In preparation for my Russian history class, I’ve recently read Serhii Plokhy’s book The Last Empire. As the subtitle suggests, it’s a detailed account of “the Final Days of the Soviet Union” (a bit too detailed, to my mind). The focus of Plokhy’s narrative is on the rivalry between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and, predictably, the role of Ukraine in bringing about the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Plokhy is a scholar of Ukrainian history, after all). All in all, although the book is illuminating as to the minute details of the fateful year of 1991 and the varying opinions, plans and attitudes of the major players in and outside the Soviet Union, it left me dissatisfied as to the answer to the crucial question, why. Plokhy’s explanation of why the Soviet Union disintegrated makes sense: once Ukraine pulled out, as did the Baltic countries, it was pretty much Russia against the Muslim republics of Central Asia, and those two camps didn’t want to be left alone in one union or confederation. But it does not touch upon the question of why the communism (or more accurately, socialism) failed as, and when, it did. After all, Ukraine, as Plokhy justly points out, wanted independence first and de-communization later, if at all. In fact, as late as the 1998 legislative election, the majority of the areas in Ukraine still voted for the Communist Party, as can be seen from the following map from ElectoralGeography.com:
The Communist Party of Ukraine took part in the legislative elections in 2002, 2006, 2007, and 2012, albeit with more limited success. It was finally dissolved in December 2015.
One thing I did find beautifully poignant is a little vignette that Plokhy includes in the last chapter of the book, “Christmas in Moscow” (p. 374). Here, Plokhy tells the story of Gorbachev signing his resignation decrees. Apparently, for this final act as the first and last President of the USSR, Gorbachev had to borrow a pen from Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, whose crew was recording the events of those last few days of the Soviet Empire. The country that had once planned to enter the exalted state of communism by 1980 and later boasted to be poised “to catch up and overtake America” has run itself into such state of chaos and ruin that its president could not find a working pen in his own office. A wonderful metaphor of what the collapse of socialism has been all about.