Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Very often people confuse three different processes that were taking place in the late 80s and early 90s. And the one was the collapse of communism as ideology. Another was the end of the Cold War. And the third one was the end of the Soviet Union. All of these processes were interrelated, interconnected.
But when people provide ideology as the explanation for all of these processes, that's where I disagree. Because ideological collapse happened on the territory of the Soviet Union in general. Soviet Union lost the Cold War, whether we are talking about Moscow, Leningrad, or St. Petersburg now, or Vladivostok. But the fall of the Soviet Union is about a story in which Vladivostok and St.
Petersburg ended up in one country, and Kyiv, Minsk, and Dushanbe ended in different countries. So the theories and explanations about how did that happen, for me, these are really very helpful theories for understanding the Soviet collapse. So the mobilization from below, the collapse of the center, against the background of economic collapse, against the background of ideological implosion.
That's how I look at the fall of the Soviet Union, and that's how I look at the theories that explain that collapse.
The Soviet collapse was unique, but not more unique than collapse of any other empire. So what we really witnessed, or the world witnessed back in 1991, and we continue to witness today with the Russian aggression against Ukraine, is a collapse of one of the largest world empires.
We talked about the Soviet Union and now talk about Russia as possessing plus minus one-sixth of the surface of the Earth. You don't get in possession of one-sixth of the Earth by being a nation-state. You get that sort of size as an empire.
The Soviet collapse is a continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology, and then came back in full force. in the late 80s and early 90s.
So the most important story for me, this is the story of the continuing collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise of not just local nationalism, but also rise of Russian nationalism that turned out to be as a destructive force. For the imperial or multi-ethnic, multinational state, as was Ukrainian nationalism or Georgian or Estonian, for that matter.
The pressure from the United States, this is part of the Cold War. And Cold War part of that story, but it doesn't explain the Soviet collapse. And the reason is quite simple. The United States of America didn't want the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate. They didn't want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948, we now have the strategic documents,
They were concerned about that, they didn't want to do that, and certainly they didn't want to do that in the year 1990-1991. As late as August of 1991, the month of the coup in Moscow, President Bush, Judge H.W. Bush, travels from Moscow to Kyiv and gives famous or infamous speech called Chicken Kyiv Speech, basically warning Ukrainians against going for independence.
The Soviet collapse was a huge headache for the administration in the White House for a number of reasons. They liked to work with Gorbachev. The Soviet Union was emerging as a junior partner of the United States on the international arena. Collapse was destroying all of that. And on the top of that, there was a question of the nuclear weapons, unaccounted nuclear weapons.
So the United States was doing everything humanly possible to keep the Soviet Union together in one piece until really late November of 1991, when it became clear that it was a lost cause and they had to say goodbye to Gorbachev and to the project that he introduced.
A few months later, or a year later, there was a presidential campaign, and Bush was running for the second term and was looking for achievements. And there were many achievements. I basically treat him with great respect. But destruction of the Soviet Union was not one of those achievements. He was on the other side of that divide.
But the politics, the political campaign, of course, have their own rules. And they produce and give birth to mythology, which still, at least in this country, we live till now, till today.
Of course, history, on the one hand, there is a statement. It doesn't allow for what-ifs. On the other hand, in my opinion, history is full of what-ifs. That's what history is about. And certainly, there are scenarios how the Soviet Union would continue. Would continue beyond, let's say, Gorbachev's tenure. Mm-hmm.
And the argument has been made that the reforms that he introduced, that they were mismanaged and they could be managed differently, or there could be no reforms and there could be continuing stagnation. So that is all possible. What I think would happen one way or another is the Soviet collapse in a different form on somebody else's watch.
at some later period in time because we're dealing with not just processes that were happening in the Soviet Union, we're dealing with global processes and the 20th century turned out to be the century of the disintegration of the empires.
You look at the globe, at the map of the world in 1914, and you compare it to the map at the end of the 20th century in 1991, 1992, and suddenly you realize that there are many candidates for being the most important event, the most important process in the 20th century. But the biggest global thing that happened was redrawing the map of the world and producing
dozens, if not hundreds, of new states. That's the outcome of the different processes of the 20th century. Look, Yugoslavia is falling apart around the same time. Czechoslovakia goes through what can be called a civilized divorce, a very rare occurrence in the fall of multinational states.
So, yeah, the writing was on the wall, whether it would happen under Gorbachev or later, whether it would happen as the result of reforms or as the result of no reforms. But I think that sooner or later that would happen.
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