The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday essay 31
Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to
keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Cau
casus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the
metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Uk
rainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenit
syn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the
centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan
Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black
Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Bela
rusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith. Being united
with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as Euro
pean. In “Lost Kingdom” (2017) Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian histori
an, describes how “the Kyivan myth of origins...became the cor
nerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mon
gol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian
empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than
one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring
country was unimaginable to Russians.
But not to Ukrainians. At the first dinner in Viskuli, with Yelt
sin and Mr Kravchuk sitting opposite each other, a number of
toasts were raised to friendship. The friendship Mr Kravchuk
wanted, though, was of the cordial sort that comes with a decent
alimony cheque, not the sort that goes with
a fresh plighting of troths.
Mr Kravchuk was born in 1934 in the
western Ukrainian province of Volhynia—
then part of Poland, but ceded to the ussr
as part of the infamous pact it made with
Germany in 1939. A childhood surrounded
by ethnic cleansing, repression and war
had taught him, as he put it, “to walk be
tween the raindrops”. It was a skill that
made him an ideal party apparatchik and
then saw him turn himself into a champi
on of Ukrainian independence—not for
any highminded ideological reasons, but
because he wanted the chance to be in
charge of his own country.
The referendum had given it to him,
with independence endorsed by majorities
in every part of the country, both those in the formerly Austro
Hungarian west, with its Baroque churches and coffee shops, and
in the Sovietised and industrialised east, where most of Ukraine’s
11m ethnic Russians lived. There were practical things he needed
from Russia, and Russian interests he recognised; he wanted a
good relationship with Yeltsin and so had come to the forest meet
ing. But he was not interested in giving Russia an exit from the un
ion that in any way compromised Ukrainian independence.
The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morn
ing achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For
Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would
have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers.
So instead they abolished the union itself.
The Soviet Union had been formed, in 1922, through a joint dec
laration by four Soviet republics—the Transcaucasian republic
and the three represented at Viskuli. With the Transcaucasian re
public long since dismembered, the presidents dissolved by fiat
what their forebears had bound together. In its place they put a
Commonwealth of Independent States (cis)—Mr Kravchuk would
not allow any use of the word “union”—with few clearly defined
powers which any postSoviet state would be welcome to join.
There was to be no special relationship between the Slavic three.
That afternoon the three men signed the agreement, thereby
proclaiming that “The ussras a subject of international law and
geopolitical reality has ceased to exist.” It then fell to the most ju
nior of the three—who was also the least enthusiastic about whatA
round eightin the evening of Sunday December 8th 1991,
Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, picked
up a phone call on a topsecurity line. The caller was Stanislav
Shushkevich, a modest physics professor whom Mr Gorbachev’s
reforms had placed at the helm of the Soviet Republic of Belarus a
few months before. Mr Shushkevich was phoning from a hunting
lodge in the magnificent Belovezh forest to tell the great reformer
that he was out of a job: the Soviet Union was over.
In retrospect, its last gasp had come in August, when the kgb,
hardline Communists and the army had placed Mr Gorbachev un
der house arrestand mounted a coup. After three days of peaceful
resistance led by Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Re
public, they backed down. That ruled out any return to a Soviet
past. But Mr Gorbachev still clung to hopes for some sort of post
Soviet liberal successor as a way to hold at least some of the repub
lics together. Mr Shushkevich’s call killed any such aspiration.
One of its triggers was Russia’s economic collapse. As Yegor
Gaidar, Yeltsin’s top economic reformer, was later to write, it was
an autumn of “grim food lines...pristinely empty stores...women
rushing around in search of some food, any food...an average sala
ry of seven dollars a month”. To successfully enact the sweeping
reforms Mr Gaidar was designing, Yeltsin needed a Russia which
controlled its own currency. That meant leaving the ussr.
Mr Shuskevich, too, was motivated by
the dreadful economy. He had invited Yelt
sin to the retreat in the forest in the hope
that by wining and dining him he would
ensure that Russian gas and electricity
would keep flowing to Belarus. It would
have been a hard winter without them. The
venue he chose was a lodge called Viskuli,
where Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khru
shchev had entertained themselves shoot
ing bison and other game (hence its hard
wired connection to Moscow).
Yeltsin suggested that Leonid Krav
chuk, the president of the Ukrainian re
public, join them. The previous Sunday,
Ukraine had voted overwhelmingly to rati
fy the declaration of independence from
the Soviet Union which had been passed in
its parliament, the Rada, immediately after the August coup.
Yeltsin did not just want what Mr Kravchuk had achieved in Uk
raine for economic reasons. Independence would, he felt, be cru
cial to consolidating his power and pursuing liberal democracy.
And Ukraine—never, until the 19th century, a welldefined territo
ry, and home to various ethnic enclaves and deep cultural di
vides—becoming an independent unitary state within its Soviet
borders set a precedent for Russia to define itself the same way,
and refuse independence to restive territories such as Chechnya.
That was whythe Russian republic was one of the first three poli
ties in the world to recognise it as an independent state.
But if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus
were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attrac
tive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other
way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin. It was not just that
Ukraine was the secondmostpopulous and economically power
ful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated
with Russia’s. Nor was it the question of what was to happen to the
nuclear forces stationed there but still notionally under the com
mand of Soviet authorities in Moscow. It went deeper.
In “Rebuilding Russia”, an essay published in the ussr’s most
widely circulated newspaper the year before, Alexander Solzhenit
syn had asked “What exactly is Russia? Today, now? And—more
importantly—tomorrow?...Where do Russians themselves see the
boundaries of their land?” The need to let the Baltic states go was
clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn,
“RUSSIA CAN BE
AN EMPIRE OR A
DEMOCRACY, BUT IT
CANNOT BE BOTH”