rather, it was a set of interrelated streams
of activity in which action in one context exercised a profound effect on action
in other contexts what I have called the tidal context of nationalism. Indeed,
neither the Soviet state nor east European communism would likely have collapsed
7

These arguments are drawn from or are elaborations on my own work on the Soviet collapse. See
Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilisation and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

335

had these nationalist revolts occurred in isolation from one another, so that these
interconnections were critical to the production of the collapse itself. Third, while
clearly structured, acts of nationalist mobilisation did not simply reflect a pre-existing
logic of institutions, structures and identities. Rather, acts of mobilisation also played
independent roles in transforming institutions, structures and identities, so that while
the collapse of communism is often portrayed as a structurally overdetermined drama8
(some would even say that communisms collapse was predetermined from its very
establishment), its manifestation depended on myriad acts of defiance and contention
whose outcomes themselves were hardly predetermined.
Nationalisms extraordinary appeal under glasnost

Gorbachevs policy of glasnost and the political liberalisation that it produced were
obviously the critical institutional conditions that allowed the collapse of communism
to occur. Without glasnost, the forces that most directly brought about the collapse
could never have materialised or been able to act. But despite the absolute importance
of the Gorbachev factor and the broader factors that led Gorbachev to choose this
path, we should also remember that the collapse of communism was in fact the
unintended result of Gorbachevs policies, not its conscious goal, and that the collapse
occurred precisely because other social forces moved into the widening political space
that glasnost afforded. Gorbachev sought to reform communism both domestically
and internationally, not to dismantle it. As Gorbachev recalled about the early years
of perestroika, We talked not about revolution, but about improving the system. Then
we believed in such a possibility.9 Gorbachevs disavowal of the Brezhnev doctrine
in late 1988 similarly was not aimed at dismantling socialism in eastern Europe or
undoing the division of Germany, but rather at remaking Soviet relations with its
allies while undoing the cold war division of Europe. Of course, there was a great
deal about Gorbachev that was naive. But communism collapsed not only because
of Gorbachevs policies, but also because social forces (in some places but not others)
utilised the opportunities that Gorbachevs policies produced in order to mobilise
oppositions, transform institutions and identities, and appropriate power.
There is an unfortunate tendency in the literature on the collapse of communism
to draw a sharp line between events within the Soviet Union and those in eastern
Europe. Scholars of the Soviet collapse tend not to speak about a single annus
mirabilis,10 but of a five-year intense and protracted period in which new revelations
filled the newspapers every day, a dizzying array of institutional changes were enacted
and dozens (at times hundreds) of protests were mounted daily many of them
spectacular events. From this perspective, the east European revolutions were but one
set of episodes (though a very critical set) in the events that constituted communisms
8

9
10

For a critique of the heavy determinism in the literature on the breakdown of communism, see Stathis
N. Kalyvas, The Decay and Breakdown of Communist One-Party Systems, Annual Review of Political
Science, 2 (1999), 32343.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn i reformy, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 203 (emphasis in original).
Michael Howard, The Springtime of Nations, Foreign Affairs, 69, 1 (1990), 1732.

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Contemporary European History

collapse. An accurate understanding of the collapse of communism needs to view its

Soviet and east European dimensions as interrelated rather than separate processes.
What stood beneath this interrelationship was the ability of oppositions to draw
analogies across a wide expanse of political and cultural space, due to subjection
to common modes of domination and a shared sense of alien rule. It is here that
nationalism played a critical role in providing a frame through which analogies across
cultural and political boundaries were drawn.
The issues that effectively mobilised populations within the Soviet Union
during these years revolved precisely around nationalism. To be sure, issues
of democratisation, labour unrest and consumer shortages, and environmental
justice constituted autonomous vectors of mobilisation, at times intersecting with
nationalism and at times diverging from it. But as my own study of thousands of protest
demonstrations throughout the Soviet Union during the glasnost period showed,
nationalism gained a particular force and appeal not enjoyed by these other streams
of contention. For example, not only were demonstrations that voiced nationalist
demands but not democratising demands almost three times more frequent than those
that voiced democratising demands but not nationalist demands, but demonstrations
that voiced nationalist demands and did not raise democratising demands mobilised
ten times more participants than those voicing democratising demands but not raising
nationalist demands. The patterns are quite striking. Moreover, demonstrations that
combined both democratising and nationalist demands mobilised five times more
participants than those voicing democratising demands but not raising nationalist
demands. In other words, the strongest pressures from society for democratisation
came precisely from those movements that also pulled on nationalist tropes, and
without nationalism to underpin them demands for liberalisation on their own had
relatively weak resonance within Soviet society. A similar but even more pronounced
difference occurred between mobilisation over nationalist demands and mobilisation
over economic demands in spite of the enormous decline in living standards that
occurred during this period.11 In short, nationalism exercised an unusual force of
attraction within the Soviet society during these years that was unparalleled by any
other set of issues.
The deeper causes for this were rooted in Soviet history and in the institutional
crisis of the Soviet state. Significant grievances revolving around the brutality of
the Stalinist past and the struggle for historical truth played prominent roles in
motivating nationalist mobilisation during glasnost. The Brezhnev era, lasting from
the accession of Leonid Brezhnev to the post of general secretary of the Communist
Party in October 1964 until Gorbachevs selection as general secretary in March
1985, bred a sclerotic political system, a declining economy, widespread corruption,
and a deepening malaise and cynicism within society all of which contributed
to a growing identification of the Soviet ruling elite as an alien other, even among
many ordinary Russians. The Soviet state and communist regime were closely fused,
since the multinational state had been founded by the communist regime, and the
11

Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 759.

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

337

regime sought to legitimate itself primarily as an internationalist revolution. Yet

beneath the veneer of formal equality the reality of Russian dominance persisted,
reinforced in particular during Stalins rule, when a once multi-ethnic political elite
tipped towards disproportionate Russian representation, and a discourse of cultural
and political stratification came to be embraced. As a result of the fusion of state
and regime, any political opening that led to challenges against the regime was also
bound to politicise issues of stateness,12 particularly for groups like the Balts, who had
been incorporated forcefully into the USSR as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact of 1939. And because the state had been the creation of the regime, widespread
separatist challenges also necessarily assumed the form of anti-regime activity and were
unambiguous challenges to communist rule. Thus, regime change and the break-up
of the Soviet state were not easily separable phases in the demise of communism, but
were interrelated and partially concurrent phenomena.
As number of scholars have pointed out, many of the everyday institutional
practices of the Soviet state in the nationalities sphere (the ethnofederal system,
the primordialised passport system of ethnic identification and its use as a source
of discrimination in everyday life, the promotion of minority cultures within the
framework of the socialist state, and official personnel policies that promoted cadres in
part on the basis of nationality) also reinforced ethnicity over other (specifically, class)
modes of identity.13 Class identities had, of course, provided the initial underpinning
for communist ideology. But as modernisation and upward mobility proceeded, the
class basis of communism receded and the ethnic dimension of everyday life grew
more prominent.
Still, until glasnost, secessionist sentiments remained very much on the margins of
Soviet society even in regions like the Baltic, where Soviet rule had come to be
seen as an unalterable fact of life and a permanent state of affairs.14 When glasnost
first began in late 1986 and early 1987, it contained no strong nationalist component,
and as an Estonian sociologist later observed, neither its chief architects nor the
broad public were prepared for the possible rise of national movements.15 Glasnost
initially manifested itself almost entirely in the operation of official institutions
in the press, movie theatres and government offices. But already by spring 1987
glasnost began to escape official control, as small groups of hippies, Crimean Tatars,
ecologists, Jewish refuseniks, Russian nationalists and Baltic dissidents tested the
boundaries of the permissible by taking politics to the street, engaging in small-scale
demonstrations. The new atmosphere of press freedom, growing factionalism within

12
13

14
15

Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Philip G. Roeder, Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993); Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Rogers Brubaker, Nationhood and the
National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account, Theory
and Society, 23 (1994), 4778.
Andrejs Plakans, The Latvians: A Short History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 162.
K. S. Hallik, quoted in Pravda, 7 June 1989, 2.

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the Politburo and toleration of small-scale protest encouraged deeper politicisation. In

the early years of glasnost nationalist mobilisation followed closely upon the heels of
institutional reform, with key periods of institutional reform precipitating thickenings
of nationalist activity: the October 1987 Central Committee Plenum; the Nineteenth
Party Conference in June 1988; the March 1989 elections; and meetings of the First
Congress of Peoples Deputies in July 1989. But by spring and summer 1989, largescale nationalist demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of participants had
spread across multiple republics and had become a relatively frequent affair. By this
time the effect of institutional constraints on nationalist action had largely faded, and
nationalist mobilisation had increasingly become its own autonomous progenitor of
events, influencing the character of political institutions instead of being contained
by them.
Just how rapidly this transformation occurred is one of the astounding features
of the collapse of communism. It was not until February 1988 over a year after
the initiation of glasnost that the first major eruptions of nationalism occurred
in the Soviet Union: the massive Armenian protests over Karabakh, involving up
to a million people in Yerevan alone. Over the following nineteen months from
February 1988 to August 1989 the USSR experienced a veritable explosion of
nationalist mobilisation in the Baltic, the Transcaucasus, Ukraine and Moldova. By the
end of 1988 and the beginning of 1989, the coherence of Soviet control over its own
territory had been compromised by the rise to dominance of nationalist movements
within the Baltic republics and the veritable loss of control by the Soviet state over
events in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The massive mobilisations in Tbilisi in April 1989
that incited violent suppression by the Soviet army and the political backlash that this
evoked not only had undermined completely communist control in that republic,
but also convinced many throughout the Soviet Union and in the Soviet government
itself to question the utility of the deployment of the army as a means for containing
nationalist revolt. By summer 1989 the tide of nationalist contention spread to the
point that the Soviet regime appeared highly unstable. Enormous demonstrations
(involving hundreds of thousands of people, and sometimes up to a million) racked
all the republics of the Baltic and Transcaucasus at the time, spreading as well to
Western Ukraine and Moldova. During summer 1989, multiple violent inter-ethnic
conflicts also broke out across the southern tier of the USSR: between Uzbeks
and Meskhetian Turks, Kazakhs and Lezgins, Abkhaz and Georgians, Armenians
and Azerbaijanis, and Kyrgyz and Tajiks. Massive miner strikes in eastern Ukraine,
western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan though non-national in character
reflected the spread of large-scale protest to the Russian community, as well as the
growing disaffection of Russians from the Soviet state.
This mounting domestic incoherence and instability of the Soviet state was an
important part of the political opportunity structure that presented itself to east
Europeans in autumn 1989. If Balts could get away with declaring sovereignty visa` -vis the Soviet state at the end of 1988 and early 1989, and up to a million of
them could hold hands across the Baltic in August 1989 in favour of independence
from the USSR, why should Poles and Czechs not be expected to press their own
claims for popular sovereignty against their repressive, Kremlin-controlled regimes?

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

339

Why should Russians be afforded a greater degree of press freedom than Bulgarians
or East Germans (particularly when Soviet newspapers were readily available for
purchase throughout eastern Europe)? And if the Soviet state could not contain mass
revolts within its own borders, why should its client states in eastern Europe be
expected to contain them, even if they had been able to rely on Soviet help (which
Gorbachev had privately indicated would not be forthcoming)? Until early 1989
the pace of political change inside the Soviet Union outstripped the pace of change
within the Soviet Unions Eastern Bloc allies, so that the example of political change
within the Soviet Union emboldened political reformers throughout the communist
world (and not only in eastern Europe, as the Chinese example illustrates). By
early 1989 reform efforts were already under way in Poland and Hungary, leading
to free elections in Poland in June 1989 and to the opening of borders and the
transition to political pluralism in Hungary. This in turn led to a dizzying threemonth cascade of events in late 1989: massive demonstrations in East Germany,
the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, unrest and the
removal of Zhivkov in Bulgaria, and the violent overthrow of the Ceausescu regime in
Romania.
In turn, the collapse of communism in eastern Europe enormously accelerated and
radicalised processes of nationalist revolt within the Soviet Union itself, leading to a
sense that a momentum had built up against the Soviet state that could no longer be
contained. The Ukrainian nationalist movement Rukh, for instance, actively utilised
the east European example to mobilise support for its cause. The peoples of Poland,
Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia have said no to communist dictatorship,
its banners at a demonstration read. The next word is ours, citizens!16 The first half
of 1990 saw a sharp rise in the number of groups pressing separatist demands inside
the Soviet Union, spurred on in particular by republican elections, which brought to
power nationalist movements in many republics and led to a bifurcation of authority
(dvoevlastie) and increasingly bitter disputes over sovereignty. It was at this time as
well that Gorbachevs popularity plummeted among Russians and nomenklatura
elites began to defect from the centre in significant numbers, reinventing themselves
as nationalists in anticipation that Soviet power would not last much longer. The
classic example was Leonid Kravchuk. A party propagandist who once had been an
implacable enemy of Rukh, Kravchuk came, in the course of 1990, to embrace the
cause of Ukrainian sovereignty and independence. That once loyal nomenklatura like
Kravchuk could reconfigure themselves as father of their respective nations was not
a plausible outcome outside these cross-case influences, for there would be no reason
why, in isolation from what had occurred elsewhere, these elites would have ever
considered defection.
The transnationalism of nationalism

Thus nationalist mobilisation during the collapse of communism was not a collection
of separate stories, but a series of interrelated streams of activity in which action
16

Ekspress khronika, no. 51, 17 December 1989, 1.

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Contemporary European History

in one context exercised a profound effect on action in other contexts what I

have called elsewhere a tide of nationalism. This tidal dimension is often lost in
the literature on the collapse that focuses on a single country or on national cases.
The interconnectedness produced by common targets of mobilisation, common
institutional characteristics, common ideologies and common modes of domination
meant that oppositions also perceived a linkage of political opportunities, feeding
the spread of contention across cultural and political boundaries. The upsurge of
mobilisation across multiple contexts was produced not by a single shock, but rather
by the way in which agents forged connections with the challenging actions of others
through analogy and emulation. Institutional arrangements like ethnofederalism
or the Warsaw Pact became lightning rods for the lateral spread of contention,
because they connected populations in analogous ways. When such analogies
cohered, the example of successful contention in one context weakened political
order in other contexts by raising expectations among challengers that authority could
be successfully challenged. Challengers looked towards each other for inspiration
and ideas, widely borrowing tactics, frames and even programmes from those who
demonstrated prior successes. Nationalism is often portrayed as parochial and inwardlooking, lacking empathy and incapable of identifying with others. But the collapse
of communism illustrates the limits of such stereotypes. Most nationalist movements
are actually transnational in orientation, forced by strategic circumstances to conceive
of their fates as intertwined with others.
But the transnational spread of nationalist mobilisation was more than just a matter
of analogy and emulation. Those movements that gained early success also consciously
sought to spread their contention laterally so as to increase overall chances of
consolidating their victories by gaining allies and by further disrupting the coherence
of the state they wished to undermine. After the Nineteenth Party Conference in June
1988, attempts to challenge the Soviet regime proliferated with great rapidity, diffusing
across multiple groups. At this very time challenging groups engaged in a widespread
sharing of information, pamphlets, expertise, modes of challenge and mobilisational
frames. By June 1988 representatives of Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian, Latvian,
Lithuanian and Estonian dissident nationalist movements had initiated contact with
one another and established a coordinating committee among themselves. Indeed,
in summer and autumn 1988 popular fronts created along the lines of the Baltic
model sprang up throughout most of the Soviet Union. Representatives of these
groups met frequently, shared documents and ideas, and occasionally aided each
other by providing material support or organising demonstrations in solidarity with
each others demands. The tide of nationalism thus assumed concrete form during the
collapse of communism in the ways in which nationalist paradigms were consciously
exported and borrowed, organisational resources were shared and challenging groups
sought inspiration from one another.
Arguably the most important mobilisational frame to emerge within the Soviet
Union during the glasnost era was the anti-imperial sovereignty frame that played
such an important role in the ultimate demise of the Soviet state. In its final years
of existence the imperial persona implicit within the Soviet state came to be openly

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

341

affirmed, as nations claimed sovereignty up to and including their place on the political
map of the world. This anti-imperial sovereignty frame first gained mass resonance in
the Baltic in summer 1988 and subsequently spread massively to Georgia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine and, eventually, to Russia itself. When Boris Yeltsin
embraced Russian sovereignty vis-`a-vis the USSR in June 1990, he was borrowing
from the tide of nationalism that had already swept across much of the USSR (Or,
as one Politburo member put it, To make Russia sovereign is the golden daydream
of the Balts.)17 So successful was the spread of this sovereignty frame that over the
course of 1990 every Soviet republic (as well as autonomous republics and even
one island in the Far East) issued their own declaration of sovereignty vis-`a-vis the
Soviet government in what came to be known as the parade of sovereignties. The
diffusion of this anti-imperial sovereignty frame beyond the Baltic was partly an
attempt to capitalise on the prior success of others a process of emulation typical of
modular phenomena like nationalism. But it was more than this. Baltic popular fronts
consciously attempted to reproduce themselves throughout the Soviet Union, out of
both philosophical and strategic considerations. They vigorously organised to extend
their influence throughout the Soviet Union for aiding the spread of the master frame
they themselves had pioneered. A conscious strategy of spreading secessionist revolt
laterally was pursued, both as an effort to consolidate secessionist movements through
the power of numbers and to weaken the regime by undermining its ability to defuse
nationalist challenges.18
It is unlikely that the Soviet state or east European communism would have ever
collapsed had these revolts occurred in isolation from one another. Certainly, had
the Balts engaged in their struggle alone, there is little doubt that they would easily
have been repressed. By contrast, the fact that claims of sovereignty against the centre
had spread broadly throughout the fabric of Soviet society made rebellion difficult to
contain. Part of the dilemma that had confronted opponents of Soviet communism
throughout its history was that past east European revolts against Soviet control had
exerted only limited influence inside the Soviet Union19 and had been repeatedly cut
short by Soviet intervention and pressure. In 1989, however, extensive revolt inside
the Soviet Union was occurring at the same time as east Europeans pressed for their
own freedom, so that the Kremlin for the first time faced a situation of multiple,
simultaneous revolts both within and outside the country. The modular spread of
revolt across the Soviet Union and eastern Europe represented an unusual period
of heightened contention that transcended cultural and international borders and in
which challenges to the state multiplied and fed off one another, overwhelming the
capacity of the state to contain them and evoking large-scale tectonic change in the
character of the state system.

17
18
19

Vadim Medvedev, quoted in Soiuz mozhno bylo sokhranit (Moscow: Aprel-85, 1995), 64.
Nils R. Muiznieks, The Influence of the Baltic Popular Movements on the Process of Soviet
Disintegration, Europe-Asia Studies, 47, 1 (1995), 325.
See Roman Szporluk, ed., The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR (New York:
Praeger, 1975).

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The weakness of Russian defence of the Soviet state

Nationalism was conspicuous in the collapse of communism not only by its presence,
but also by its absence. By all measures of conventional wisdom, Russians should
have been expected to come to the defence of Soviet communism and the Soviet
empire. Soviet communism was widely viewed as Russian communism, and Leninist
ideology was said to have resonated powerfully with embedded elements of Russian
political culture.20 Indeed, one of the reasons why earlier waves of revolt against Soviet
control had failed was precisely the way in which Russians had come to the defence
of the realm. Yet, in the late 1980s, at a time when the Soviet state liberalised and
Russian dominance was under attack, this did not happen. Instead, large numbers
of Russians protested against the Soviet state and acquiesced in its forfeiture of
empire.
How does one explain the weakness of Russian imperial nationalism in the
context of glasnost? To be sure, glasnost itself is to a large extent responsible, for
its constant revelations of Soviet abuses and atrocities drove a wedge between many
ordinary Russians and the Soviet state. But part of the explanation is also to be
found in the multiple political roles that Russians could and did assume during
these years. Russians were the dominant nationality of the Soviet Union and had
the most to lose from attempts to undermine the Soviet empire. But Russians also
constituted a disproportionate share of the Soviet intelligentsia and working class
relative to most other nationalities.21 The former were strongly attracted to ideas of
liberalisation, while the latter (due to their vulnerable position at a time of growing
economic shortage and insecurity) were most likely to protest against the regimes
economic policies. This split structural position in relation to the changes introduced
by perestroika in fact led to a trifurcation of Russian mobilisation into nationalistconservative, liberal and labour-economic streams, each of which comprehended its
relationship to the Soviet state in different terms.
In this respect Russian mobilisation differed substantially from that of other groups
in the USSR, for it was unusually divided. Not only was there a plethora of Russian
movements by 198889, but these movements stood for quite distinct, and in some
instances opposing, frames. Rather than generating a nationalist backlash among
Russians, as many observers had expected, the tide of nationalism instead drove a
wedge more deeply between Russians, politicising and polarising cleavages among
them. Russian liberals eventually forged an alliance with non-Russian separatists
against the Soviet regime, borrowing their sovereignty and anti-colonial frames. They
did not define themselves as nationalists. They saw themselves as struggling primarily
against the communist regime, not for the nation. Yet in the first half of 1990 they
adopted many of the tropes of national liberation then extant elsewhere in the USSR,
coming to advocate a brand of liberal nationalism in which Russian sovereignty
20
21

Nikolai Berdyaev, The Origins of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
1960).
Darrell Slider, A Note on the Class Structure of Soviet Nationalities, Soviet Studies, 37, 4 (October
1985), pp. 535540.

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

343

and self-determination were seen as necessary parts of the democratisation process.

In 1990 and 1991 this defence of Russian sovereignty against an overbearing and
imperial all-union government became the dominant theme of Russian mobilisation.
Similarly, as the economy deteriorated and the Soviet state disintegrated, labour
activism radicalised, coming in many cases to embrace the dismantlement of central
planning and the sovereignty paradigm.
Conservative-nationalists, by contrast, remained highly divided. Some distanced
themselves from the communist regime; indeed, demands for Russian sovereignty
initially emerged not from liberals, but from Russian nationalists, who, seeking
to counter the Russophobia prevalent at the time, noted that Russians also
had been discriminated against and victimised by communism. Others embraced
a conservative communism that emphasised the defence of the party and the
state. But nationalist-conservatives failed to find a mass base for themselves within
Russia. Their attempts to court the coalminers of Ukraine, Siberia and northern
Kazakhstan also came to nought. Their support proved to be greatest within the
Russian-speaking communities of the Baltic and Moldova, but even here much of
their capacity to mobilise opposition to nationalist movements weakened in 1990
and 1991, as the break-up of the Soviet state grew imminent. In short, Russian
nationalism fizzled out as a force for defending the Soviet empire because glasnost
significantly undermined Russian support for the communist regime, Russians
were deeply divided politically and Russians increasingly embraced the sovereignty
paradigm championed by nationalist oppositions under the influence of the tide of
nationalism.
Structure and agency within thickened history

While the events in eastern Europe in 1989 are widely referred to as revolutions,
with the exception of the Baltic states it is not fashionable today to talk about the
collapse of the Soviet Union in these same terms. After all, in some Soviet republics
political power ultimately remained in the hands of communist officials, while in other
republics nationalist revolts descended into intra-ethnic violence and even civil war.
But the disintegration of the Soviet Union unambiguously deserves to be understood
as revolutionary. It easily falls within Tillys minimalist, processual understanding of
revolution (a situation of dual sovereignty in which non-ruling contenders mobilise
large numbers of citizens for the purpose of gaining control over the state).22 Even if
we assume a more robust, outcome-oriented definition such as that used by Skocpol
(the rapid transformation of a countrys state and class structures and its dominant
ideology),23 there is little doubt that the collapse of communism was revolutionary. In
most (though not all) Soviet republics, property relations were totally reconfigured in
the wake of communisms collapse, longstanding social institutions were dismantled,

22
23

Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 14921992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
(Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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new ideologies and new classes came to the fore and new forms of social behaviour
sprang into existence.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union was accompanied by immense
transformations in political discourse and in public perceptions of politics. A
population that could barely imagine the break-up of their country came, within
a compressed period of time, to view its disintegration as inevitable. The record of
public opinion polling during these years demonstrates massive transformations in
attitudes toward the Soviet state even for groups like the Balts, among whom the
notion of independence, once considered the pipe-dream of dissidents, came to be
almost unanimously embraced under the shifting boundaries of the possible. In the
case of the Ukrainians the transformation in attitudes under the influence of external
events was stark to the point that 90 per cent of the Ukrainian population voted
in December 1991 for independent statehood in a national referendum. As Bohdan
Nahaylo described it,
What appears to have happened is that swiftly and almost imperceptibly . . . a revolution occurred
in the minds of Ukraines inhabitants. Somehow, during a remarkably short period, the idea of
Ukrainian independence, for so long depicted in the Soviet press as the hopeless cause of diehard
nationalists in Western Ukraine, took hold throughout the republic.24

Even large numbers of Russians, under the influence of events elsewhere, by

December 1991 came to support the dissolution of the USSR, as public opinion polls
at the time showed (although nostalgia for the USSR quickly developed thereafter).25
This enormous transformation in outlooks was of course facilitated by specific
structural conditions: the institutional and ideological crisis of the Soviet state, the
fusion between state and regime, the submerged sense of ethnic grievance across
multiple groups and the Soviet states overreach abroad. Moreover, patterns of
nationalist mobilisation broadly reflected such factors as the degree of urbanisation of a
nationality, the size of an ethnic group, its ethnofederal status and the degree to which
it had been assimilated to the dominant Russian culture. But the specific events that
transformed institutions and brought movements to power also contained a heavy dose
of contingency, and their outcomes were hardly predetermined. Repression could
have easily shut down challengers in 1988 and early 1989. At other moments the
backlash effects of repression, the outrage that erupted from intergroup violence and
the anger that materialised out of callous government responses to popular demands
played an important role in transforming the opinion climate of politics and affecting
the prisms through which individuals related to the state and to others. Indeed, those
who organised challenges often sought to provoke responses from states or other
groups that heightened a sense of conflict and identity, so as to drive the engine
of history more quickly, while other movements sought to ride the momentum
24
25

Bohdan Nahaylo, The Birth of an Independent Ukraine, Report on the USSR, 3, 50 (13 December
1991), 12.
See Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997),
166.

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

345

generated from the successful prior actions of others. In short, the agency of ordinary
people needs to be placed squarely in the centre of any accurate understanding of
communisms collapse.
As E. H. Carr noted, in real life there is no contradiction between the influence of
structure and the role of agency, because structure exercises its effects not by rendering
outcomes inevitable, but rather by making action possible, more probable and more
likely to meet with success.26 But it is also true that, as actions accumulate, they can
also exercise a structure-like effect, as having the capacity to render subsequent action
possible, more probable and more likely to meet with success. Rather than simply
being a manifestation of structurally predetermined conditions, the collapse of Soviet
communism materialised over a five-year period of what I have called thickened
history in which events acquired a sense of momentum, transformed identities
and political institutions and increasingly assumed the characteristics of their own
causal structure. As one Soviet journalist put it in autumn 1989, We are living in
an extremely condensed historical period. Social processes which earlier required
decades now develop in a matter of months.27 This heightened pace of contention
affected both governing and governed the former primarily in the states growing
incoherence and inability to fashion relevant policies, the latter by introducing
an intensified sense of contingency, possibility and influence from the example of
others.
One of the characteristic features of thickened history is that the pace of events
outstrips the movement of institutions and the understanding of leaders. In the
collapse of communism the pace of events was itself a causal factor in the outcome,
as events simply moved far faster than institutions were capable of reacting. This
was most glaringly evident with regard to nationalities issues, in which formulas
embraced by Gorbachev in 1988, 1989 and 1990 soon grew outdated as a result
of shifting events on the ground. The tide of nationalism also produced enormous
confusion and division within Soviet institutions, making it even more difficult to
find institutional solutions to the challenge of holding the Soviet state together. The
pull of alternative movements within the Communist rank-and-file was particularly
strong in many parts of the country. In the course of 1989 nationalist movements came
to dominate republican politics in the Baltic republics, Georgia and Armenia, so that
party organisations largely went underground, as one communist official put it. In
the 1990 republican elections nationalist movements or those sympathetic with them
came to power in practically every republic with the exception of Azerbaijan and
those in Central Asia, institutionalising the waves of nationalism that had swept across
the country. This was soon followed by what came to be known as the war of the
laws a struggle between the centre and the republics over whose laws actually were
sovereign. Gorbachev insisted that the central governments laws had precedent over
republics and localities, and declared invalid a whole series of laws that contradicted
26
27

Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1962), 124.
Literaturnaia gazeta, 13 September 1989.

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Contemporary European History

all-union laws. In turn many republics refused to recognise the authority of the centre
over them. The conservative reaction to this disorder pushed the Soviet state towards
its final, tumultuous demise in the failed August 1991 coup.
Nationalist mobilisation not only undermined the authority of state institutions;
it also helped to dissipate the states capacity to repress. In the wake of the April 1989
Tbilisi events, the use of the Soviet army as a tool to contain ethnic revolt grew
heavily politicised, and as authority shifted to the republics, actions by the central
governments institutions of order to quell the nationalist unrest became embroiled
in controversy. The constant deployment of the military and special police units to
nationalist hot spots around the country bred a sense of exhaustion among them. The
declining morale of those charged with keeping order was a constant theme during
these years, and over the course of 19901 discipline within the armed forces began to
unravel in a serious way. Most of the officers who commanded key units during the
August 1991 coup had been intimately involved in putting down nationalist unrest
in various parts of the country. Given the effect that many of these earlier actions had
on morale within the police and the military, it hardly seems accidental that these
same officers, when called on to use force against a civilian population of their own
nationality on an even larger scale for the sake of preserving the USSR, refused to
carry out their superiors orders.
Nationalism within and beyond the collapse

It would be impossible to understand post-communist politics today without

reference to the national dimension of the communist collapse one of the reasons
why any serious discussion of communisms demise needs to explicate nationalisms
role in this process rather than treat it merely as a consequence of the collapse. A
glance at the front page of a randomly chosen Russian newspaper almost two decades
after the collapse included stories about continuing conflicts between Estonia and
Russia over demarcation of their borders, claims by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov that
Ukrainian authorities were discriminating against the Russian-speaking population
of Ukraine, and the opening of regular passenger ship routes between Russia and
Abkhazia despite Georgian objections that this was a gross violation of Georgian
sovereignty.28 The collapse of Soviet communism remains a fundamental reference
point, both positive and negative, for populations throughout the region. It is either
mourned as, in Putins words, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century29
or celebrated as the foundation of a national political community and marked as
a national holiday by fireworks and military parades (as in Ukraine). These identity
narratives are woven into the fabric of new national histories and continue to manifest
themselves politically in issues such as NATO and EU expansion, the geopolitics of
28
29

Vremia, 2 July 2008, 1.

Poslanie Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii V. V. Putina Federalnomu Sobraniiu Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 25
April 2005, available at www.kremlin.ru/appears/2005/04/25/1223_type63372type63374type82634_
87049.shtml.

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

347

energy, policies toward Russians and Russophones living in the post-Soviet republics
and desires for and fear of a resuscitation of Russian power in the region. Thus
not only did nationalism occupy a central role in way in which the collapse of
communism unfolded, but the fundamental identity conflicts that gave structure to
the collapse remain with us, manifested now more in the realm of interstate relations,
but nevertheless still central to the ways in which individuals understand themselves
and their relationship to political authority.