The End Of the U.S.S.R.

Revolutions are messy affairs that may go on for years with climax after climax before a stable new regime is finally established. But along the way they pass distinct turning points at which it becomes clear that the old order is gone beyond any hope of resurrection, and the future’s possible shape, however vague and tentative, comes into view. So it was last week in the Soviet Union, late superpower and communist totalitarian state ruled from Moscow.

Since the failed coup in August, the country has been writhing in a last agony that, in the words of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, seemed to drag on “through some sort of sick eternity.” Finally Yeltsin and the Presidents of Ukraine and Belorussia — founding republics of the old union in 1922 and still its Slavic core — decided to sign a death certificate: “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence.”

That announcement, along with the formation of a new, inelegantly named Commonwealth of Independent States, came as a stunning surprise but hardly a shock. The power had long been leaching out of the central authority in the Kremlin, and it was the leaders of the key republics that everyone looked to for salvation. The fear was that they would prove too determinedly nationalistic to come together in any kind of practical alliance. Yet Yeltsin and company came up with a proposal that all the independent republics could embrace — if they wanted.

Through it all, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev fought to hold off the burial of the state he officially ruled. “I’ll use all my political and legal authority” to keep playing a major role, he said in an interview with TIME. But his position now seemed largely irrelevant. Whether he resigns in short order, as is widely expected, or continues to sit in his Moscow office a while longer, his political and legal authority is virtually gone, and there is nothing much left for him to preside over.

At the same time, the first blurry outlines of what might replace the old union began to take shape. The new commonwealth formed by the three Slavic republics would supposedly coordinate — but not dictate — the economic, military and foreign policies of its sovereign members. To dramatize the break from the communist — and before that, Russian imperial — past, the Presidents decided that the commonwealth’s coordinating bodies, yet to be formed, would be based not in Moscow, the Soviet capital, nor in the czarist capital of St. Petersburg, but in the plain-Jane, utilitarian Belorussian city of Minsk.

After months of a headlong plunge toward dissolution, anarchy and possibly even civil war, the formation of the commonwealth marked the first hopeful step toward a new cohesion. As such, it swiftly began gaining additional members. On Friday Kazakhstan and the four Central Asian republics swallowed their annoyance at not being present at the creation, as well as their fears of becoming economic and cultural poor relations in a Slav-dominated family, and decided to join, provided they are given the status of co-founders. Their move brought together, however loosely, republics with 90% of the old union’s people and all its strategic nuclear weapons. Only the small border republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldavia were left temporarily outside the new fold, and they too were thinking of coming in.

Which does not by any means ensure that the commonwealth will prevail, or even get itself truly organized. Its founding charter is not much more than a vaguely worded statement of intent. Its members must now actually define the policies they will pursue and form mechanisms to ensure that they really are coordinated. The alliance — it is not really a state — was not even a week old before its first potentially serious fissure appeared. While Yeltsin assured Soviet military leaders that the armed forces would remain under unified command, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk proclaimed that all army units in his republic — except those controlling nuclear weapons — and the Soviet Black Sea fleet were now to constitute a separate Ukrainian army and navy, of which he would be commander in chief.

Worse still, the commonwealth’s efforts to unify economic policy are in a desperate race with the forces of hunger, cold and scarcity. So far, scarcity is winning. Severe shortages of fuel closed half the country’s airports and halted domestic flights. Banks were running out of hard currency as citizens struggled with a runaway ruble. Factories called stoppages, services inexplicably ceased. Food was critically short in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ukraine and Belorussia got Yeltsin to postpone until Jan. 2 a decree freeing many Russian prices, which was supposed to take effect Monday. The delay only touched off a new binge of panic buying; longer lines than ever snaked through Moscow’s streets. While the politicians bickered over the shape of the union, citizens in the former Soviet Union were worried about how they would survive the winter.

Some help is on the way. Secretary of State James Baker,taking care not to side with either the dying union or the commonwealth aborning, announced that U.S. Air Force planes will begin flying food into Moscow, St. Petersburg and other hungry cities, using military rations left over from the Persian Gulf war. He also proposed that all nations interested in sending aid to the old U.S.S.R. hold a conference in early January to coordinate who would put up how much. But a senior British diplomat grumbled that the conference “should have been held three months ago, and now it needs to be held next week. By January it might well be too late.” The brutal Russian winter could cause suffering severe enough to trigger political chaos before the session can convene.

The new commonwealth has managed to stave off, at least for the moment, the threat of an outright economic war between the sundering union’s republics. That prospect played no small part in pushing the commonwealth’s founders together. When Yeltsin, Kravchuk, Belorussian leader Stanislav Shushkevich and some aides gathered at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha dacha, a forest retreat outside the city of Brest, on Saturday, Dec. 7, they appeared to have no intention of declaring the old union dead and founding a new association. But they quickly found they could not come to any other agreement — and agreement was imperative.

Yeltsin had been trying to introduce radical free-market reforms in Russia, but was balked partly because the remnants of the central Soviet ministries kept getting in the way. To remove them, some new form of union had to be invented, but negotiations were stymied by Gorbachev’s desire to preserve at least a pared-down central government and the insistence of several republics on complete independence. The overwhelming vote for independence in Ukraine on Dec. 1 brought the tug-of-war close to a crisis; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin had said there could be no union at all without Ukraine.

Nor was that the only cause for high anxiety. The imminence of free-market pricing in Russia frightened neighboring republics, which protested that they could not or would not move so fast. If Russia went ahead alone, prices would soar so high that neighbors could not afford to buy the republic’s products, including the oil on which they depend. Farms and factories in neighboring republics would sell their products in Russia rather than at home, while masses of Russian shoppers would cross over into other republics to buy at prices lower than in their own stores. Further, Ukraine was planning to introduce its own currency in mid-1992, a move that could have touched off a stampede to all kinds of separate currencies that would have made hash out of any future efforts to revive economic cooperation.

Meeting in Moscow two weeks ago, Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed that one last effort had to be made to keep Ukraine in some sort of union. To that end, Yeltsin took advantage of an already scheduled trip to Belorussia to sign a trade agreement and invited Kravchuk to join the discussions at the forest dacha. According to their aides, the three initially tried to revive a Gorbachev idea to form a fairly loose Union of Sovereign States that would still have a central government of sorts. But all day Saturday, says Russian Deputy Prime Minister Gennadi Burbulis, they kept hitting “a dead end.” Finally the leaders instructed their foreign ministers to start over from scratch and draft something new. Working separately through the night, the ministers produced three texts that proved to be so similar that the leaders had no trouble next morning melding them into one document.

In a separate agreement, the republics pledged to implement coordinated radical economic reforms ensuring free enterprise and to stick with the ruble as a common currency for the time being; national currencies might be allowed later, but only “on the basis of special agreements.” Less formally, they decided to move together toward free prices on Jan. 2 and to introduce a value-added tax and take other steps to hold down the budget deficits that are fueling runaway inflation. Details on how to achieve these worthy aims are to be filled in later. But at least the agreement promises to halt the slide toward economic war.

Unspecific though it is, the economic agreement is a model of concreteness next to the 14 articles of the overall pact. In only a few places does that document even approach specificity. It states that the founders are “striving to liquidate all nuclear armaments under strict international control” and pledges the republics to respect one another’s territorial integrity and to guarantee their citizens equal rights and freedoms. Bland as these provisions appear to be, they are significant in light of a major threat raised by a breakup of the U.S.S.R.: the menace of interrepublican hostility, or even war, over the status of ethnic minorities.

Otherwise the founding agreement pledges the commonwealth republics to a vague concept of cooperation in many areas of government, from education to foreign policy. But what are these common policies to be? Who is to see that they really are coordinated? How? The document says only that “the parties consider it necessary to conclude agreements on cooperation in the above- mentioned spheres.”

The signers counter that they were not preparing a document for the ages, only patching together something to arrest the momentum toward anarchy and ! begin a process of reintegration. Arguments about details would have been fatal to that endeavor. They are probably right, but the document nonetheless is rife with opportunities for bitter disagreement.

On their determination to kill off the Soviet Union as a unitary state, however, the signers were completely clear. Gorbachev was understandably insulted because Yeltsin phoned the White House to tell President Bush about the agreement before Shushkevich dialed Moscow to inform the Soviet President. Whether the snub was deliberate or an oversight, it conveyed the same message: the signers considered the Soviet President irrelevant, if not an obstacle, to their new union.

Gorbachev fought desperately to hang on. He called the agreement unconstitutional and warned of anarchy, potential civil wars and fascist takeovers if the union fell apart. Founders of the commonwealth agreed that those were real dangers, but described their association as a “last chance” to avert them. Gorbachev tried to convene the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national legislature, to work out some kind of compromise between the new commonwealth and his Union of Sovereign States, but was blocked when legislators from the commonwealth republics refused to attend. The Soviet President huddled with army commanders to appeal for military support a day before Yeltsin made a comparable pitch to a similar group of officers. Some generals interviewed on British television found Yeltsin more impressive, and subordinate officers voiced Russian variations of the Western proverb that he who pays the piper calls the tune. That can only mean Yeltsin: the Gorbachev government is flat broke and has only those funds that Yeltsin’s Russian Federation doles out to it.

Another leader who was peeved by what he regarded as cavalier treatment by the commonwealth founders was Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan. When the agreement was signed he was in the air, en route to Moscow for a scheduled meeting with Gorbachev and the three Slavic presidents that never came off; Yeltsin phoned him at Vnukovo airport shortly after his plane landed to tell him about the agreement. Nazarbayev darkly suspected that the Slavic leaders were aiming at a “medieval” division of the union along religious- ethnic-cultural lines and talked for awhile of siding with Gorbachev to keep a central government alive. His defection from the commonwealth would have been a serious blow, since among other things it would have prevented any unified or even joint command over nuclear weapons; many of the biggest multiwarhead intercontinental Soviet missiles are based in Kazakhstan.

By week’s end, however, Nazarbayev decided to cut himself in and brought the other Central Asian republics with him. Western Sovietologists speculated that he had little choice: if Kazakhstan did not join the commonwealth, it might have split in two. Kazakhs are actually a minority among its 16 million citizens; about 40% are ethnic Russians, who might have seceded rather than risk being submerged in an independent Muslim state. The other Central Asian republics simply could not survive economically on their own. They could, however, have formed a federation that would look toward alliances with such states as Turkey and Iran, and perhaps even have induced some Tatars, Bashkirs and other Islamic ethnic groups in southern Russia to secede and join them in a sort of Greater Turkestan. By inducing the Central Asians to join the commonwealth instead, the Slavic leaders passed a hard test of whether they could lead toward cohesion and stability rather than divisiveness and chaos.

Another test was acceptance by foreign governments, and the commonwealth was doing well on that score too. There was still a great deal of apocalyptic talk from analysts like CIA director Robert Gates, who warned that the former Soviet Union faced the greatest potential for explosive civic turmoil since the Bolsheviks consolidated their power roughly 70 years ago. But as the week wore on, the U.S. and its friends were beginning to face up to life without Gorbachev or a Soviet central government and to conclude that it might not be so awful after all.

In fact, the Western powers seemed informally to be coming together on a common approach. Its main elements: 1) they will, properly, leave the shape of a future union — or commonwealth or whatever — to be decided by the Soviet people and their leaders; 2) they will insist that whatever governments arise on the territory of the old union respect human rights and abide by all the U.S.S.R.’s treaty obligations, including commitments to reduce both nuclear and conventional arms; 3) they will strongly urge the successor states to preserve a unified command over nuclear weapons and offer money and technical assistance to dismantle any and all warheads that the republics want to destroy — Secretary of State Baker set out over the weekend on a five-day, five-city swing through the former U.S.S.R. for exactly that purpose; 4) they | will speed up and coordinate aid to any republics that meet these criteria. As Baker put it, “We will continue to work with reformers wherever we find them.”

Though this approach is fundamentally realistic, there are problems and ambiguities in it. The commonwealth, if it establishes itself as a going concern, is likely to include both fledgling democracies like Russia and Ukraine and unreformed authoritarian regimes like Uzbekistan. Baker specifically mentioned the southern republic of Georgia as one that would not qualify for American aid because its government is authoritarian. But can Washington maintain such a stance if Georgia is accepted into a commonwealth where most or all of the other members are getting Western aid?

At this point probably only some loose association like the proposed commonwealth, without any true central government, can bring the republics together at all. But the difficulties of making it work are immense. Of all people, Joseph Stalin gave the most eerily prophetic description. When the Soviet Union was founded on Dec. 30, 1922, he enumerated the conditions attending its birth: “devastated fields, factories at standstill, destroyed productive powers and exhausted economic resources render insufficient the separate efforts of separate republics in economic reconstruction.” The union is now dying of exactly the same ills, and its heirs have yet to prove that they know how to build something better.