How 2 Rivals Broke Up Russia’s Empire

Ten years ago today, on Aug. 19, 1991, Russians awoke to the rumble of tanks moving through the streets of Moscow. It would turn out to be a kind of historical drumroll, opening the final chapter in the story of the 20th century’s longest and bloodiest totalitarian regime.

Hard-line military and security officials ordered the tanks into Moscow as the opening act in a halfhearted coup attempt. The putsch failed within 72 hours, but it touched off a series of events that climaxed four months later when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--one of the century’s two “evil empires”--collapsed.

Fifteen nations arose in its place. Nearly 300 million people found themselves citizens of new countries, consumers in new economies, voters in new political systems. For the first time in more than 70 years, they could travel, create, publish and worship with relative freedom.

In the rest of the world, the shadow of nuclear war lifted practically overnight.

Two strong and contradictory personalities--Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin--were the somewhat unwitting engineers of this epochal change. Driven as much by personal rivalry as lofty principles, the two men together and forever changed the world.

But that didn’t earn either of them acclaim in their country. Many Russians despise both men, blaming them equally for the misfortunes that followed the Soviet collapse--a sharp drop in incomes, an increase in the death rate and paralyzing insecurity. In a poll this year, 33% of Russians said their troubles are Gorbachev’s fault; 25% blamed Yeltsin.

Even after 10 years of new freedoms and opportunities, most Russians expect little but more hardship in the future. In a recent poll, 74% of Russians said they regret the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“As they say--no man is a prophet in his own country,” Gorbachev said in an interview. “In general, I have no one to blame. I did everything I could to prevent [the collapse], but it did not work. It did not work, and I regret it very much.”

Enmity Spurred Actions

Both men wanted to change a system they knew was no longer working. But they have acknowledged that their personal dislike for each other fueled their actions.

“I had never intended to fight with [Gorbachev] personally; moreover, in many ways I had followed in his footsteps as he dismantled communism,” Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs. “But why hide it--the motivations for many of my actions were embedded in our conflict.”

Historians say it will take generations to parse the two leaders’ roles in the collapse. But they already rate the dissolution of the Soviet Union as one of the pivotal events of the last century, on a par with the two world wars.

“The rise and fall of the Soviet Union ranks with the rise and fall of Nazi Germany,” says Paul Kennedy, a Yale historian. “It causes an immense shift in the strategic landscape and the political landscape and the ideological landscape of the 20th century.”

It was the first time since at least the Middle Ages, says Kennedy, that a great power crumbled without being defeated in war.

“It was the end of 500 years of the Russian empire, one of the longest empires in history,” agrees Geoffrey Hosking, a Russian historian at the University of London. “It compares with the Roman Empire in durability and is longer than the British Empire.”

Big Impact on Breakup

Empires collapse because of long-term factors such as economic strain and political strife, historians say, so neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin can be credited with causing the Soviet Union to fall apart. But they can be credited--or blamed--for how the breakup took place.

“Without Gorbachev and without Yeltsin, things could have been very different,” says Jane Burbank, a historian at the University of Michigan.

With the Western public, Gorbachev tends to have the brighter reputation than Yeltsin, that of a suave visionary who brought freedom and openness to his country. The fact that the Soviet collapse was an unmitigated benefit for the West also makes Gorbachev the more popular figure outside his homeland. By contrast, Yeltsin is generally seen as a blusterer and a blowhard who brought Russia corruption and cronyism instead of a market economy and democracy.

These images are reinforced by the contrasting positions of the two men now. Gorbachev is a humanitarian jet-setter, touring the world in behalf of disarmament and environmental protection. Yeltsin resigned from the presidency in ill health and quasi-disgrace on Dec. 31, 1999, and has since mostly cloistered himself in his country home. He declined The Times’ request for an interview.

Those images contrast with an emerging historical consensus: Both men essentially failed as leaders, but Gorbachev failed worse by clinging to a dying system. Yeltsin, if nothing else, presided over the birth of a new one.

“[Gorbachev] didn’t spill blood to keep himself in power, so from that point of view you can salute him,” says Martin McCauley, a retired professor at the University of London who wrote a biography of the last Soviet leader. “But he didn’t understand economics, and he didn’t understand what he was doing.”

By contrast, “Yeltsin did introduce the foundations of a market economy, the foundations of a democratic political system, the foundations of a parliamentary political system and the foundations of a civil society,” McCauley said.

Perhaps no two historical figures ever started out so much alike and yet wound up so different.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin were born a month apart in the winter of 1931. Both had family members “repressed” during the dark years of Josef Stalin’s rule by terror. Both came of age during the “thaw” that followed the purges and World War II, members of a more hopeful generation. And both rose through the ranks of the Communist Party in the Russian provinces before being brought to Moscow as reformers.

In the early years, Yeltsin was one of the boldest supporters of Gorbachev’s reforms. But in 1987--perhaps from conviction, perhaps from ambition--Yeltsin used a closed party meeting to criticize Gorbachev for listening too much to his wife. The Soviet leader took umbrage and revenge, tossing Yeltsin out of the Communist Party’s ruling body in disgrace.

Hastening the Decline

By 1991, the onetime allies were bitter adversaries. Gorbachev fought to keep the Soviet Union together. Yeltsin fought to break it apart.

Personal battles notwithstanding, Gorbachev laid the groundwork for his own defeat. When he became Soviet president in 1985, he discovered that the economy, which had been in steady decline since the 1970s, was in even worse shape than he thought. He launched economic reforms that came to be known as perestroika, or restructuring.

But perestroika only accelerated the decline. With a voracious military sector and anemic growth, collapse was inevitable. Gorbachev’s policies speeded it.

“It wouldn’t have been 1991. Maybe it would have been 2001,” McCauley says.

Prices and death rates were rising and unpleasant historical truths were being dug up. And because Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost had lifted controls on the media, ordinary Russians were hearing such bad news for the first time in their lives.

Toward the end of his term, the increasingly unpopular Gorbachev began to fear that the country would unravel. To avoid bloodshed, he had already stood aside in 1989 while Poland elected a non-Communist government, the first in Eastern Europe. By year’s end, all the Soviet puppet states had fallen and the Berlin Wall itself had been dismantled by angry East Germans. Many historians consider that Gorbachev’s finest moment.

“His willingness to give up Eastern Europe without a second thought is astounding,” Burbank says. “[Russians] are imperialists to a degree they can’t imagine. So his ability to do this and to do this peacefully--these are truly fantastic characteristics.”

KGB Targeted Protesters

Gorbachev drew the line at the boundaries of the Soviet Union. While he agreed to some reforms, he was not prepared to allow the union itself to fall apart.

“I believed to the end that there would be no disintegration,” Gorbachev told The Times. “To the very end.”

As republics in the Baltics, Caucasus and Central Asia grew assertive and restive, Gorbachev turned increasingly to the KGB and other hard-liners to preserve the union. Taking their advice, he sent troops to quell street protests, causing dozens of deaths--including 19 in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and 13 in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. In response, liberals deserted Gorbachev in droves.

But unlike some of his predecessors in the Politburo, Gorbachev had little taste for blood. Many historians say that Gorbachev’s greatest act was one of omission--he did not resort to force as the collapse drew nearer.

“[Gorbachev] was not the architect of East Europe’s freedom,” Oxford historian Norman Davies has written. “He was the lock-keeper who, seeing the dam about to burst, decided to open the floodgates and to let the water flow. The dam burst, in any case, but it did so without the threat of a violent catastrophe.”

Yeltsin, on the other hand, was the impatient hand tugging at the loosening knots. He had been elected president of Russia in June 1991, the first leader ever installed by popular ballot in the country’s more than 1,000-year history. With his popularity and legitimacy on the rise, Yeltsin moved quickly to make Russia more important economically and politically than the increasingly shell-like Soviet Union. He was already dismantling the economy, claiming Soviet assets as Russian assets.

Throughout the summer of 1991, Yeltsin and leaders of other republics pushed Gorbachev to give the republics more power, drafting a treaty that granted them significant autonomy, including control of taxes and budgets, while keeping the union together. The treaty, which effectively redesigned the Soviet Union, was to be signed Aug. 20.

The coup plotters struck the day before, on a Monday.

Coups are often conducted by groups who feel marginalized. But in this case, the core group was a collection of gray bureaucrats who had become the most powerful men in the country after Gorbachev: Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev, Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov, KGB chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, Defense Minister Dmitry T. Yazov and Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo.

“It was a coup of Gorbachev against Gorbachev,” Hosking says. “It was mounted by people he had appointed himself and who represented one half of what he was trying to do, while he himself was left stranded representing the other half of what he’d been trying to do.”

The high ranks of the putschists also suggest that in many ways, Gorbachev wasn’t the real target. The real target was the upstart Yeltsin.

“He was the legitimate Russian leader in a way no Russian leader had ever been before and in a way Gorbachev was not, because Gorbachev wasn’t elected [by popular vote],” Hosking says.

The putschists imprisoned Gorbachev in his vacation home in the south. They declared a state of emergency and suspended independent media. But they didn’t take extremely forceful measures--they pretended that Gorbachev was just ill, and they failed to close the borders. The most provocative action they took was to send the tanks rolling into Moscow.

It was a hollow show, as Yeltsin quickly demonstrated the morning of the coup by climbing atop one of the tanks outside the white marble tower that housed the Russian government. He denounced the coup as illegal and the plotters as criminals. At a news conference in the late afternoon, the plotters appeared so nervous and defensive that journalists were emboldened to needle them.

It was clear that the revolutionary contagion that seized Eastern Europe in 1989 had seeped into Moscow. Yeltsin turned the White House, as the government building was called, into a bastion of defiance. Thousands of Muscovites rallied outside in support and built makeshift barricades. Half a dozen tank crews violated orders, turning their turrets to defend, not oppose, Yeltsin.

Plotters in Retreat

No assault came. The standoff demonstrated the raw truth that by 1991, not even the KGB was willing to shed blood to keep the Soviet Union alive. On the other hand, Yeltsin and his supporters were willing to brave bullets to defend the fledging Russian Federation.

The plotters backed down; one of them, Pugo, committed suicide. Gorbachev, who had left Moscow for his Black Sea vacation home on the jet of the Soviet president, flew back on Yeltsin’s jet. He could no longer rely on his own institutions, even on his own pilots. By the evening of Aug. 22, the tanks had returned to their bases.

Yeltsin had deftly directed events in his favor. He was on the putschists’ arrest list, but he not only evaded their grasp, he seized the initiative.

It would be wrong to see Yeltsin as motivated purely by a desire to bring democracy and prosperity to his long-suffering country, says Mark von Hagen of Columbia University. After his triumphal election two months before, Yeltsin was on the rebound. And destroying the Soviet Union was a way to destroy Gorbachev.

“I think it was that kind of personal hatred that motivated Yeltsin to dismantle the Soviet Union more than any real broad political vision of what should happen next,” Von Hagen says. “Gorbachev began a process that allowed Yeltsin to emerge as the ‘anti-Gorbachev.’ ”

One by one through the autumn, republics declared independence. Soviet imperialism had always been whitewashed with the fiction that the non-Russian republics had “voluntarily” joined the union. Now that the central controls imposed by Soviet founder Vladimir I. Lenin were weakening, the fictive “union” became historically useful by giving the republics a peaceful mechanism for withdrawing.

And primary among the republics, with more than half of the people and the vast majority of territory, was Yeltsin’s Russia.

In many ways, Yeltsin’s career as president never lived up to the promise of the moment on the tank. Russia’s political system is still based more on clans and elites than on democracy. Russia’s economy is still far less efficient and productive than it wants or needs to be. For many Russians, the economic hardships they have endured have been too high a price to pay for a few new freedoms.

But the fact that Russia has recovered so little over the last 10 years tends to dismay historians less than politicians.

“In many ways, the Yeltsin era is the completion of the destruction of the old planned economy,” McCauley says. “After the [1991] political collapse, the country still needed to collapse fully economically.”

Perhaps this is one more reflection of a great irony: Some of the greatest moments of the past century were wrought by leaders who failed to do what they set out to do.

“Both had genuine courage and real promise, but in the end they were both captives of the Soviet system,” Hosking says. “Gorbachev was an institutional captive, clinging to his post as [Soviet leader]. . . . Yeltsin was more a mental or spiritual captive--he destroyed the Soviet system but then proceeded to resurrect the nomenklatura ruling class. They both failed to evolve beyond the Soviet system that brought them up.”

In the end, Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s personal feelings and failures will matter less than the historical process they unleashed. History will judge them by what happens in the next 20, 50 or 100 years.

“Russia still hasn’t been transformed,” says Stanford historian Robert Conquest. “It’s not over yet.”

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Timeline of the Coallapse

1991

Aug. 19: Military and security officials launch a coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, holding him in seclusion at his holiday residence on the Black Sea and declaring a state of emergency. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin denounces coup as illegal, organizes resistance.

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Aug. 22: Coup attempt crumbles; Gorbachev returns to Moscow.

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Aug. 24: Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, suspends its activities. Ukraine declares independence.

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Sept. 2: U.S. formally recognizes former Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as independent.

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Sept. 6: Georgia severs ties to Soviet Union; Leningrad renamed St. Petersburg.

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Oct. 11: Soviet State Council breaks up KGB into three separate organizations.

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Nov. 4: Leaders of the republics meet with Soviet State Council, move to abolish most ministries.

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Nov. 6: Yeltsin abolishes Russian Communist Party, confiscates assets.

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Dec. 1: Ukraine voters approve referendum declaring independence.

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Dec. 7-8: Presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus meet secretly and sign agreement abolishing Soviet Union and forming Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev brands the move “dangerous and illegal.”

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Dec. 17: Gorbachev, Yeltsin agree Soviet Union will cease to exist by Jan. 1, 1992.

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Dec. 25: Gorbachev resigns as Soviet president; Russian flag replaces Soviet one over Kremlin.

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Dec. 31: Soviet Union officially ceases to exist.

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After the Breakup

The Economy Then and Now

Average change in GDP

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1990 1999 Armenia -11.7% 3.3% Azerbaijan -11.7 7.4 Belarus -2.2 3.4 Estonia 7.1 -1.1 Georgia na 3.3 Kazakhstan 4.6 1.7 Kyrgyzstan 5.7 3.7 Latvia -1.2 0.1 Lithuania 9.5 -4.2 Moldova -2.4 -4.4 Tajikistan na 3.7 Turkmenistan 0.7 16.0 Ukraine -6.4 -0.4 Uzbekistan 1.6 4.4

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Source: The World Bank