[National] pasts were constructed and reconstructed; traditions were selected, invented, and enshrined; and even those with the greatest antiquity ofpedigree became something quite different from past incarnations. While alternative discourses of affiliation, like class and gender, were silenced, the dominance of the national discourse defined its constituents almost exclusively as subjects of the nation, effacing the multiplicity of possible identities.[52]
A series of flashpoints in particular republics exemplified and exacerbated nationality-related problems. The appointment of a Russian, Gennadii Kolbin, as first secretary of the CPSU in Kazakhstan (on the recommendation of the outgoing first secretary, Dinmukhamed Kunaev) in December 1986 provoked riots in Alma Ata (Almaty). In July 1987 Moscow's Red Square was the scene of a sit-down demonstration by Crimean Tatars demanding to be allowed to return to the homeland from which they had been exiled by Stalin. From February 1988 the temperature ofthe dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the land of Nagorno-Karabakh was seldom below boiling point. The federal authorities found this an especially intractable problem, since both Armenians and Azeris were utterly convinced of their historic claim to the territory. The fact that this predominantly Armenian enclave was within the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan had long been a sore point for Armenians. It was - for Gorbachev and the federal authorities - just one of the unintended consequences of liberalisation that Armenians in their tens of thousands felt able to raise the issue sharply less than three years into perestroika. The dispute led to inter-ethnic violence in 1988 with at least thirty-two people, mainly Armenians, killed in the city of Sumgait in Azerbaijan where many more Armenian homes were wrecked. In turn there were fatal attacks on Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh and in Armenia itself. A further escalation of violence occurred in 1990 when a pogrom of Armenians in Baku killed at least sixty people. This led Gorbachev's special envoy, Evgenii Primakov, to urge strong action against the Popular Front in Azerbaijan. The indiscriminate nature ofthe onslaught subsequently ordered by Soviet senior officers on the spot produced an official death toll of eighty-three, though according to Azeri nationalist sources several hundred people may have died. The cycle of violence merely further inflamed national passions and did nothing to resolve the problems.
This was never more evident than in the case of the violent suppression of a peaceful demonstration by young people in Tbilisi in April 1989. Soviet troops, with the support of the first secretary of the CPSU in Georgia (and against the explicit wishes of Gorbachev who had asked Shevardnadze to fly to Georgia to negotiate a peaceful end to the stand-off), brutally attacked the protestors. Nineteen of the demonstrators (mainly young women) were killed and several hundred were injured. From that time on, Georgian nationalism was more than ever a force to be reckoned with. Similarly, violence against protesters in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, and the Latvian capital, Riga, in early 1991 merely added fuel to the fires of national discontent. Gorbachev, in the winter of 1990-1, had made a tactical shift in the direction of more conservative forces and at times his rhetoric was a throwback to an earlier period. He desperately wished to preserve the Union, but was not willing to pay the price of bloodily suppressing nationalist movements. Each use of excessive force by
Soviet troops was intended by their chiefs in the power ministries to be but the beginning of a more general crackdown on all fissiparous movements. They also hoped to separate Gorbachev from the most liberal-minded members of his team and from the democratic movement that had developed after 1989 in Russian society. In the latter aim in particular the conservatives had some success. Yet - in contrast with the sustained violence in Chechnya in post-Soviet Russia - each incident in which force was used in the Gorbachev era was a one-day event. The forces favouring violent suppression of national and separatist movements were never given their head to 'finish the job', partly because of Gorbachev's reluctance on moral grounds to shed blood and partly because he realised that such violence as had been applied was entirely counter-productive.
Separatist movements in the Soviet Union were given a huge impetus by developments in Eastern Europe in 1989. It was at this point that the radicali- sation of the political agenda came full circle. Developments within the Soviet Union itself had been the key to change in the rest of Communist Europe. The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe had decided to test the sincerity of Gorbachev's professed willingness to let the people of each country decide for themselves the character of their political system. They could not fail to notice that, to their surprise, domestic liberalisation had gone further by the end of 1988 within Russia than it had in most of the Warsaw Pact countries. The outcome of taking Gorbachev at his word was that in the course of one year Eastern European countries became non-Communist and independent. For Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, this was especially significant. They were no longer ready to argue simply for greater sovereignty within a renewed Soviet Union but for an independent statehood that would be no less than that enjoyed by Czechs, Hungarians and Poles.[53] Moreover, competitive elections had brought to the fore politicians - including, in the case of Lithuania, even the Communist Party first secretary (Algirdas-Mikolas Brazauskas) - ready to embrace the national cause.
When Gorbachev had declared each people's 'right to choose', he had in mind existing states. He truly believed that there was a 'Soviet people' who had a lot in common which transcended national differences. His doctrine of liberation was not intended to lead to separatism in the USSR. When he came round to recognising the reality of the Soviet Union's own 'nationality problem', his preferred solution was to turn pseudo-federation into genuine federation-even, as a last resort, in late 1991 into a loose confederation. In April 1991 Gorbachev initiated a new attempt to negotiate a Union Treaty that would preserve a renamed Union on a voluntary basis. Only nine out of the fifteen republics participated in the talks. The fact that they went ahead regardless reflected the fact that Gorbachev and the liberal wing of the leadership (people such as Yakovlev, Shakhnazarov and Cherniaev) had come to accept de facto that the Union would not consist of as many as fifteen republics in the future. They wished, however, that secession, where it had become a political necessity, would be orderly and legally defined.
Events conspired against the preservation of even a smaller union. The election of Yeltsin as Russian president in June 1991 gave him a legitimacy to speak for Russia that was now greater than that of Gorbachev, who had been only indirectly elected by a legislature representing the whole of the USSR more than a year earlier. For some time Yeltsin had been pressing for Russian sovereignty within the Union. In May 1990 he insisted that Russian law had supremacy over Union law. This was a massive blow against a federalist solution to the problems of the Union.[54] The same claim had been made on behalf of Estonia, but Russia contained three-quarters of the territory of the USSR and just over half of its population, so the threat to the future of a federal union was of a different order. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1991, the nine plus one negotiations had produced a draft agreement which Yeltsin and the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, were prepared to sign. The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, at that time a strong supporter of preserving a Union, played a constructive role in securing the agreement.[55]Gorbachev had made many concessions. A vast amount of power was to be devolved to the republics, so much so that the conservative majority within the CPSU apparatus, the army and the KGB were convinced that this would be but a stepping-stone to the break-up of the Soviet Union.
52
Ronald G. Suny
53
Archie Brown, 'Transnational Influencesin the Transition from Communism',
55
Georgii Shakhnazarov