BIBLIOGRAPHY
In the late 1980s, as then Washington Post reporter David Remnick travelled around the USSR, he found that opinions varied on when and where the old regime died. Uzbeks in Tashkent and Samarkand told him that the exposure in 1988 and 1989 of the haphazard manner in which Moscow had turned all of Central Asia into a vast cotton plantation — “in the process destroying the Aral Sea and nearly every other area of the economy” — was the turning point. In the Baltic states, Remnick says the official “discovery” of the secret protocols to the Nazi-Soviet pact was the key moment. But, as he writes in Lenin’s Tomb, it was in Ukraine that he found the most “unifying event, the absolute metaphor for the explosion of the last empire on earth.” On a trip to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov in 1989, he met with small groups of nationalists who promised that “one day” their republic of over 50 million people, the biggest after Russia, would strike out for independence (that came two years later in August, 1991). Quoting from history, they told Remnick, “’For us’, Lenin once wrote, ‘to lose the Ukraine would be to lose our head’.” In his speech on February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin, justifying his military action in Ukraine, blamed Soviet leaders, especially Lenin, for the disintegration of “historical Russia”.
Putin alleged that Lenin’s idea of building the country “on the principles of autonomisation” finally resulted in the fall of the USSR. For Remnick, the old regime collapsed, “practically and metaphorically”, on April 26, 1986, the moment of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl (Ukraine): “The accident at Chernobyl embodied every curse of the Soviet system, the decay and arrogance, the willful ignorance and self-deception.” The terrible accident was played down, people were not immediately evacuated because “panic is worse than radiation” and so they lived under a radioactive cloud for days, and Gorbachev himself appeared on television a “full 16 days after the accident, and much of his talk was taken up with denunciations of the western press.”
In Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum zooms in on two policies — the Holodomor (terror famine or death by hunger) in the winter and spring of 1933 and the repression of the Ukrainian intellectual and political class in the months that followed — to argue that these brought about the “Sovietisation of Ukraine, the destruction of the Ukrainian national idea, and the neutering of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet unity.” The Ukrainian People’s Republic had lasted a few months in 1917, before Lenin’s 1922 treaty (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Transcaucasus) that created the Soviet Union. During the rapid ‘Russification’ of Ukraine, says Applebaum, the history of the famine of 1932-33 was not taught. “Instead, between 1933 and 1991, the USSR simple refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place… and in 1991, Stalin’s worst fears came to pass. Ukraine declared independence.”
When did Putin embark on a pro-Stalinist journey? Why does the collapse of the Soviet Union still irk him? Masha Gessen’s biography of the Russian President, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, is a chilling portrait of how a “low-level” KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency, “destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.” Gessen writes that in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, the KGB was all powerful, and even as the country opened up further, it “preserved and perfected many of the key features of the Soviet state – it was a system of government that worked to annihilate its enemies — a paranoid, closed system that strove to control everything and wipe out anything that it could not control.”
Two other books, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok, and Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of a Post Cold War-Stalemate by M.E. Sarotte, explain the disintegration of the USSR in great detail, one paying attention to the economic and financial factors within a larger historical perspective, and the other zooming in on the U.S. and the West’s role. With Ukraine not willing to tow Russia’s line, this fallout has not surprised close Russia-watchers.
