This story originally ran in the baiduhai on Dec. 9, 1991.
MOSCOW — It was the last empire.
The Soviet Union — the vast territory stretching from the Baltic Sea and Finland in the west, to the Pacific Ocean almost to Alaska in the east, to the Caspian Sea and Iran in the south and far beyond the Arctic Circle in the north — was more than a country.
It was indeed the last polyglot empire on the face of Earth, an empire as sure as those built by Britain, France and Spain in earlier centuries.
Sunday’s decision by Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia to form a commonwealth of independent nations ended that empire. But in reality it had been dying for the last half-decade, ever since President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms loosened the central authority that held such diverse places as Latvia and Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Tadzhikistan together.
The superpower that became the West’s Cold War adversary was a nation put together — frequently by force and intimidation — on the basis of what was czarist Russia.
The country known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born on Dec. 30, 1922, with the signing of a treaty forming a confederation of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Caucasian republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
Built by a communist system rooted in the Bolshevik idea of world revolution, the core of that nation expanded quickly to encompass the Central Asia republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenia and Kirgizia during the later part of the 1920s.
Despite its size, the USSR when founded included less territory than the czarist empire of the Romanov dynasty that preceded it.
Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, granted independence to, or lost control of, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the empire’s Polish territories, western parts of Ukraine and Byelorussia as well as Bessarabia in what is today Moldavia.
During the course of the next two decades, decades during which dictator Josef Stalin ruthlessly imposed his vision on the union, the country once again expanded.
In the years of World War II, Stalin succeeded in restoring much of the territory lost by the Bolsheviks when they first came to power in the wake of the Russian Revolution.
Through secret agreements with Nazi Germany, Stalin annexed the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Through campaigns in the Far East, the country acquired territories from Japan, land that remains a point of contention between the two countries even today.
By the end of the second world war the Soviet Union had reached the end of its expansion, and a period of consolidation began. First under Stalin and then through a succession of Soviet leaders, the Soviet Union was relentlessly centralized.
Stalin began with the collectivization of agriculture and purges of officials whom he saw as personal threats. This continued with a steady expansion of central power through every aspect of Soviet life, ranging from the distribution of food and basic goods to the amount of living space each person was legally allowed to have in his apartment.
Such rules, as in all empires, were universal and the Soviet diktats extended from Moscow to Tashkent, from Riga to Vladivostok.
Russian became the lingua franca of the new empire, just as English was for Great Britain’s domain and French and Spanish were for the territories they ruled.
Throughout the decades of the expanding Soviet economy after World War II, the empire grew stronger. It was backed by enough money to carry the idea of world revolution around the globe.
Soviet influence and domination expanded beyond the country’s already mammoth borders to Eastern Europe, much of Africa, to Vietnam and other parts of Asia and eventually to Latin America. But eventually it started to collapse under its own weight, as other empires had before it.
By the late 1970s the deficiencies of a strict centralized system that dictated frequently unrealistic economic targets became apparent.
Five-year plans went unfulfilled. Crops rotted in the fields because the system couldn’t deliver them efficiently to the people who needed them. Factories weren’t modernized and the nation’s physical plant decayed. Ideological strictures excluded the Soviet Union from the economic progress that united and developed the United States, Western Europe and Japan.
The cost of sustaining world revolution in the face of competition from buoyant capitalistic economies became untenable. A generation of Soviets grew up cynically rejecting the communist ideals their grandparents had fought for, and the prized “internationalist” view that was the bulwark of the Soviet empire collapsed.
By the time Gorbachev came to power, the question had become one of damage control. No longer was the goal to expand the empire, but rather to sustain what was left of it.
Gorbachev’s idea, as evidenced by his efforts since he was elected Communist Party leader in 1985, was to reform the Soviet Union enough to save it. But once that process was begun it became clear the system was so badly decayed that the deeper the reforms went, the more the inevitability of its collapse became apparent.
The metaphor frequently used in this vegetable-starved nation was of a rotting cabbage. Each layer that was peeled away revealed that the next leaf was as badly spoiled as the one before.
Once begun, Gorbachev’s policies of liberalization ultimately led to the end of the empire.
It was Gorbachev who started the process of democratization and the end of the draconian controls that had kept the Soviet Union together. Once he opened that Pandora’s box, there was no way to close it.
The three Baltic states, among the last territories to be brought into the union, were the first to officially go.
First declaring their independence in the face of fierce Kremlin opposition, they eventually won their freedom in the wake of last August’s failed coup.
Following that putsch, one after another of the 15 republics declared their independence, but it was Ukraine’s overwhelming vote to leave the union Dec. 1 that dealt the final blow to the Soviet Union.
A week later, in a hunting lodge in the Byelorussian woods, not far from the Polish border, the leaders of three of the republics of the old empire-Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia-signed the death warrant of the last empire.
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