Thirty-five years ago, in August 1991, the Soviet Union was living through its final summer. The crisis was obvious, yet even then, few imagined that within months one of the world’s two superpowers would disappear from the map.
The USSR had been a pillar of the international order established after 1945 and its collapse set off a restructuring of world politics that is still underway. The attempt to replace the old balance with an American-led order has failed to produce lasting stability, while what comes next remains uncertain.
For Russia, as for the other former Soviet republics, the years since 1991 have been a difficult exercise in self-definition. At first, independence appeared straightforward: just declare a new state and begin a new life. In reality, creating a new political identity has proved far more complicated.
The Ukraine conflict is also part of this process, as however painful and contentious for Russia, it raises questions about borders that cannot be resolved simply by referring to the Soviet Union’s peculiar system of administrative divisions. It also forces the country to define its place in the world, a place necessarily different from that of the ideological superpower it once was.
Russia takes pride in its centuries of continuous statehood. Although its political forms have changed dramatically, from empire to the Soviet Union to the present federation, the state has endured. Continuity, however, has never meant standing still and each stage of Russian history has involved adapting to internal pressures and changes in the surrounding world. For a country of Russia’s size and diversity, finding the right balance between preservation and renewal is especially difficult and that search continues.
The Soviet collapse also left a legacy that still shapes relations with the West. Many Western leaders, particularly in Europe, remain reluctant to negotiate seriously with Moscow on security. One reason, I believe, is the precedent of 1991 when they saw a formidable adversary disappear, seemingly almost overnight.
Today, the end of the Cold War is often presented as inevitable as the Soviet Union supposedly lost its contest with the “free world” and was destined to collapse, but this interpretation owes more to hindsight than to what people believed at the time.
For four decades, Western governments had regarded the USSR as a dangerous, even existential, opponent, so its disappearance was an outcome they welcomed, but one that even committed anti-communists had scarcely dared to expect. Until almost the final moment, the speed and scale of the collapse seemed unimaginable.
Certainly, the Soviet system had been in trouble for years and its economic weaknesses and failure to respond to global changes had become increasingly serious, but decline didn’t automatically mean extinction and the USSR might have survived in another form, or at least for much longer.
Instead, the measures introduced by its last leadership to arrest that decline helped accelerate it, while reforms undertaken without sufficient understanding of the system’s internal contradictions weakened the very institutions they were intended to save. It’s impossible to prove that a different course would have preserved the Union, but the policies actually pursued produced consequences that its opponents could hardly have hoped to achieve themselves.
Were these the results of deliberate betrayal or honest mistakes? The anniversary will doubtless revive that argument, but my own view is that the catastrophe owed more to misplaced idealism and incompetence, not to mention a failure to grasp political realities, than to a carefully organized conspiracy. The USSR’s adversaries didn’t need to engineer its demise, but they were delighted to claim the credit afterwards and that experience encouraged a dangerous Western confidence.
When politicians in Western capitals now demand Russia’s “strategic defeat” and reject compromise with Moscow, they appear to be relying on the same historical script in that they assume that relentless pressure will eventually destabilize Russia internally, just as they believe Ronald Reagan’s confrontation with Moscow helped bring down the Soviet Union.
The reasoning is simple: escalate, refuse concessions, place pressure and wait for the Russian state to crack, and eventually its leaders will be forced to accept Western terms, or the system itself will give way.
But history doesn’t provide such convenient guarantees and today’s Russia isn’t the late Soviet Union because its economy and social structure are different, as is the international environment. The wider world is no longer organized around two opposing blocs, and Western governments no longer possess the same ability to dictate the terms of global affairs.
Above all, Russia has learned from 1991, but still its leadership must remember that misjudged reforms and ignored problems can destroy a state from within while society must understand that bitter internal divisions can bring losses to everyone, not victory to any one faction.
Western leaders, meanwhile, need to recognize that the Soviet collapse was a tragic and exceptional event, but not a reliable model for dealing with Russia and the extraordinary gift their predecessors received at the end of the Cold War will not be repeated simply because they wish it.
Russia’s future is still being shaped, but Russia itself isn’t going anywhere.
This article was first published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and was translated and edited by the RT team