In Moldavia, the party managed to keep the forces of change at bay until mid-1988. But when the breakthrough came in the summer of that year, the republic's intellectuals promptly established both cultural organisations and the more politically oriented Democratic Movement in Support of Restructuring. (These and other pro-reform groups in May 1989 united in the Moldavian Popular Front.) Like the Ukrainian opposition, the Moldavian opposition united around the language issue, which in the Moldavian case entailed not just the status and protection of Moldavian as a state language, but also the recognition of its unity with Romanian and its 'return' to the Latin script. But in all republics of the western belt, the language issue was a political issue.
Although all of them had been created ostensibly to assist Gorbachev in the implementation ofhis perestroika policies, the popular fronts in the Soviet west soon concentrated on the issues specific to their nations. Originally they were limited to language, the environment and Stalinist crimes, but these issues already challenged the Soviet Union's legitimacy. Ultimately, Gorbachev's reforms gave nationalists the opportunity to go public, and the Kremlin proved unable to prevent them from starting mass mobilisations. Initially, popular fronts included reformist Communists and minorities, but the opposition they encountered from the conservative party leadership in most republics, as well as from the emerging minority movements, radicalised their ideology. The seemingly easy collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was also a contributing factor. By 1990, the popular fronts had evolved from the defence of democratic rights in the republics to the defence of national interests of the titular nations.
During 1989, the national movements went political and succeeded in capturing the protest vote in the Soviet west. Once again, Moscow initiated this turn of events by calling free elections to the All-Union Congress of People's Deputies (March-May 1989). In Lithuania, Sajudis won all the seats except two that went to national Communists whom the nationalists did not oppose. In Estonia and Latvia, nationalists also won, although on a less impressive scale. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1989, the Baltic popular fronts mounted the most imposing protest action yet when they organised a human chain of some 2 million people from Tallinn to Vilnius. The event drew the world's attention to the growing national unrest in the region.
In 1990, elections to republican parliaments (Supreme Soviets) revealed the emerging political realignment. In Lithuania, where the majority of Communist Party members belonged to the titular nationality, the party proclaimed its independence from the All-Union Party (November 1989). In the months leading to the elections, the reformist Communist leader Algirdas Brazauskas co-operated with the Popular Front, but his party won only a minority of seats. In March 1990, the parliament elected as president the nationalist Vytau- tas Landsbergis and voted unanimously for the republic's independence, which the Kremlin did not recognise and which was later revoked after a three-month economic blockade.[318] In Estonia and Latvia, the Communist parties captured the votes of primarily ethnic Russians, yet nationalists had a majority and in March 1990 could proclaim - although not as clearly as the Lithuanians had - their republics' intention to re-establish their independence. Perhaps more important, the Baltic governments began asserting their economic independence by stopping financial contributions to the central budget and initiating independent economic reforms.
While Gorbachev was shocked by the mass support for separatism, he remained reluctant to use force in the republics. Although the local press repeatedly warned about an impending crackdown, it never materialised as a large-scale military operation. Rather, in January 1991, a series of smaller incidents took place in the Baltic states, with the Kremlin either denying its involvement or apologising for the 'unintended violence'. In Lithuania, Soviet troops took control of the radio and TV centre, killing fourteen people and injuring 150. In Latvia, five people died and ten were injured when Soviet police special forces captured the building of the Ministry of the Interior. Because these events received extensive media coverage both within and outside the USSR, instead of harassing nationalists as intended, they actually harmed the cause of those in Moscow who had favoured the use of violence in the borderlands.
In contrast, the March 1990 elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Belorussian SSR demonstrated the extent of the authorities' control, with the Communist Party winning 86 per cent of seats. After years of prodding by the intelligentsia, party bureaucrats did agree in January 1990 to pass a law making Belorussian the official language of the state. (Similar laws were by then passed in all other republics of the Soviet west.) Yet, in practice the population of Belorussia remained the most Russified and the least politically active in the region.
In Ukraine, support for Rukh was unevenly distributed geographically. In Western Ukraine, the national movement enjoyed mass support, while in the east it relied primarily on the humanitarian intelligentsia in the cities. Correspondingly, during the 1990 elections, Rukh captured most seats from the western provinces and some in big urban centres, but its total was only 90 out of 450 seats. Hard-line Communists remained policy makers in the republic, although they now had to face opposition in the parliament. Still, following the example of other republics, especially Russia, the majority felt it necessary to pass a declaration of sovereignty (July 1990), which was more an affirmation of the republic's rights than a separatist statement.
In Moldavia, however, the Popular Front, together with the reformist Communists, won the majority of seats during the 1990 elections. The majority pushed through a number of Romanian-oriented cultural reforms, which alienated the minorities. (It is worth noting, nevertheless, that the idea of union with Romania had little support even among Moldavians.) In August 1990, the Turkic-speaking Gagauz population in the south declared a separate Gagauz Republic with its capital in Comrat, and in September, Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Transnistria created the Dniester Republic with its capital in Tiraspol'. Some 50,000 Moldavian nationalist volunteers immediately marched on the Dniester Republic, where fighting would go on intermittently for several years.
When the abortive coup in August 1991 destroyed the centre's remaining power structures, the Baltic republics were the first to claim their full independence. The Estonian parliament passed a motion to this effect on 20 August, and the first international recognition, from Iceland, followed on 22 August. Yeltsin's Russia was a close second, on 24 August, while both the USA and the USSR hesitated until early September. Although the Soviet military went violent in Riga, Latvia and Lithuania were equally prompt and successful in asserting their independent statehood. At the end of September, all three states already had separate seats at the UN General Assembly.
In Ukraine and Belarus, Communist-dominated parliaments also issued declarations of independence, on 24 and 25 August, respectively. Disoriented by the collapse of the party's centralised controls, local bureaucrats let themselves be persuaded by nationalists and reformers. Moreover, former Communists envisaged their continuing rule after independence. The Ukrainian referendum on independence on i December i99i, with over 90 per cent voting in favour of separate statehood, delivered the final blow to the idea of reviving the Soviet Union. The general population, including the minority voters, was swept away by the promises of economic prosperity that state-run media and nationalist agitators issued so easily. Moldova was the last to declare independence, on 27 August 1991, and the question of possible union with Romania that overnight acquired practical significance caused further splits within both the Popular Front and among the reformist Communists.
318
Alfred Erich Senn, 'Lithuania: Rights and Responsibilities of Independence', in Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras (eds.),