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.”
