Thirty-three years ago today, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.
I am not old enough to remember everything, but I remember this. I was 23 years old. Much hope was in the air. Optimists like Francis Fukuyama were trumpeting the End of History.
Based on subsequent events in the 1990s, and current events between Russia and Ukraine, those 33 years have not been happy ones, on balance.
With the possible exception of the Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), the former Soviet republics have not become “normal”, prosperous European countries.
There is as much distrust between Moscow and the West today as there was during the darkest days of the old Cold War. We are just as close to nuclear armageddon in 2024 as we were in 1984. Perhaps more so.
Back then, not everyone was an optimist. In his then much derided “Chicken Kiev speech” of August 1991, US President George H.W. Bush warned the Soviet nationalities against “suicidal nationalism”. Bush was speaking to ultranationalist forces in Ukraine, but also in Russia, where Boris Yeltsin was already ascendent.
Bush clearly believed that it would be better for the USSR to devolve gradually rather than suddenly, with so many unresolved issues on the table. Like, for example, the future of Crimea, and the Russian-dominated oblasts in the eastern portion of Ukraine.
Oh, and then there was the question of NATO’s future in a post-Soviet world. Lots of people were wondering about that in 1991, too.
In August 1991, no one was much interested in heeding the cautionary words of George H.W. Bush, a member of the generation that had fought World War II, and thus knew firsthand the dangers of both extreme nationalism and utopianism.
After an abortive coup attempt by Soviet hardliners later that same month, the course for the abrupt, pell-mell dissolution of the USSR was set in stone. The Soviet Union ended that same year, with ill will between the constituent republics, and distrust between Russia and the West regarding the future of NATO.
And 33 years later, here we are. An authoritarian super-state like the Soviet Union was probably never going to dissolve without any bloodshed. But it might not have come to all this.
Maybe we should have been a bit less optimistic in 1991. Perhaps we should even have listened to the warnings of George H.W. Bush. In retrospect, Bush seemed to have a better handle on the future than Francis Fukuyama, or the impatient nationalists in the USSR.
-ET