The Mess We're In: On the Inevitability of Post-Cold War Chaos

If the United States won the Cold War, as I think it did, then the Soviet Union, or rather Russia, lost it, and lost it big. The main reason this happened was that its political leaders, in the Communist Party, did not give its own population a political, economic, or social system that was fit for purpose. The Soviet peoples had sacrificed immensely during the 20th century in an attempt at building a state and society of which they could be proud. The vast majority of citizens had believed that their hard work and defense of their achievements had created both a Superpower with a global reach and a better future for themselves. The ability to believe in improvement under Soviet rule, which would also be the pinnacle of Russian achievement, kept doubts away for the majority, even for those who ought to have known better. The crimes of the Soviet state were ignored by rulers and ruled alike, in a mutual conspiracy of silence.

Then, in the 1980s, it all came crashing down. Conditions at home got worse, not better. The state, which many had thought to be near omnipotent, failed at carrying out even the simplest tasks. Afghanistan and the cost of international isolation deprived the young of the future they wanted. And when necessary reform set in under Gorbachev, it too failed to deliver the progress that citizens craved. Although many Soviets embraced the freedom to speak openly, to vote, to form organizations, to practice their religion, or to watch films and read literature that had been banned, there was a gaping hole at the core of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Without bread, what freedom?, some of them asked, increasingly often.

And then the Communist Party self-destructed and the Soviet government suddenly was no more. With the exception of the Baltic states, independence came to the Soviet republics not as a preexisting demand from below, but more as an effect of the ongoing Soviet collapse. After December 1991 15 republics, all former parts of the USSR, suddenly had to find their own way in the world. Nationalism came to most of them as a justification for national independence, not the other way around. In that way the collapse of the Soviet Union was indeed a case of decolonization, reminiscent of what had happened to the British or French empires. No wonder that almost all of the post-Soviet states struggle with high levels of ethnic and political tension even after a generation of sovereignty.