Why the Soviet empire collapsed

Why did an empire held together by the world's largest army, nuclear weapons and half a century of fear collapse? There is no single cause — historians argue about the weights to this day — but the layers that broke one after another in 1985–1991 are well documented: the economy, the truth, the nations, and finally the party itself. And one line runs through the layers: a system built on violence and a lie did not survive the moment when the violence hesitated and the lie died.

The economy: the model exhausted

The command economy had exhausted its growth by the 1970s — the Brezhnev-era “stagnation” meant technological backwardness, shortages and grain dependency: grain output had stood still since 1966 while 80 million people moved from the countryside to the cities, and the union imported up to 17 per cent of its grain — paid for with oil. On 13 September 1985 Saudi Arabia stopped defending the oil price; it collapsed severalfold within months, and by the reckoning of the economist (and later Russian prime minister) Yegor Gaidar the USSR lost about 20 billion dollars a year — money without which the empire could buy neither grain nor silence. On top of that: an arms race devouring a huge share of the economy, the war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and the upkeep of the satellite states. By 1991 the state was in essence insolvent — the gold gone, credit closed, the shops empty.

Chernobyl and the price of truth

On 26 April 1986 the Chernobyl reactor exploded — and the system did what it always did: it lied. Three days of silence, children's May parades under a radioactive cloud — and then the lie could no longer hold the cloud. Chernobyl forced Gorbachev to let glasnost loose in earnest, and openness proved deadlier to the empire than any economic indicator: out of the archives rose Katyn, the deportations, and finally the founding crime itself — the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which the USSR acknowledged and annulled on 24 December 1989 (see A secret declaration of war). The lifespan of the lie was the lifespan of the crime: once the state had to admit what its borders stood on, not a strip of legitimacy remained in the Baltics. Two years after the protocol's annulment, the occupation was over.

The prison of nations opens

The empire called itself the friendship of peoples; in truth it was a prison of nations, and when the fear receded the doors began to creak open. Estonia broke first: the phosphorite war of 1987 was the first mass protest, the Hirvepark meeting (23 August 1987) demanded the secret protocol be made public, the IME proposal demanded economic self-management — and on 16 November 1988 the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR adopted, first among the union republics, a declaration of sovereignty, nearly a year ahead of the others. The Singing Revolution made resistance a people's movement; on 23 August 1989 two million people stood in the Baltic Way from Tallinn to Vilnius — on the pact's fiftieth anniversary, demanding the truth about it. The sparks ran across the empire: Karabakh (1988), Tbilisi (1989), Baku (1990), the “parade of sovereignties” in which, in June 1990, even Russia itself declared sovereignty. And the decisive blow came from Ukraine: on 1 December 1991 over 90 per cent voted for independence in the referendum — a week later the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus dissolved the union at Belovezha.

The party gave up on itself

Gorbachev did not set out to dismantle the empire — he wanted to save it, and precisely that proved fatal. Glasnost took the lie from the system, perestroika took the command from the command economy, democratisation took the monopoly from the party: in March 1990 Article 6 of the constitution, on the party's leading role, was repealed. When the old guard tried to turn the clock back with a coup in August 1991, the putsch failed in three days — and killed exactly what it tried to save: Estonia restored its independence on the coup's second day, 20 August 1991, the union republics fled the sinking ship, and on 25 December 1991 Gorbachev resigned. The flag came down over the Kremlin without a single battle in the empire's centre — because no one was willing to die for it any more.

The historians' debate

The weights are argued over. Yegor Gaidar (Collapse of an Empire) puts the centre of gravity on the economy: oil and grain broke the regime's solvency. Stephen Kotkin (Armageddon Averted) stresses contingency: as late as 1985 the union was “lethargically stable” and could have smouldered on for decades — the collapse was set off by the reform attempt itself, the faith in “socialism with a human face”, which opened a system that could not be opened; for him the mystery is rather how a nuclear empire fell with so few casualties. Serhii Plokhy (The Last Empire) shows that Ukraine was decisive — without Ukraine there was no union left to save. Mark Beissinger and Ronald Suny put the cascade of national movements at the centre: each opened door made the next one possible. These explanations do not exclude one another — the economy took the regime's strength, glasnost took its lie, the nations took its territory, and the party took from itself the last will to command.

Estonia and our community

For Estonia it was not a “union” that collapsed but the occupation — and the difference in words is a difference in substance: on 20 August 1991 no new state was born; the state that had existed in law since 1918, confirmed by the Treaty of Tartu, was restored. Estonia was the icebreaker of the collapse: the first mass protest (the phosphorite war), the first declaration of sovereignty, and the demand for the truth about the pact — from Hirvepark to the Baltic Way — set the precedent on which the whole empire's legitimacy came apart. As the occupation collapsed, the Estonian Tatar community woke as well: its societies revived in the awakening years, the Crimean Tatars could at last return home, and Tatarstan declared sovereignty in August 1990. The russification machine stopped (see Russification) — though its consequences stand to this day, and in Russia itself the same machine is gathering speed again today (see Minorities in today's Russia). The empire that began with a secret protocol ended when the secret protocol was admitted to be true: that is not a poetic coincidence but a causal chain — power built on violence and a lie does not survive truth and free choice at the same time.

Sources: Yegor Gaidar: The Soviet Collapse — Grain and Oil (Russia Matters / AEI) · Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse (OUP) · Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire (review) · The 1991 Ukrainian independence referendum (Wikipedia) · The Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet's sovereignty declaration, 16 Nov 1988 (ERR) · The Singing Revolution (Vikipeedia) · Mark Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (2002); Ronald Suny, The Revenge of the Past (1993); Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire (2007).

See also: A secret declaration of war · How to hold Russia accountable · Russification.