government would rather not answer. Freedom of speech also meant freedom of different political and other opinions, and consequently the legitimacy of different political and other parties, an obvious conclusion which Gorbachev tried for a time to deny by upholding glasnost but rejecting political pluralism. Glasnost and related measures of liberalization would lead to the appearance of diverse groups - from monarchists to Fascists and from Orthodox clergy to the champions of homosexuals - in the streets and squares of Moscow and other Soviet cities. Perhaps most important, they led to the revival of numerous nationalisms, suppressed but still alive in the Marxist superstate. The new time of troubles, like the original one at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, was to have its national phase.
The Rise of Nationalisms and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Because of the number, richness, variety, and specificity of ensuing developments, it is impossible to present in a brief general account an adequate summary of the rise of nationalism, or rather nationalisms, in the Soviet Union after centralized control was removed or even merely weakened. All fifteen constituent republics were radically affected. Moreover, many ethnic subdivisions within these republics and still other ethnic minorities also entered the fray. In line with the nature of nationalism, the relations of the participants were usually antagonistic, sometimes to the point of physical combat. It was illustrative of the many-sided struggle that Tskhinvali, the main town of the South Ossetian Autonomous Region within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, came to be held one-third by the local Ossetian militia, one-third by Georgian nationalist forces, and one-third by the Soviet army. This treatment of the issue of nationalism in the Soviet Union is limited to mentioning a few highlights and suggesting certain emerging patterns.
In many respects, the three Baltic republics - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - led the way. Independent states between the two world wars (and in the case of Lithuania, of course, in the much longer, richer, and more complex historical past), forced to join the Soviet Union only about fifty years ago, and possessed of their own languages and, on the whole, of a skilled and well-educated citizenry, the three republics, once self-expression became possible, made no doubt of their desire for independence. It was in Estonia that the first large-scale non-communist political coalition, the People's Front, received recognition, in June 1988, and it was Estonia that proclaimed on November 17, 1988, the right to reject Soviet laws when they infringed on its autonomy. On January 18, 1989, Estonian became the official language of the republic; legislation was enacted in an even more rigorous form a week later for the Lithuanian language in Lithuania, and still later, after mass demonstrations, for the Latvian language in Latvia. In May 1989, the Lithuanian legislature adopted a resolution seeking independence, and on August 22, 1989, it declared null and void the Soviet occu-
pation and annexation of Lithuania in 1940. In early December 1989, Lithuania became the first republic to abolish the Communist Party's guaranteed monopoly of power, while later that month the Communist Party in Lithuania voted to break away from Moscow, thus becoming the first local and independent Communist Party in the U.S.S.R., and to endorse political separation. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania, led by its president, Vytautas Landsbergis, proclaimed full independence. Events in Estonia and Latvia followed a similar course. It is worth nothing that whereas Lithuanians constituted at least three-quarters of the total population of their republic, Latvians and Estonians composed only a little more than half of theirs, and that all three new states tended toward rather exclusive policies that mandated a single official language and, for citizenship, a residential or familial connection with the pre-Soviet period to eliminate Russian newcomers. Yet in spite of the resulting built-in opposition, which claimed discrimination, in February 1991, 91 per cent of the voters in Lithuania approved independence; in March, referendums in Estonia and Latvia gave independence a three to one majority - clearly, not only the Baits, but also many Russians and people of still other ethnic backgrounds wanted above all to escape the Soviet system.
Gorbachev drastically underestimated the power of nationalism in the Baltic area, as well as elsewhere, and at first tried to ignore or dismiss the demands for recognition and independence. Once the crisis became obvious, he attempted persuasion, political maneuvering with the many elements involved, including different kinds of communists, and coercion, although never to the extent of mass military repression. Thus on January 11, 1990, he went to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, hoping to convince both leaders and milling crowds to check the nationalist course of development, but his trip was in vain. More successful was the oil blockade, a great reduction in the supply of oil to Lithuania, which began in mid-April 1990 and forced the republic to suspend, although not repeal, its declaration of independence on May 16. More violent coercion consisted of such incidents as army intervention in Vilnius, resulting in the death of fourteen people, and the assault by Black Berets on a Latvian government ministry building in Riga, both in January 1991 - aborted coups d'etat in the opinion of some - as well as repeated attacks on border posts and customs personnel of the nationalist republics, the signs of their new independence. The perpetrators included special army forces, such as the Black Berets, and perhaps some paramilitary groups, as in the case of seven Lithuanian customs and police officers killed on July 31, 1991. Officially, all these violent acts were labeled local incidents or transgressions; Gorbachev, in particular, denied any complicity. In fact, he emphasized that he objected to the manner of procedure of the Baltic republics, not to their goal of independence, which could be legitimately obtained in time, although personally he retained the hope that they would decide to remain in the new Soviet Union.
While nationalisms developed in a parallel and even co-operative way in the Baltic area, they were from the start on a collision course in Transcaucasia. Of the three Soviet republics beyond the great Caucasian mountain range - Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan - the first two represent two of the oldest yet entirely distinct peoples and cultures of the world. With their histories antedating Christianity by far, the Georgians and the Armenians also built Christian states and cultures centuries before the vaunted conversion of the Rus in a.d. 988. The Georgians are Orthodox; the Armenians are Eastern Christians but not Orthodox. Becoming part of the Russian Empire when it finally reached them in the early nineteenth century may have been important, even essential, for their survival in the face of hostile Moslem Turks and Persians, now Iranians. (Armenians who remained in Turkey did not survive.) Yet if the Baltic republics kept referring to 1940 as the crucial year when Soviet power crushed their independence, the Georgians focused on 1918, when, following the Russian revolutions of 1917, they created an independent Menshevik-led state, only to be overcome after three years by the Red Army. Azerbaijan, not a distinct historical entity, represented the Turkic element so prominent in the past and present life of the area; its inhabitants are historically Moslem and are closely related to other Turkic speakers in the U.S.S.R. from the Volga to the Chinese border, especially in four of the five Soviet Central Asian republics, as well as to Turks abroad.