The Cold War was pronounced dead many times, but it is safe to say that the ideological reasons for its continued existence had ceased to exist before the end of 1988 and that it ended in political reality in 1989. The reunification of Germany in 1990 was a natural consequence of Soviet acquiescence in the destruction of the Berlin Wall.[48] The suddenness of the process, nevertheless, took both the Soviet leadership and its Western counterparts by surprise.
Gorbachev hadbecome the first Soviet leader since the end ofthe Second World War to recognise in 1987 that Germany might not remain divided for ever, but neither he nor, at that time, Chancellor Helmut Kohl imagined for a moment that within three years unification would have occurred. Given, however, Gorbachev's aversion to the use of force to preserve unpopular Communist regimes in East-Central Europe, the logic of events led to his telling Chancellor Kohl in February 1990 that it was up to the Germans to decide in what kind of state they wished to live and the speed with which they would attain it.[49]Both within the International Department of the Central Committee and in Soviet military circles, there was criticism of Gorbachev and Shevardnadze for not striking a tougher bargain over Germany. Against that, the countries of what had been the 'Soviet bloc' were returned to the citizens of East-Central Europe in a remarkably peaceful process. While events had passed beyond the control of Moscow, the Soviet Union could have greatly complicated them. Had not Soviet troops been kept in their barracks throughout the region, the short-term outcome might have been different and would certainly have been bloodier. In the specific case of German unification, Gorbachev's conduct of negotiations (that were delicate and dangerous for him in the context of Soviet domestic politics) left a legacy of German goodwill both for him personally and for Russia.
From pseudo-federation to disintegration
From the outset ofperestroika, its proponents had stressed how crucially interrelated were both domestic and foreign policy. Whereas in the first three and a half years of perestroika, this meant that domestic change in the Soviet Union was having a dramatic impact on international relations, from early 1989 the boot was on the other foot. Developments in Eastern Europe began to feed back into Soviet domestic politics in a way which threatened and ultimately destroyed the unity of the Soviet state.
The break-up of the Soviet Union had several proximate causes in addition to the legacy of the past. That legacy, however, was especially important in two respects. First, the suppression of national aspirations and the severe persecution of even peaceful manifestations of nationalism meant that there was an underlying resentment of the Soviet political order that existed to some degree in all the union republics, but was more widespread in some than others. It amounted to outright disaffection in the three Baltic states which had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union against the will of the great majority of their populations in 1940. The second legacy was an institutional one. The fact that the union republics had their own 'national' branches of the Communist Party (with the exception of Russia - until 1989), their own Councils of Ministers, Supreme Soviets and Academies of Sciences meant that under conditions of liberalisation and democratisation they had available to them institutions through which they could articulate distinctive national sentiments and demands. The significance of this element of institutional path determinism is indicated by the fact that the only Communist states which disintegrated in the course of transition from Communist rule were the three that had federal forms (the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) and by the equally significant datum that it was the fifteen union republics of the USSR, which were the best endowed with institutional resources - and not other national territories, such as the so-called 'autonomous republics' or 'autonomous regions' - that achieved independent statehood. Thus, though the power structure of the unreformed Soviet Union could fairly be characterised as 'pseudo-federal', the federal forms which up until 1985 played an extremely circumscribed role in the political life of the country were of great latent importance.[50]
Yet another legacy of the pre-perestroika Soviet period that played its part in fomenting national discontent was, paradoxically, one of the success stories - the achievement of near-universal literacy in the USSR and the existence of a substantial stratum of the population in all of the republics who had received a higher education. It is, as a rule, intellectuals rather than peasants who are the bearers of nationalist ideology. In the Central Asian republics, in particular, a native intelligentsia and national consciousness were equally the creations of the Soviet period. New ways of looking at the world were both a result of higher education and broadening intellectual horizons, on the one hand, and the federal forms, on the other, even though it was well into the Gorbachev era before the latter acquired federal substance. Contrary to the predictions of some scholars, however, it was not from the Asian and Islamic parts of the Soviet Union but from its most westerly European republics that the strongest pressure for sovereignty emanated.[51] The majority of citizens of Soviet Central Asia, like a majority of inhabitants of Belarus, had independent statehood thrust upon them in 1991. Only a minority had been striving for it.
Perestroika produced its own impetus for centrifugal pressures. Glasnost' brought to the surface injustices and discontent that it would have been dangerous to air earlier. These revelations, in turn, had a radicalising effect on opinion within several of the republics. Moreover, the reduction and subsequent removal of the 'leading role' of the Communist Party took away a key institutional pillar not only of the Soviet system but of the Union. The federal forms had been tolerated by Soviet leaderships prior to perestroika because they were outweighed by the 'leading role' of the party. The party remained strictly hierarchical and even republican party first secretaries had to be highly responsive to instructions coming down the line from the Central Committee in Moscow. This meant that the party, at the level of the union republic Central Committee, could, and did, place limits on the extent to which republican ministries or republican institutes of the Academy of Sciences might ignore Moscow's wishes.
As already noted, both democratic centralism and the monopoly of power of the Communist Party had ceased to exist by 1989 when competitive elections for a new legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, took place and were followed a year later by contested elections for legislatures in the republics. While the institutional changes were especially important in permitting national movements to gain a strong foothold within a system in flux, the withering away of Marxism-Leninism also played a part. Although many officials, not to speak of ordinary citizens, had paid only lip-service to the ideology, its thorough debunking by the end of the 1980s left space open for other ideologies, of which nationalism turned out to be especially important for the future (or, more precisely, non-future) of the Union. As Ronald Suny has aptly put it:
48
On the political process of German unification, see Timothy Garton Ash,
50
See Rogers Brubaker,