Soviet Union: A Discussion on the Disintegration of the USSR State from a Historical and Civilization Perspective
Collapse of Socialist Social System and the Disintegration of the USSR State Are Two Different Issues
January 2022
Author Prof. Han Kedi is an associate researcher at the Institute of Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev announced his resignation, and the hammer and sickle flag was slowly lowered from the Kremlin, marking the Soviet Union’s entry into history. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was one of the two most important historical events in the world after the end of World War II (the other was the founding of the People’s Republic of China). It completely changed the international structure and international rules formed after World War II, and mankind entered a new era of globalization. The material foundation we enjoy today, as well as the popular values of society, are all built on this foundation.
Therefore, the collapse of the Soviet Union is an event that affects the fate of mankind and also profoundly affects the destiny of China. Its causes and consequences deserve serious consideration and interpretation. However, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of the collapse of the Soviet Union in China. Regardless of political stance, the consensus is still that “the collapse of the CPSU is due to the three monopolies” (power monopoly, economic monopoly, and economic monopoly) or “the collapse of the Soviet Union is the result of the peaceful evolution of the West.” There is even less discussion on the historical impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It has been 30 years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In these years, our humanities and social sciences have made great progress. We should have a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, so as to live up to the research value of the Soviet Union as a “civilization history level” and summarize things that are more meaningful for China’s development. Because China and the Soviet Union are both late-developing powers, many lessons from the Soviet Union’s development transformation and building of global leadership are worth learning. This article will use the perspective of big history to explore several core issues related to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
1. The perspective of civilization history
The disintegration of the Soviet Union actually includes two aspects: one is the collapse of the Soviet Stalinist socialist system at the political level, the consequence of which is the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party; the other aspect is the collapse of the multi-ethnic state empire dominated by Russians, the consequence of which is the independence of various ethnic states and the disintegration of the USSR state.
Nowadays, people often confuse the two things, believing that the disintegration of the Soviet Union is the inevitable consequence of a highly centralized political and economic system. However, if we look at the modern history of the world, political revolutions may not necessarily lead to the disintegration of the state structure. For example, the Xinhai Revolution in China in 1911 did not lead to the disintegration of the Chinese multi-ethnic empire; the Russian Revolution in 1917 did not lead to the disintegration of the Tsarist Russian conquest empire. However, why did the drastic change of the Soviet system in 1991 lead to the collapse of the state? This needs to be interpreted from the perspective of civilization.
The Russian nation has been in a stage of continuous rise and development since the 16th century. Over the next 300 years, it has successively destroyed a series of ethnic regimes in the Volga Basin, Siberia and Central Asia, and gained a large amount of territory from wars against Sweden, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Qajar Dynasty of Iran, the Ottoman Empire and the Qing Empire, establishing a large empire with an area of 22 million square kilometers and ruling more than 100 ethnic groups.
The essence of this empire is a political and civilizational order created by the Orthodox Slavs. The core of the order is the Slavic Orthodox civilization, which also includes the Catholic Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian civilizations, the Protestant Baltic civilizations, and the Islamic Caucasian and Central Asian civilizations. For these “marginal civilizations”, the Russians can only conquer them by force, and cannot create a new civilization to integrate and digest them, because many nations have a longer history than Russia and a more developed economy. These marginal civilizations will eventually have a strong centrifugal force on Russia.
However, the Russian civilization, which was in its ascendant, was able to glue together the mosaic of the empire’s ethnic groups through its population, culture, and military advantages. The Russian nation was one of the fastest growing nations in the world at the time. In 1719, the population was about 11 million, and in 1914 it reached about 70 million, an increase of 5.4 times in nearly 200 years. During this period, the population of China increased by less than 1.5 times. The Russian nation jumped from a second-class nation in Europe to the largest nation in Europe. The rapid population growth allowed the civilization to maintain a strong external tension. By the beginning of the 20th century, more than 9 million immigrants had infiltrated every corner of the conquered lands, ensuring control over these places. This was also the fundamental reason why the empire was able to be preserved in the severe turmoil after the October Revolution.
At the same time, the Russians, who have convenient exchanges with Western civilization, have achieved more civilization than other nations. They have produced writers such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, natural scientists such as Lobachevsky, Mendeleev, and Pavlov, and artists such as Tchaikovsky and Repin. These are all world-class treasures. The advantage in cultural soft power also makes the Russians’ rule over ethnic minorities in border areas more legitimate.
The Soviet Union, which inherited the colonial legacy of the Russian Empire, was a brand new country in terms of ideology, but it still faced the same problem as all multi-ethnic empires: how to control ethnic minorities and maintain unity. However, in the early days of the Soviet Union, the Russians continued the tension of the imperial era and were still able to continue to control the state well.
During this period, the number of Russian immigrants in the border areas increased further (from 9 million to more than 20 million), the central power penetrated the border areas to the grassroots, and the Russian language became more popular than ever before. It seemed that the Russians had avoided the danger of the collapse of the empire or civilization order under the Soviet system.
But starting in the mid-20th century, Russian control over ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union began to weaken dramatically, as evidenced in three areas:
First, Russia’s demographic advantage was declining. After completing industrialization, the Russians, who were in the early stages of development, encountered a population birth rate cliff problem, with the fertility rate dropping sharply from 6.08 in 1925 to 1.94 in 1964. Affected by this, the proportion of Russians in the Soviet Union continued to decline, from nearly 60% in 1950 to 51% in 1989, barely reaching the majority.
The 1970 Soviet census showed that in the 14 republics outside the Russian Federation, the proportion of Russian population in 9 was declining, and the control of Russians over the entire country was weakened.
Second, the decline of Russian culture. The reason can be said to be that ideological autocracy and anti-counterrevolutionary activities made the Russians dig their own graves. In the early days of the Soviet Union, at least 6 million people died in various political repressions, most of whom were intellectuals, priests, officials, businessmen and other social elites. Their mass extermination meant that social culture was breaking.
After World War II, Russian culture was no longer the same as it was in the early 20th century. As a result, the Russians gradually lost their cultural discourse power to rule other nations.
Third, the overall rise of ethnic minorities in terms of civilization. After experiencing industrialization, the population of ethnic minorities increased rapidly. From 1939 to 1989, the population of the Russian ethnic group increased from 99.59 million to 145 million, an increase of 45%, while the population of the Uzbek ethnic group increased from 4.84 million to 16.69 million, the population of the Azerbaijan ethnic group increased from 2.27 million to 6.67 million, the population of the Armenian ethnic group increased from 2.15 million to 4.62 million, and the population of the Turkmen ethnic group increased from 810,000 to 2.72 million, all increasing by 1-3 times, and the growth rate was much higher than that of the Russian ethnic group.
What followed was the development of national self-awareness and national culture. If we say that when the Soviet Union was first established, most ethnic minorities were just tribes without self-awareness and very backward, then after the mid-Soviet period, they had become modern nations. This is the universal benefit of the Soviet Union’s development, and it also created the foundation for the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
By the late Soviet Union, the internal forces of the civilized order built by the Russians in the 19th century had undergone a fundamental reversal. On the one hand, there was the Russian ethnic group, which was in a state of decline and declining in population, and on the other hand, there were ethnic minorities whose self-consciousness was gradually awakening and whose population was growing rapidly. The absolute control of the Russians over the entire empire was rapidly losing. One of the most obvious examples was that at the end of the Soviet Union, as the army that paid the most attention to the purity of the Slavs, Muslim soldiers accounted for nearly 40%. If the Russians can no longer control the violent machine that intimidates other ethnic groups, how can they talk about controlling other ethnic groups?
In the late 1970s, Western Soviet experts who understood the importance of the concept of civilizational conflict and population ratios sensed the risk of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. At this time, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University published “The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future”, edited by Robert Conquest, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies published La Politique soviétique au Moyen-Orient, a professor at the school.
These books all argued that the risk of ethnic conflict to the Soviet Union was far greater than the impact of the highly centralized model of the Stalinist system.
Therefore, the collapse of the Soviet Union cannot be completely attributed to the failure of the Stalinist system, but is also the result of changes in the population and civilization structure. The increasing imbalance in the power comparison between various ethnic groups and civilizations within the Soviet Union accelerated the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. If the Russians still maintained an absolute advantage in the empire, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would not have collapsed so quickly; even if the Communist Party of the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russians would still change the system to continue to maintain the multi-ethnic empire.
The lesson of the Soviet Union’s collapse once again illustrates the fundamental impact of demographic changes on the political order of a multi-ethnic country, which is a risk that any multi-ethnic country will eventually face in its historical evolution. Political scientists such as Huntington worry that if the European white population in the United States falls below 50% in the future, the federation may split, and this is also the reason; China’s multi-ethnic regions in western China will also face the test of the law of civilization conflict.
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