The anniversary today of the end of the USSR. Putin: one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the 20th century
MOSCOW – When you write that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are practically the same people and that it makes no sense for them to be separated, it is clear that Vladimir Putin in his heart would really like to correct what he called one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the twentieth century.
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But today it is impossible to recreate the Soviet Union or even just focus on a union of the Slavic peoples. If nothing else, because too much water has passed under the bridge since December 1991 when the red flag with hammer and sickle was lowered from the Kremlin. The disintegration of the Union created by Lenin was already an accomplished fact and today the xx Soviet republics have traveled too far in different directions. But even then in those cold days that followed the historic proclamation of the end of the games signed on December 8 by the leaders of the three major republics, those that had founded the USSR in 1922, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the efforts of Gorbachev appeared useless: it was impossible to turn the hands of history backwards. And so on Christmas Day (for us; for the Soviets it was just a normal December 25 that no one celebrated) the President of the USSR, the last Secretary General, the man who had initiated the epochal changes, resigned.
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It had been just over six years since his arrival in the Kremlin, after the tragicomic era of the final gerontocracy.. Three Genseks (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko) died within 28 months. He, barely fifty-four, would have to put the sick pachyderm back on its feet. But his reforms, with Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (transparency) ended up instead giving breath to the desire for freedom of all peoples subjected to the Tsars and then to the General Secretaries, starting an unstoppable process.
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First the satellite states left, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989; then they left the Baltic countries, which were waiting for nothing more to free themselves from the yoke of Moscow. Attempts to save what could be saved collided with the harsh reality of a collapsing economy and an ideology now in an irreversible coma. So that December thirty years ago saw the curtain fall on the representation that had lasted since 1985: the attempt to give life to a USSR with a human face. An era was ending but a new period of great hopes and enormous deprivation for millions and millions of people who no longer had any reference point began. Vladimir Putin had just returned to Leningrad after experiencing the collapse of Communist Germany in Dresden where he was head of the local KGB station. He and his people blew up the stove at the headquarters in an attempt to burn all the secret documents. He confessed to his biographers that he tried to call home for instructions, but Moscow did not answer. In the Baltic city he was now working hard to survive as a taxi driver. And he truly experienced the end of the USSR as a huge catastrophe, like many of his fellow citizens.
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Even if from Kiev which would have been the Russia of the Tsars, Ukraine in December 1991 did not think twice about turning its back on Moscow. On 1 December a referendum was held on independence from the USSR and they won with 90 percent. Belarus also wanted nothing more to do with Moscow and that Union of sovereign republics that Gorbachev was trying to put together. Thus in the Belovezhskaya forest in Belarus on December 8 the leaders of the three republics met, Boris Yeltsin for Russia, Stanislav Shushkevich for Belarus and Leonid Kravchuk for Ukraine.. Without hesitation they signed the document: The USSR as a geopolitical reality and subject of international law, ceases to exist.
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For Gorbachev it was a stab. In March 1990 he had been elected president of the Soviet Union, but now he found himself driving an empty box: formally under him remained Armenia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kirgizistan, Georgia, Moldavia and Azerbaijan. Other than the Soviet Union! On the 21st it was the turn of the other republics (eight out of nine, with the exclusion of Georgia) to sign the death of the USSR and join the new Community of Independent States created by the Big Three in the Belarusian forest.
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There was nothing more to be done. On the 25th Gorby’s resignation arrived on live TV. On the 29th the president of the USSR left the Kremlin and the keys passed to the leader of Russia Yeltsin. For Putin, as for so many other former men of the apparatus, what seemed like the worst day of their lives turned out to be the beginning of a bright future. Many seized enormous wealth that had belonged to the state; the KGB, after a very hard initial period, flourished in a new country with a new name. Vladimir Vladimirovich climbed all the ladders of power to become the Kremlin’s longest-lived tenant after Stalin. And everything suggests that he will get over it.
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December 25, 2021 (change December 25, 2021 | 10:18)
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